Spyridon Kitsiou

Email Address: skitsiou@uic.edu
College: Applied Health Sciences Department: Biomed and Health Info Sciences
Title: Assistant Professor
Office: 205 Phone: 312-355-3519
Participating in the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Awards program: Yes

Research Interest:
My research interests focus on the development and evaluation of mobile health app-based interventions to promote healthy lifestyle and self-management of chronic diseases such as heart failure, diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mobile health technologies (mHealth) such as smartphones, mobile applications (apps), and wearable activity tracking devices that permit real-time collection of large amounts of data have become ubiquitous, offering significant and innovative opportunities to researchers and clinicians. New wearable devices such as Fitbits allow users to collect objective measures of their own daily activities and obtain more detailed feedback on their performance. In addition to self-monitoring, these devices support the exchange of information between consumers and health providers, enabling remote monitoring and assessment of multiple activity behaviors in various contexts and thus development of more dynamic and personalized interventions to support behavior change. However, the effectiveness of these mHealth technologies has not been thoroughly investigated in the management of chronic diseases.

Minimum time commitment in hours per week: 3

Qualifications of a Student:
Majors of Interest include: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Health Information Management, Nursing, Pre-Med, or other Health Science related fields.

GPA 3.0 or above. Familiarity with, or friendly attitude toward, computers, ability to work as an independent, yet interactive member of a team.

Ability to think analytically and creatively. The student must me highly motivated; willing to learn new methods and techniques to address interdisciplinary research questions and problems; willing to undergo Human Subject and HIPAA Training; willing to assist with patient recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings.

Brief Summary of what is expected from the student:
Student will become familiar with the techniques and data collection methods used in the mHealth Innovation Lab; execute a hypothesis-driven investigation; and present the results at conferences and other venues.

Students with programming skills are expected to contribute to the development and refinement of mobile health apps for the purposes of the research projects conducted at the mHealth Innovation Lab.

Return to Biomed and Health Info Sciences list

Return to Departments list