Return to work after Post-COVID: describing affected employees' perceptions of personal resources, organizational offerings and care pathways.

Background: Most individuals recover from the acute phase of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, however, some encounter prolonged effects, referred to as the Post-COVID syndrome. Evidence exists that such persistent symptoms can significantly impact patients' ability to return to work. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of different care pathways and resources, both personal and external, that aim to support Post-COVID patients during their work-life reintegration process. By describing the current situation of Post-COVID patients pertaining their transition back to the workplace, this paper provides valuable insights into their needs. Methods: A quantitative research design was applied using an online questionnaire as an instrument. Participants were recruited via Post-COVID outpatients, rehab facilities, general practitioners, support groups, and other healthcare facilities. Results: The analyses of 184 data sets of Post-COVID affected produced three key findings: (1) The evaluation of different types of personal resources that may lead to a successful return to work found that particularly the individuals' ability to cope with their situation (measured with the FERUS questionnaire), produced significant differences between participants that had returned to work and those that had not been able to return so far (F = 4.913, p = 0.001). (2) In terms of organizational provisions to facilitate successful reintegration into work-life, predominantly structural changes (i.e., modification of the workplace, working hours, and task) were rated as helpful or very helpful on average (meanworkplace 2.55/SD = 0.83, meanworking hours 2.44/SD = 0.80; meantasks 2.55/SD = 0.83), while the remaining offerings (i.e., job coaching or health courses) were rated as less helpful or not helpful at all. (3) No significant correlation was found between different care pathways and a successful return to work. Conclusion: The results of the in-depth descriptive analysis allows to suggests that the level of ability to cope with the Post-COVID syndrome and its associated complaints, as well as the structural adaptation of the workplace to meet the needs and demands of patients better, might be important determinants of a successful return. While the latter might be addressed by employers directly, it might be helpful to integrate training on coping behavior early in care pathways and treatment plans for Post-COVID patients to strengthen their coping abilities aiming to support their successful return to work at an early stage.

Legal and Ethical Challenges in the Development of mHealth Applications.

Researchers frequently face ethical and privacy challenges on health applications. Ethics is a branch of moral philosophy and deals with the "right" and "good" actions of humans, which often leads to dilemmas. Reasons for this are social and societal dependencies of the respective norms. Data protection is regulated by law throughout Europe. This poster provides guidance on these challenges.

Enhancing mHealth data collection applications with sensing capabilities.

Smart mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets have become an important factor for collecting data in complex health scenarios (e.g., psychological studies, medical trials), and are more and more replacing traditional pen-and-paper instruments. However, simply digitizing such instruments does not yet realize the full potential of mobile devices: most modern smartphones have a variety of different sensor technologies (e.g., microphone, GPS data, camera, ...) that can also provide valuable data and potentially valuable insights for the medical purpose or the researcher. In this context, a significant development effort is required to integrate sensing capabilities into (existing) data collection applications. Developers may have to deal with platform-specific peculiarities (e.g., Android vs. iOS) or proprietary sensor data formats, resulting in unnecessary development effort to support researchers with such digital solutions. Therefore, a cross-platform mobile data collection framework has been developed to extend existing data collection applications with sensor capabilities and address the aforementioned challenges in the process. This framework will enable researchers to collect additional information from participants and environment, increasing the amount of data collected and drawing new insights from existing data.

PeterPandemic: A Serious Game for Pandemic Management.

The COVID-19 situation shows that a deep understanding of how pandemics spread and how they can be managed is important in a multitude of domains. Various studies have shown that students benefit from game-based learning approaches. Therefore, we introduce the concept of a web-based serious game to teach students important aspects when dealing with pandemic situations.

Collecting Data from Senior Citizens Using Serious Games.

Training cognitive skills of people suffering from dementia by using serious games has been found to be a successful approach. But there is still no approach which takes advantage of performance measurements to evaluate the treatment of the patient. The literature describes several games which aim to improve cognitive skills, but none of them collects and analyses data while the patient is playing the latter. In this work we present a prototypical mobile application which applies concepts from serious games to collect performance data of patients and thereby evaluate the success of their treatment in the long run. We expect this approach to be a fast and cheap way of keeping track of the success of specific treatments.

CARE REGIO - Digital Transformation and Technology in Nursing Care.

Digital technologies have the potential to improve the quality of nursing care. CARE REGIO is a Bavarian joint research project for digital transformation and technology in nursing care. The project goals are supporting the nursing staff, saving time, improving the quality of care as well as increasing the quality of life and safety of those in need of care. In Phase 1 of the project, literature and stakeholder analyses, and qualitative surveys were carried out. Subsequently, central fields of action were defined for Phase 2 of the project. CARE REGIO can make a significant contribution to evaluating existing digital solutions, developing new solutions, and accelerating their implementation into practice.