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A Gamified Mobile Health Intervention to Promote Physical Activity, Executive Function, and Mental Health in College Students: Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: College students commonly experience suboptimal health conditions, including insufficient physical activity (PA), excessive body weight, and declining physical fitness. Traditional interventions face low adherence, while gamified mobile health (mHealth) programs may improve engagement and outcomes. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of a novel gamified, incentive-based mHealth intervention on primary outcomes (PA and adherence) and secondary outcomes (physical fitness, body composition, executive function [EF], and mental health). Methods: A 2-arm parallel-group randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted in 2025 at Yantai University with 160 college students (18‐25 years; BMI 18.5‐30.0) who were randomized 1:1 (computer-generated, sex-stratified blocks of 4; concealed allocation) to the intervention group (IG) or control group (CG; n=80 each); major exclusions were contraindications to exercise, severe physical/mental illness, recent PA interventions, or psychotropic medication use. Both used the same fitness watch–app system and identical PA targets (β‰₯150 min moderate-to-vigorous physical activity [MVPA] per week or β‰₯900 metabolic equivalent-minutes [MET-min] per week); IG additionally received team-based gamification (competition, points/leaderboards, feedback, and rewards), while CG received monitoring only. PA and adherence were monitored throughout the 8-week intervention; other outcomes were assessed at baseline and 8 weeks (fitness, body composition, EF, and mental health). Open-label with blinded outcome assessors/analysts; intention-to-treat (ITT) with multiple imputation. Results: At 8 weeks, data were available for 154 participants (IG 78; CG 76); all 160 were analyzed per ITT. Compared to the CG, the IG demonstrated significantly higher mean levels in all primary PA outcomes over 8 weeks (daily steps: mean 10,356, SD 1245 versus 8242, SD 1087; Ξ”=2114; =1.81, 95% CI 1.44‐2.18;

Embedding Enhancement via Fine-Tuned Language Models for Learner-Item Cognitive Modeling

arXiv:2604.04088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learner-item cognitive modeling plays a central role in the web-based online intelligent education system by enabling cognitive diagnosis (CD) across diverse online educational scenarios. Although ID embedding remains the mainstream approach in cognitive modeling due to its effectiveness and flexibility, recent advances in language models (LMs) have introduced new possibilities for incorporating rich semantic representations to enhance CD performance. This highlights the need for a comprehensive analysis of how LMs enhance embeddings through semantic integration across mainstream CD tasks. This paper identifies two key challenges in fully leveraging LMs in existing work: Misalignment between the training objectives of LMs and CD models creates a distribution gap in feature spaces; A unified framework is essential for integrating textual embeddings across varied CD tasks while preserving the strengths of existing cognitive modeling paradigms to ensure the robustness of embedding enhancement. To address these challenges, this paper introduces EduEmbed, a unified embedding enhancement framework that leverages fine-tuned LMs to enrich learner-item cognitive modeling across diverse CD tasks. EduEmbed operates in two stages. In the first stage, we fine-tune LMs based on role-specific representations and an interaction diagnoser to bridge the semantic gap of CD models. In the second stage, we employ a textual adapter to extract task-relevant semantics and integrate them with existing modeling paradigms to improve generalization. We evaluate the proposed framework on four CD tasks and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) task, achieving robust performance. Further analysis reveals the impact of semantic information across diverse tasks, offering key insights for future research on the application of LMs in CD for online intelligent education systems.
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