| Enabling human status awareness in assistive environments based on advanced sound and motion data classification | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1 | |
| Charalampos Doukas; Ilias Maglogiannis | |||
| The paper presents the concept and an initial implementation of a patient
status awareness system that may be used for patient activity interpretation
and emergency recognition in cases like elder falls and distress speech
expressions. The awareness is performed through collecting, analyzing and
classifying motion and sound data. The latter are collected through sensors
equipped with accelerometers and microphones that are attached on the body of
the patients and transmit patient movement and sound data wirelessly to the
monitoring unit. Applying Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and spectrogram
analysis on sounds detection of fall incidents is possible. The classification
of the sound and movement data is performed using Support Vector Machines.
Evaluation results indicate the high accuracy and the effectiveness of the
proposed implementation. The system architecture is open and can be easily
enhanced to include patient awareness based on additional context (e.g.,
physiological data). Keywords: SVM classification, emergency event detection, movement and sound analysis,
patient status awareness | |||
| An ontology-driven ambiguous contexts mediation framework for smart healthcare applications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 2 | |
| Nirmalya Roy; Gautham Pallapa; Sajal K. Das | |||
| Ubiquitous (or smart) healthcare applications envision sensor rich computing
and networking environments that can capture various types of contexts of
patients (or inhabitants of the environment), such as their location,
activities and vital signs. Such context information is useful in providing
health related and wellness management services in an intelligent way so as to
promote independent living. However, in reality, both sensed and interpreted
contexts may often be ambiguous, leading to fatal decisions if not properly
handled. Thus, a significant challenge facing the development of realistic and
deployable context-aware services for healthcare applications is the ability to
deal with ambiguous contexts to prevent hazardous situations. In this paper, we
propose a quality assured ontology-driven context mediation framework, based on
efficient context-aware data fusion using resource constrained sensor network.
The proposed framework provides a systematic approach based on dynamic Bayesian
network to derive context fragments and deal with context ambiguity in a
probabilistic manner. It has the ability to represent contexts according to the
applications' ontology and easily composable ontological rules to mediate
ambiguous contexts. We have also implemented a demonstration of the use of our
model using semantic web language. Through simulation, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed framework. Keywords: Bayesian networks, context-awareness, health monitoring, multi sensor
fusion, ontology, semantic web | |||
| Issues in data fusion for healthcare monitoring | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 3 | |
| Hyun Lee; Kyungseo Park; Byoungyong Lee; Jaesung Choi; Ramez Elmasri | |||
| Pervasive healthcare monitoring using body sensors and wireless sensor
networks is a rapidly growing area in healthcare monitoring applications.
Several issues arise in these systems, such as complex distributed data
processing, data fusion, unreliable data communication, and uncertainty of data
analysis in order to successfully monitor patients in real time. In this paper,
we introduce some of the important issues in healthcare monitoring with focus
on software problems such as reliability, network robustness, and context
awareness. We describe related works in data filtering, data fusion, and data
analysis then we suggest new architecture for handling data cleaning, data
fusion, and context and knowledge generation using multi-tiered communication
and a triadic hierarchical class analysis approach. The proposed architecture
is called "Pervasive Healthcare Architecture" and we discuss how it can be
applied to a particular monitoring scenario. Keywords: context generation, data fusion, pervasive healthcare monitoring system,
reliability | |||
| Context-aware computing for assistive meeting system | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 4 | |
| Peng Dai; Guangyou Xu | |||
| Human-centered computing and implicit human computer interaction will be the
future computing models, which can be realized in various pervasive computing
environments. Thus computer understanding of human actions and intentions
becomes the key. Context plays a significant role in the understanding of
multi-party human interactions such as meetings. Dynamic context in this paper
cannot be sensed through traditional context-aware approaches; instead a
probabilistic framework is required to perform online analysis of multi-level
context. Therefore this paper presents a Dynamic Context Model to solve the
problem of context awareness toward group meeting analysis and services, which
includes multimodal analysis of group interaction scenarios and provision of
attentive services to the users. According to our concepts, a distributed
multimedia processing system has been implemented in the smart meeting room and
preliminary experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Keywords: assistive meeting system, context-aware computing, dynamic context model,
group meeting analysis | |||
| Effective collaboration for healthcare by bridging the reality gap across media-physical spaces | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 5 | |
| Kei Hoshi; John Waterworth | |||
| There are growing needs for communication and collaboration on different
managerial and operational levels in healthcare. On e trend th at has been
noted in our modern society is the move of nursing care from traditional
hospitals to the patient's own home. The aim of this paper is to suggest a
conceptual solution for healthcare collaboration and to provide an
intersectional approach to go beyond that which was possible today and towards
better communication and collaboration tomorrow. First, this paper discusses
specific issues in communication and collaboration arising from the reality gap
between media-physical spaces, then proposes an overview of a new way to
approach problems for which conventional design methods offer no clear
solution. The paper is thus mostly a description of a problem area, and a
general approach to addressing it. We conclude with a description of future
needs for further research on collaborative healthcare. Keywords: collaboration environment, context, presence, tangibility | |||
| Virtual humans for assisted health care | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 6 | |
| Patrick Kenny; Thomas Parsons; Jonathan Gratch; Albert Rizzo | |||
| There is a growing need for applications that can dynamically interact with
aging populations to gather information, monitor their health care, provide
information, or even act as companions. Virtual human agents or virtual
characters offer a technology that can enable human users to overcome the
confusing interfaces found in current human-computer interactions. These
artificially intelligent virtual characters have speech recognition, natural
language and vision that will allow human users to interact with their
computers in a more natural way. Additionally, sensors may be used to monitor
the environment for specific behaviors that can be fused into a virtual human
system. As a result, the virtual human may respond to a patient or elderly
person in a manner that will have a powerful affect on their living situation.
This paper will describe the virtual human technology developed and some
current applications that apply the technology to virtual patients for mental
health diagnosis and clinician training. Additionally the paper will discuss
possible ways in which the virtual humans may be utilized for assisted health
care and for the integration of multi-modal input to enhance the virtual human
system. Keywords: advanced 3D modeling and animation technology, applications, emotion and
social behavior, experience reports and user studies, game characters, health
care, models of personality, multi-user/multi-virtual-agent interaction, verbal
and non-verbal expressiveness, virtual humans, virtual patients | |||
| Translation and scale-invariant gesture recognition in complex scenes | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 7 | |
| Alexandra Stefan; Vassilis Athitsos; Jonathan Alon; Stan Sclaroff | |||
| Gestures are a natural means of communication between humans, and also a
natural modality for human-computer interaction. Automatic recognition of
gestures using computer vision is an important task in many real-world
applications, such as sign language recognition, computer games control,
virtual reality, intelligent homes, and assistive environments. In order for a
gesture recognition system to be robust and deployable in non-laboratory
settings, the system needs to be able to operate in complex scenes, with
complicated backgrounds and multiple moving and skin-colored objects. In this
paper we propose an approach for improving gesture recognition performance in
such complex environments. The key idea is to integrate a face detection module
into the gesture recognition system, and use the face location and size to make
gesture recognition invariant to scale and translation. Our experiments
demonstrate the significant advantages of the proposed method over alternative
computer vision methods for gesture recognition. Keywords: DSTW, dynamic space-time warping, gesture recognition | |||
| Sensor experiments to facilitate robot use in assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 8 | |
| Roger Bostelman; James Albus | |||
| In this paper, we describe the mobile robot and sensor research and
development toward assistive devices ongoing at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST). Through mobility research projects, NIST has
been studying advanced sensor navigation technology for indoor mobile robots
and a novel Home Lift, Position, and Rehabilitation (HLPR) Chair. This
assistive device can provide independent patient mobility for indoor tasks,
such as moving to and placing a person on a toilet or bed, and lift assistance
for tasks, such as accessing kitchen or other tall shelves. These
functionalities are currently out of reach of most wheelchair users. One of the
design motivations of the HLPR Chair is to reduce back injury, typically, an
important issue in the care of this group. The HLPR Chair is currently being
extended to be an autonomous mobility device to assist cognition by route and
trajectory planning. Localization sensor technologies are being studied for use
in combination with the HLPR Chair. This paper briefly describes a mobile robot
(HLPR Chair) and its onboard sensors. We then describe performance measurements
of absolute positioning and obstacle detection sensor technologies towards
combining them with the mobile robot into a cost effective home or assistive
care facility, patient transfer and rehabilitation system. Keywords: localization sensors, mobility, patient lift/transfer, rehabilitation, robot | |||
| Design and evaluation of haptic effects for use in a computer desktop for the physically disabled | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 9 | |
| Brian Holbert; Manfred Huber | |||
| The human-computer interface remains a mostly visual environment with little
or no haptic interaction. While haptics is finding inroads in specialized areas
such as surgery, gaming, and robotics, there has been little work to bring
haptics to the computer desktop which is largely dominated today by the
GUI/mouse relationship. The mouse as an input device, however poses many
challenges for users with physical disabilities and we feel that a haptically
enhanced interface could have significant impact assisting in target selection,
in particular for these users. To address this, this paper presents a study
intended to evaluate haptic effects used with a force feedback mouse on a
computer desktop and a prediction algorithm designed to focus those effects on
the desired target. This paper introduces the proposed framework and presents
experimental results from targeting tasks using differing haptic effects with a
group of physically disabled users. Keywords: haptic interface, haptic mouse, target prediction, targeting | |||
| A framework for human-robot interaction | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 10 | |
| Dimitrios Vogiatzis; Vangelis Karkaletsis | |||
| This work recommends an architecture for the dialogue system of robots that
serve as guides in art collections. Such robots interact with visitors
providing information about the exhibits or the educational programmes of a
museum. The interaction takes place in natural language in the form of a
dialogue session during which, the robot provides suggestions or explanations
about programmes or exhibits; furthermore the robot leads the visitors to the
room of the desired exhibit. Past research projects have led us to suggest a
cognitive based dialogue architecture that is based on four modules: a
reactive, a delibetative, a reflective, and an affective one. The cognitive
model, allows great flexibility, comprehensibility, facility to revise certain
modules as desired and a high degree of naturalness in dialogue and behaviour
with humans. In addition the dialogue system relies on resources such as OWL
domain ontologies, user types, user interaction history and a robotic
personality. Keywords: HCI, cognitive architecture, dialogue system | |||
| Conceptual modeling of service-oriented programmable smart assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 11 | |
| Yiannis Verginadis; Panagiotis Gouvas; Thanassis Bouras; Gregoris Mentzas | |||
| The imperative need of older people to lead a more independent life in their
familiar environment can not be addressed only by the vast progress of the
information and communication technologies but also modeling efforts are needed
that take into serious account these specific needs. In this paper, we describe
our approach concerning the conceptual design of a service oriented
programmable smart system that integrates assistive environments for the
elderly. Specifically, we present the role of the conceptual model emphasizing
at its respective meta-model, while we document the design and development of
the conceptual model authoring environment for enabling the scenario modeling
of the ambient assistive living application domain. Keywords: ambient assistive living, conceptual model, service oriented programmable
environments | |||
| Towards an evaluation framework for assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 12 | |
| Vangelis Metsis; Zhengyi Le; Yu Lei; Fillia Makedon | |||
| As the world population is aging, there is an increasing need to support
independent living of elderly people. Assistive environments incorporate the
latest pervasive and ubiquitous technologies and provide a viable alternative
to traditional assistive living. In this paper, we propose an evaluation
framework to assess the quality of assistive environments. An assistive
environment can be successful only if the potential users are willing to adopt
it. The proposed framework identifies a set of attributes that are considered
critical to user adoption. Sample metrics, as well as possible approaches to
measure them, are also suggested to quantify those attributes. The framework is
illustrated using an experimental assistive apartment environment that is being
built at the University of Texas at Arlington. Keywords: assistive environments, assistive living, metrics, pervasive computing | |||
| Requirements for implementation of localization into real-world assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 13 | |
| Eric Becker; Yurong Xu; Heng Huang; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Accurate and efficient localization methods in sensor networks are critical
to enabling a robust assistive environment where tracking human actions and
interactions are needed to predict human behavior and prevent accidents. In
this paper we describe an anchor-free localization approach where the sensor
motes themselves determine their location without any given starting point or
additional hardware. Instead, the location is discovered by allowing sensors to
branch out through their connections to each other to establish maps that
define their surroundings. We describe a Geographical Distributed Localization
(GDL) algorithm which consists of a set of motes that compute local maps based
on their hop counts from a special mote called bootstrap. In this paper, we
provide a set of requirements for real world conditions, since GDL was
developed and tested using the NS2 simulation system using synthetic data. It
is now desired to test GDL in a real world assistive environment and generate a
set of requirements that are useful in this and other settings. To do this, we
chose Tmote Invent wireless sensors and designed ways to transfer the system
from simulation to laboratory. Later, we used SunSPOT motes to continue the
system. In this paper we report on specific features and requirements
discovered that need to be taken into consideration to account for physical
limitations of the sensors, when trying to move the system from one environment
to another. Also, we provide new directions of research when mapping sensor
localization to real-world environments, based on the given resources and the
components available. Keywords: assistive environments, localization, pervasive computing, tracking,
wireless sensor networks | |||
| Medication intake assessment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 14 | |
| Ilias Sachpazidis; Georgios Sakas | |||
| Today, more than 430 million people worldwide are estimated to be suffering
at any given time from mental disorders. Surprisingly, there is limited
awareness that mental disorders are a major cause of lost healthy years of
life. According to the World Health Organisation, Affective Disorders
(depression and manic-depression or bipolar disorder), Schizophrenia and
related conditions are among the top ten leading causes of disability
worldwide. This evidence shows how important it is to respond to the growing
global burden of mental illness. Europe is taking a leading role in this field
with a number of initiatives aiming to improve the mental well-being and reduce
the level of social exclusion and disability amongst the mentally ill. Recent
years have seen a dramatic increase in our understanding of the biological,
psychological and social determinants of mental illness and this has led to the
development of many effective medicines. However, we also know that the quality
of treatment delivery is of paramount importance. Prescribed medication becomes
a truly effective intervention if it is coupled with efficient service
delivery. In such circumstances patients have the opportunity to realize their
potential and to become functioning and productive members of their
communities. Key components of efficient service delivery are timely detection
of non-adherence to medication and rapid response by mental health
professionals to any signs of impeding relapse.
In this paper, we are going to describe a home care application for medication adherence monitoring and assessment. Keywords: entropy, home care, medication adherence, telemedicine | |||
| A scalable and self-adapting notification framework for healthcare information systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 15 | |
| Anthony Okorodudu; Leonidas Fegaras; David Levine | |||
| There has been a great interest in publish/subscribe systems in recent
years. This interest, coupled with the pervasiveness of lightweight electronic
devices, such as cellular phones and PDAs, have opened a new arena in
publish/subscribe networks. Currently, many broker overlay networks are static
and never change in structure. Often, a network overlay structure is predefined
or manually manipulated. We present a dynamic broker network in the context of
disseminating critical labs and patient information in a Healthcare Information
System (HIS). Our work builds upon previous network optimization research on
ad-hoc publish/subscribe networks. Our framework utilizes user-defined
heuristic cost functions to satisfy QoS constraints. We also address certain
reliability issues by providing a scheduling algorithm to selectively
retransmit information. Keywords: healthcare information systems, publish/subscribe networks | |||
| PINE-guided cache replacement policy for location-dependent data in mobile environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 16 | |
| Mary Magdalene Janef; R. Parameswaran; R. Nadarajan; Maytham Safar | |||
| Caching frequently accessed items on the mobile client is an important
technique to enhance data availability and to improve data access time. Cache
replacement policies are used to find a suitable subset of items for eviction
from the cache due to limited cache size. The existing policies rely on
Euclidean space and consider Euclidean distance as an important parameter for
eviction. However, in practice the position and movement of objects are
constrained to spatial networks where the important distance measure is the
network distance. In this paper we propose a cache replacement policy, which
considers the network density, network distance and probability of access as
important factors for eviction. We make use of an already proven technique
called Progressive incremental network expansion to compute the network
distance more efficiently. A series of simulation experiments have been
conducted to evaluate the performance of the policy. Results indicate that the
proposed cache replacement scheme performs significantly better than the
existing policies FAR and PAID and WPRRP. Keywords: cache replacement, location dependent information services, mobile computing | |||
| A performance monitoring method for wireless sensor networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 17 | |
| Thomas Lindh; Ibrahim Orhan; António Gonga | |||
| This paper presents a monitoring method and its implementation as a
light-weight end-to-end performance meter for quality-demanding applications in
wireless sensor networks. The use of performance feedback information for
control and management is also considered. The method is evaluated in a
wireless sensor network testbed for healthcare applications. Keywords: measurements, monitoring, performance meter, wireless sensor networks | |||
| Wireless patient monitoring for the e-inclusion of chronic patients and elderly people | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 18 | |
| Konstantinos Perakis; Maria Haritou; Radovan Stojanovic; Bogdan Asanin; Dimitris Koutsouris | |||
| e-Health has clearly started to become an important issue for
implementation, operational deployment of services and a promising market for
industry. The need for concentration of the information society technologies on
the future so-called convergence generation has been specifically noted since
FP6. The scope of this paper is to present an ambient, home based health and
wellness measurement and monitoring architecture, especially targeting the
elderly and chronic patients, aiming to facilitate their social inclusion
(e-inclusion) by providing the means of easy follow-up from their home
environment. The proposed paper presents a one-button functional, wireless
monitoring system capable of acquiring 3 leads of ECG, pulse oxymetry and
temperature measurements, and transmitting them over ZigBee to a computing
device, which in turn is responsible for the transmission of the signal to a
consultation unit. The authors envisage the development of a lightweight
unobtrusive, belt-like wearable device that would enable patients to be
monitored daily and at the same time allow them to perform their regular daily
activities. Keywords: Bluetooth, ECG, ZigBee, monitoring, pulse oxymetry, temperature, wireless | |||
| Power efficient multi-band contextual activity monitoring for assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 19 | |
| A. L. Praveen Aroul; Achutan Manohar; Dinesh Bhatia; Leonardo Estevez | |||
| The advancement in technology for patient monitoring and smart living
environments is making a huge impact on providing health care for the elderly
and needy population. An energy efficient context aware system for sensing and
reporting events based on wireless sensor networks (WSN) is presented in this
paper. It is demonstrated that it is possible to build and deploy power
efficient systems with an extended battery life by exploiting the recent
technological innovations and properly using the architectural framework for
supporting WSNs. The system evolves with highly localized computations aided by
the contextual information which helps in detecting events and alerting the
care provider for only the positive events. Keywords: RFID, ZigBee, battery life, contextual sensing, low power RF, remote
monitoring, tele-medicine, wireless sensor network | |||
| Simplifying home health monitoring by incorporating a cell phone in a weight scale | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 20 | |
| Thomas G. Zimmerman; Keng-hao Chang | |||
| The overweight under-exercised aging baby-boom generation is creating an
epidemic of chronic diseases that is placing a tremendous burden on the health
care system. Frequent monitoring and contact between a patient and health care
professional can help the patient control their diet, get more exercise and
increase medication compliance. These factors produce dramatic improvements in
patient health and well being. We present a home health system to manage heart
disease that monitors patient weight and symptoms and support verbal
communication between patient and health care professionals. The system embeds
a cell phone, electronics and a large battery inside a weight scale to simplify
installation and use, leverage cell phone cost-performance and speed up
prototype development. Keywords: cell phone, chronic disease management, embedded system, home health
monitoring, wireless | |||
| Hazard monitoring for visually impaired people enabled by wireless sensor networking technology | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 21 | |
| Aristides Mpitziopoulos; Charalampos Konstantopoulos; Damianos Gavalas; Grammati Pantziou | |||
| Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been identified as a promising
technology for supporting assistive environments. This article introduces
PROTECT, a system that employs autonomous software objects referred to as
Mobile Agents (MAs) able of locating and informing visually impaired persons
for potential risks. PROTECT utilizes a 3-tier architecture where the first
tier comprises a Base Station (BS), the second tier mobile sinks (carried by
blinds on their sticks) and the third tier stationary sensor nodes. This WSN is
deployed in an urban environment. In the event of an alarm issued by a sensor
node, the BS launches a number of MAs supplied with a near-optimal itineraries
that visit the nodes in the alarm's surrounding area and notify visually
impaired people for potential hazards in their proximity. In the event of
communication problems (e.g. failure of some sensor nodes) PROTECT modifies the
itineraries of the MAs to bypass the problematic areas avoiding disruption of
the data collection process from working sensors. Simulation results confirm
the high effectiveness of our proposed scheme in WSNs used in assistive
environments and its performance gain over alternative approaches in data
fusion tasks. Keywords: assistive environments, hazard monitoring, healthcare, itineraries,
itinerary design, mobile agents, wireless sensor networks | |||
| PLASMA: personalized, location aware services over mobile architectures | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 22 | |
| Charalampos Z. Patrikakis; Athanasios S. Voulodimos; Ioannis G. Nikolakopoulos | |||
| In this paper, we describe a platform that aims to provide a service
framework that can be deployed over mobile devices (smart phones, PDAs,
PocketPCs) offering personalized, context aware (with emphasis on location
awareness) services. The services, instead of being offered in the traditional
way, are based on an open architecture, which allows the user to design, test,
deploy and share service modules. The framework allows for personalized
deployment of services that can be customized as regards the level of privacy
of personal information and accuracy of offered data. Keywords: context awareness, location based services, mobile computing,
personalization, privacy | |||
| A pervasive architectural framework for providing remote medical treatment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 23 | |
| D. Vassis; P. Belsis; C. Skourlas; G. Pantziou | |||
| The proliferation of mobile devices has led to their integration into a huge
number of assistive environments where they perform a key role. Pervasive
environments, built over wireless infrastructures, introduce new possibilities
in the healthcare sector realizing the anytime-anywhere access to medical
information paradigm. Towards this direction pervasive technology can be
deployed in assistive environments, such as home monitoring for elderly or
patients. In this paper we describe a policy based architecture that utilizes
software agents and wireless sensor technologies to enable remote monitoring of
patients and elderly people. We also discuss the technical challenges which
directed the decisions with respect to the design of our software prototype
architecture. These decisions mainly focus on providing continuous feedback of
the patient's condition, while transferring encrypted versions of the necessary
medical information in accordance with the increased security and privacy
requirements. The presented prototype implementation utilizes advanced network
management technologies and software agent engineering in order to operate
effectively, to achieve interoperability through the different modules and in
order to comply with the imposed (by the legislative framework) increased
security and privacy requirements. Keywords: medical information systems, pervasive environments | |||
| Feasibility study of a joint e-health mobile high-speed and wireless sensor system | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 24 | |
| Dimitris Komnakos; Demosthenes Vouyioukas; Ilias Maglogiannis; Philip Constantinou | |||
| The present paper studies the prospective and the performance of a
forthcoming high-speed third-generation (3.5G) networking technology, called
Enhanced Uplink, in collaboration with the well known wireless sensor
technology, for delivering electronic health (e-health) pervasive applications.
The performance of the sensor network along with the 3.5G network is a critical
factor for successful development of e-health services perceived by end-users.
In this paper, we propose a methodology for performance assessment based on the
joint uplink transmission of voice, realtime video, biological data, such us
electrocardiogram, vital signals and heart sounds. Various scenarios were
concerned for homecare patient applications in terms of real-time and
non-realtime in random locations, where no other system but 3.5G is available.
The accomplishment of quality of service (QoS) was explored through the delay
and the jitter of the networks' parameters, attributing the joint network
system for best performance in the context of the desired e-health services. Keywords: e-health, enhanced uplink, healthcare, telemedicine | |||
| A wireless sensor network architecture and its application in an assistive environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 25 | |
| Eric Becker; Yurong Xu; Steven Ledford; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Today's assistive environments place pervasive technologies in the patient's
living area in order to provide therapeutic or assistive type of human
monitoring [13]. One type of pervasive technology commonly used is using
wireless sensor motes, which can be deployed in an indoor environment.
In this paper, we propose a system architecture for placing a wireless sensor network (WSN) in a home; sensor nodes are placed into different private rooms where people are intended to live. Using photocells sensors in the nodes, our system can detect the movement of people inside of the rooms. Our system also includes a web-based interface which is used to visualize the data flow in our system in real-time. We call such a WSN implementation Assistive Home Monitoring, or AtHoM. This paper studies how we can combine the WSNs architecture with a WWW application to create a system that can visualize the data remotely by reacting to the sensors deployed in the environment. This paper describes an architecture to integrate the Web with Wireless Sensor Networks for an assistive environment and how it was implemented in the context of experiments. We provide a detailed description of the architecture of the AtHoM system we designed by basing our experiments on a real-world apartment, the Heracleia Apartment., that exists inside our laboratory, the Human Centered Computing Lab. We describe two different experiments implemented within the Heracleia apartment. The aim of these experiments is to validate localization algorithms and all related measurements. From the first experiment and the two subsequent applications we implemented in our apartment test bed, we found that the integration of WWW and WSNs can make the sharing of data collected by WSNs easier for people to access and visualize. Keywords: assistive environment, web applet, web sensor networks, wireless sensor
networks | |||
| Distinct value estimation on peer-to-peer networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 26 | |
| Zubin Joseph; Gautam Das; Leonidas Fegaras | |||
| Peer-to-Peer networks have become very popular on the Internet, with
millions of peers all over the world sharing large volumes of data. In the
assistive healthcare sector, it is likely that P2P networks will develop that
interconnect and allow the controlled sharing of patient databases of various
hospitals, clinics, and research laboratories. However, the sheer scale of
these networks has made it difficult to gather statistics that could be used
for building new features. In this paper, we present a technique to obtain
estimations of the number of distinct values matching a query on the network.
We evaluate the technique experimentally and provide a set of results that
demonstrate its effectiveness, as well as its flexibility in supporting a
variety of queries and applications. Keywords: assistive healthcare, peer-to-peer networks | |||
| Preserving visual information in low resolution images during navigation of visually impaired | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 27 | |
| D. Dakopoulos; N. Bourbakis | |||
| This paper presents several important issues related with the preservation
and analysis of important image information needed by a visually impaired
individual for safe navigation in an indoor environment. The image information
is provided to a visually impaired individual, via a 2D Vibration Array (VA),
which is part of the Tyflos navigation system and is attached on the
individual's abdomen. The system is also consisted of two micro-cameras (hidden
in a pair of dark glasses), headphone, microphone and a portable computer. The
cameras capture video from the 3D surrounding environment and after stereo
vision processing 3D representations are created. These representations are
projected on the VA whose 4x4 vibration elements vibrate in various levels
corresponding to the distances of the surrounding objects. During this
projection appropriate high-to-low resolution algorithms are used in order to
make the image mapping onto the VA. Keywords: blinds' navigation, high-to-low resolution, low resolution 3d
representations, mobility assistant, wearable system | |||
| Using robust audio and video processing technologies to alleviate the elderly cognitive decline | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 28 | |
| Vasileios Mylonakis; John Soldatos; Aristodemos Pnevmatikakis; Lazaros Polymenakos; Alex Sorin; Hagai Aronowitz | |||
| We are recently witnessing a growing interest for pervasive context-aware
products and services for elderly users. This is largely due to falling
fertility and rising longevity phenomena, as well as due to the proliferation
of the aging population all over the world. In this paper we present a number
of leading edge audio and video processing technologies, which can be exploited
to build robust ambient assisted living applications for elderly groups. In
particular, we discuss application requirements aiming at alleviating the
cognitive decline of elderly users and present audio and video processing
components that can essentially fulfill these requirements. We emphasize on
technologies such as automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, face
detection, person tracking, face identification, and demonstrate how mature
versions of these technologies can be appropriately customized to give a
significant boost to AAL applications for senior citizens. The challenges,
solutions and ideas within this paper are part of the EU project HERMES, which
aims at providing an integrated approach to cognitive care, based on assistive
technology that reduces age-related decline of cognitive capabilities. Keywords: 3D tracking, automatic speech, speaker and face recognition | |||
| Extracting spatiotemporal human activity patterns in assisted living using a home sensor network | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 29 | |
| Dimitrios Lymberopoulos; Athanasios Bamis; Andreas Savvides | |||
| This paper presents an automated methodology for extracting the
spatiotemporal activity model of a person using a wireless sensor network
deployed inside a home. The sensor network is modeled as a source of
spatiotemporal symbols whose output is triggered by the monitored person's
motion over space and time. Using this stream of symbols, we formulate the
problem of human activity modeling as a spatiotemporal pattern-matching problem
on top of the sequence of symbolic information the sensor network produces and
solve it using an exhaustive search algorithm. The effectiveness of the
proposed methodology is demonstrated on a real 30-day dataset extracted from an
ongoing deployment of a sensor network inside a home monitoring an elder. Our
algorithm examines the person's data over these 30 days and automatically
extracts the person's daily pattern. Keywords: human activity model, spatiotemporal activity patterns | |||
| Nearest neighbor search methods for handshape recognition | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 30 | |
| Michalis Potamias; Vassilis Athitsos | |||
| Gestures are an important modality for human-machine communication, and
robust gesture recognition can be an important component of intelligent homes
and assistive environments in general. An important aspect of gestures is
handshape. Handshapes can hold important information about the meaning of a
gesture, for example in sign languages, or about the intent of an action, for
example in manipulative gestures or in virtual reality interfaces. At the same
time, recognizing handshape can be a very challenging task, because the same
handshape can look very different in different images, depending on the 3D
orientation of the hand and the viewpoint of the camera. In this paper we
examine a database approach for handshape classification, whereby a large
database of tens of thousands of images is used to represent the wide
variability of handshape appearance. Efficient and accurate indexing methods
are important in such a database approach, to ensure that the system can match
every incoming image to the large number of database images at interactive
times. In this paper we examine the use of embedding-based and hash table-based
indexing methods for handshape recognition, and we experimentally compare these
two approaches on the task of recognizing 20 handshapes commonly used in
American Sign Language (ASL). Keywords: BoostMap, DBH, distance-based hashing, embeddings, gesture recognition, hand
pose estimation, hash-based indexing | |||
| Continuous camera-based monitoring for assistive environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 31 | |
| Guanling Chen; Prabhu Govindaswamy; Nan Li; Jie Wang | |||
| Camera-based monitoring is a valuable tool for assistive environments to
meet the important needs of those who may have physical or cognitive
impairment. It is, however, particularly difficult to continuously monitor a
moving subject in a large facility where many cameras are deployed. In this
paper, we propose Sensor-Integrated Camera Surveillance (SICS) to address this
problem. SICS uses wearable wireless sensors to locate moving subjects and
automatically selects the camera covering the subject, allowing human operators
to focus only on one screen to monitor an individual.
To improve flexibility and reduce cost, SICS connects distributed cameras through a self-organizing wireless mesh network. To reduce bandwidth consumption, SICS leverages onboard image processing on the camera for selective transmission. To enable automated reasoning, SICS uses a knowledge base for efficient rule specification and execution. Through empirical evaluation, we found that the automatic camera handoff enabled by SICS was effective for continuous camera-based monitoring. We provide quantitative performance evaluation results in this paper and discuss potential extension to the SICS infrastructure. | |||
| Monitoring human behavior in an assistive environment using multiple views | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 32 | |
| Dimitrios Kosmopoulos; Panagiota Antonakaki; Konstandinos Valasoulis; Dimitrios Katsoulas | |||
| This paper presents our approach in understanding the behavior of humans
moving on a plane using multiple cameras. This approach is appropriate for
monitoring people in an assistive environment for the purpose of issuing alerts
in cases of abnormal behavior. We perform camera registration based on
homography estimation and we extract position on 2D projection map. We use the
output of multiple classifiers to model and extract abnormal behaviour from
both the target trajectory and the target short term activity (i.e., walking,
running, abrupt motion etc). The proposed approach is verified experimentally
in an indoor environment. The experiments are performed with a single moving
target, however the method can be generalised to multiple moving targets, which
may occlude each other, due to the use of multiple cameras. Keywords: behavior monitoring, hidden Markov model, homography, optical flow | |||
| Towards iTV accessibility: the MPEG-21 case | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 33 | |
| Evangelos Vlachogiannis; Damianos Gavalas; Christos Anagnostopoulos; George E. Tsekouras | |||
| In this paper, the accessibility of the interactive television is being
discussed seen as a primary factor for its satisfactory adoption and commercial
success. This is a presentation of work undertaken in the context of a research
project aiming at delivering iTV services to disabled children. The project
approaches this objective through the utilization of the upcoming MPEG-21 ISO
standard. Based on that, iTV accessibility is faced through metadata and
adaptation. This work approaches the accessibility of iTV in a wider manner
contrary to previous studies that focus mostly onto the users with low vision.
Such a case study is being presented accompanied with a discussion of relevant
architectures, technologies and faced design issues. Keywords: MPEG-21, SMIL, XSLT, accessibility, human computer interaction, iTV,
metadata, pervasive environments, usability | |||
| Objective comparison of speech enhancement algorithms under real world conditions | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 34 | |
| Stavros Ntalampiras; Todor Ganchev; Ilyas Potamitis; Nikos Fakotakis | |||
| Over the past decades the problem of one channel, speech enhancement has
been addressed by a great deal of researchers. In this work selected methods
belonging to a variety of categories are applied to denoise speech signals
corrupted by non-stationary urban noise. The performance of spectral
subtraction, signal subspace, model-based and Kalman filtering approaches is
evaluated. Several objective measures which are designed to predict human
listening tests are employed in order to reach accurate conclusions. Two series
of experiments were carried out while multiband spectral subtraction along with
a short-time spectral amplitude (STSA) estimator based on the minimization of
the mean square error (MSE) of the log-spectra are shown to outperform the rest
of the algorithms. Keywords: Kalman filtering, model-based enhancement, signal subspace, spectral
subtraction, speech enhancement | |||
| CAMILE: Controlling AmI Lights Easily | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 35 | |
| Dimitris Grammenos; Sokratis Kartakis; Ilia Adami; Constantine Stephanidis | |||
| Ambient Intelligent (AmI) environments bring a number of interoperating
computing-embedded devices into our everyday life. The related usage scenarios
get more complex when users with disabilities and elderly are taken into
consideration. This paper presents an interactive application for intuitively
controlling multiple sources of light in AmI environments, built so that it can
be used by anyone, the young, the elderly, people with visual disabilities, and
people with hand-motor disabilities alike. In order to accommodate such a wide
range of users, we developed three different modes of interaction: (a)
touch-screen-based for sighted users with no motor impairments; (b) remote
controlled operation in combination with speech for visually impaired users or
tele-operation by sighted users; and (c) scanning (both manual and automated)
for motor-impaired users. In the paper, first we describe the design decisions
taken and their rationale. Then, we present the user interface that was
developed. Following that, we discuss the outcomes of a user-based evaluation
in which people with disabilities also participated, suggesting potential
interface improvements stemming from the evaluation results. Finally, we
provide our conclusions and insight on future R&D work in this area. Keywords: ambient intelligence, interface design, light controllers, touch screen
interfaces, visual disability | |||
| Human evaluation of the LOGOS' spoken dialogue system | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 36 | |
| Alexandros Lazaridis; Theodoros Kostoulas; Iosif Mporas; Todor Ganchev; Nikos Katsaounos; Stavros Ntalampiras; Nikos Fakotakis | |||
| In this work, the evaluation of the LOGOS' spoken dialogue system is
presented. The system offers user-friendly access to information, entertainment
devices and white good appliances. Short description of the LOGOS system's
architecture is given. The user interface of the system is based on remote
control device, PC keyboard and spoken language. In this paper we focus on the
speech interface and the spoken dialogue management. A group of 15 members,
aged 23 to 35, were used, in order to evaluate the usability and the degree of
acceptance of the LOGOS' spoken dialogue system from real users. The users were
given taskcards, which constructed the scenarios implemented for the home
devices' control and the SMS messaging services. Keywords: dialogue, human evaluation, multimodal dialogue system, smart home, speech
interaction, spoken dialogue system | |||
| A multimodal communication with a haptic glove: on the fusion of speech and deixis over a raised line drawing | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 37 | |
| Francisco Oliveira; Francis Quek | |||
| Mathematics instruction and discourse typically involve two modes of
communication: speech and graphical presentation. For the communication to
remain situated, dynamic synchrony must be maintained between the speech and
dynamic focus in the graphics. In normals, vision is used for two purposes:
access to graphical material and awareness of embodied behavior. This
embodiment awareness keeps communication situated with visual material and
speech. Our goal is to assist blind students in the access to such
instruction/communication. We employ the typical approach of sensory
replacement for the missing visual sense. Haptic fingertip reading can replace
visual material. For the embodied portion of the communication, we want to make
the blind student aware of the deictic gestures performed by the teacher over
the graphic in conjunction with speech. We propose the use of haptic gloves
paired with computer vision based tracking to help blind students maintain
reading focus on a raised line representation of a graphical presentation to
which the instructor points while speaking. In this initial phase of our
research, we conducted three experiments that show that: 1) The gloves convey
sense of direction; 2) The gloves do not interfere in fingertip reading; 3) A
person can navigate with the help of this system while listening to a story; 4)
It is possible to fuse the information received from both modes. We discuss
these findings in this paper. Keywords: awareness, embodiment, gesture, multimodal, sensory replacement | |||
| A holistic anonymity framework for web services | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 38 | |
| Spyridon Papastergiou; Giorgos Valvis; Despina Polemi | |||
| Security and Interoperability has been considered as the main requirements
for e/m-business services. Technologies such as XML-security and WS-security
were acknowledged as the most appropriate solutions to meet these requirements
and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), the most appropriate framework
design. Anonymity has become lately an additional requirement for various
e/m-business services (e.g. e/m-ordering, e/m-ticketing) enabling the execution
of unlikable, untraceable and unobservable interactions and enhancing the
privacy of these services This paper proposes a holistic SOA meeting the
security, interoperability and anonymity requirements. Keywords: connection anonymity, hidden web services, service oriented architecture
(SOA), web services (WS) | |||
| Providing location privacy in assisted living environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 39 | |
| Yi Ouyang; Yurong Xu; Zhengyi Le; Guanling Chen; Fillia Makedon | |||
| While pervasive technology becomes more widely used in assisted living
environments, it becomes more important to preserve the privacy of patients
being monitored. Location data of patients can be collected through sensors for
behavior patterns analysis, and they can also be shared among researchers for
further research for early disease diagnosis. However, sharing location
information also introduces privacy concerns. A series of consecutive location
samples can be considered as a trajectory of a single person, and this may leak
private information if obtained by malicious users. In this paper, this problem
is discussed and a location randomization algorithm is proposed to protect
users' location privacy. We defined privacy metrics according to location
privacy and proposed a method using dynamic mix zones to confound trajectories
of two or more persons. Keywords: algorithms, location privacy, sensor networks | |||
| Enhance the interoperability of the library search systems with zSAPN | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 40 | |
| Michalis Sfakakis; Sarantos Kapidakis | |||
| The wide adoption of the Z39.50 protocol from the Libraries exposes their
abilities to participate in a distributed environment. In spite of the
specification of a unified global access mechanism from the Z39.50 protocol,
unsupported Access Points result to query failures and/or inconsistent answers.
A challenge to this issue is to substitute an unsupported Access Point with
others, so that the most similar semantics to the original Access Point can be
obtained. In this paper we present the zSAPN (Z39.50 Semantic Access Point
Network), a system which enhance the interoperability of the library search
systems, by exploiting the semantics from the Bib-1 Access Point official
specification of the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol. zSAPN substitutes
each unsupported Access Point with a set of other supported ones, whose
appropriate combination would either broaden or narrow the initial semantics,
according to the user's choice. Keywords: Z39.50, interoperability, semantic access point substitution | |||
| Mobile device protection from loss and capture | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 41 | |
| Zhengyi Le; Yi Ouyang; Yurong Xu; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Mobile devices play a critical role in assistive environments. How to
authenticate and secure communications among them has become more important
especially against loss and capture of the devices. In this paper, we present
an approach to protect signing keys of mobile devices based on mediated RSA
introduced by Dan Boneh and others. The important property of our scheme is
transparent self-resilience. In other words, in case a device is lost or
captured and at the risk of being compromised and impersonated, our scheme can
disable the device instantly and the replacement will be transparent to other
users. In this way, if an attacker captures a mobile device, he has limited
time to use it because it will become soon invalid. If he wants to break our
scheme, he must compromise the device and its mediator simultaneously. Keywords: assistive environment, authentication, digital signature, forward security,
mobile device | |||
| Maximum supported network coverage area and cost evaluation of key pre-distribution schemes | | BIBA | Full-Text | 42 | |
| Yuan Xue; Helmut Jürgensen | |||
| Sensor nodes are low-cost computing devices combining wireless transmitters
with specialized sensors, such as temperature, humidity, light, motion, speed,
acoustic, chemical and seismic sensors. Sensor nodes are typically deployed in
great density over a large geographical area. After deployment, these nodes
organize themselves into an ad hoc network to gather the required information
from the target environment.
A variety of key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed for establishing secure communication in sensor networks. Key pre-distribution schemes bootstrap secret information in each sensor node to enable secure link establishment after deployment. The secure link establishment probabilistically depends on whether two neighboring nodes share some common secret information preloaded before deployment. In this paper, we address key pre-distribution schemes from system aspects: the estimation of maximum supported network coverage area, which memory size to choose and how many nodes to deploy in a target area. Since the unit cost of a sensor node and network density determine the total cost of a sensor network, we believe the analysis of the relationship between memory space, network density and security can benefit the realistic deployment of cost-aware sensor networks. We come to the conclusion that the security performance of key pre-distribution schemes is determined by the cost of the network. The schemes of Eschenhauer et al. and Du et al. can improve the network resilience to node capture or increase the maximum supported network coverage area either by increasing memory space or by increasing network density. On the other hand, in the scheme of Camtepe et al., increasing memory space requires increasing the network density at the same time to improve the security. The scheme of Chan et al. is perfectly resistant to node capture and the maximum supported network coverage area is determined by the memory space only. Contrary to intuition, the scheme of Chan et al. is most efficient when it reduces to preload N -1 keys in each node in the network of N nodes. | |||
| The future of homecare systems in the context of the ubiquitous web and its related mobile technologies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 43 | |
| Carl Taylor; Lubna Dajani | |||
| This paper is a call for the technological provision of homecare to be seen
in the wider context of the development of the Internet, and the connected
benefits that it brings to the elderly citizen. Recent discussions on the
Ubiquitous Web at MobileMonday New York [6] considered the social, technical
and economic effects that the Ubiquitous Web will bring about. This paper
highlights those effects relevant to in-home care. The imminent convergence of
Web 2.0 technologies with personal health monitoring, affordable broadband
fixed and mobile communications, and distributed data storage has the
capability to deliver vast improvements to the in-home care environment. The
advent of tools such as life logging, voice-based search and low-cost sensory
monitoring enrich this convergence, and can generate significant social
improvements for the elderly.
The aging world population is increasingly living in dense urban conurbations, which bring the benefit of plentiful wired and wireless broadband communication technology. Tomorrow's elderly citizens will be familiar with distributed family groups, and will use digital communication technologies to ensure their everyday inclusiveness and with their families and social tribes. This paper presents the enabling technologies that will bear on the assistive home care environment and assesses their convergence. It concludes with the recommendation that home care technologies should not be developed in isolation, but that they should be developed in the realistic expectation of cost-effective wide-area broadband networks and web-based care services. Future designers of such care services should use web, mobile and broadband technologies to balance reliance between local and network devices, such that elderly citizens have ubiquity of support services where ever they may be, rather than becoming bound to their homes or health centers. Keywords: ZigBee, broadband, home care, interactive voice recognition, internet, life
logging, mobile, near field communications, personal area network, sensors,
software, software as a service, ubiquitous web | |||
| Towards personalised home care systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 44 | |
| Feng Wang; Kenneth J. Turner | |||
| Home care is increasingly seen as a promising alternative to traditional
care services. Programming home care systems remains a significant challenge
considering the potentially large scale of deployment, the differences between
individual care needs, and the progressive nature of ageing. In this paper, we
present ongoing work on programming home care systems to support
personalisation, adaptability over time, and dependability. A policy-based
approach is used to build such systems. We present the technical details of our
approach, including a policy language for home care and the corresponding
system architecture. Policy examples are used to illustrate how the approach
supports personalisation of home care services. Keywords: home care, personalisation, pervasive computing, policy-based management | |||
| An integrated approach to supporting interaction evolution in home care systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 45 | |
| Tony McBryan; Marilyn R. McGee-Lennon; Phil Gray | |||
| There are many sources of change within the domain of home care. People have
changing needs, beliefs, and preferences regarding their care plan and how they
might want to interact with existing and emerging home care technologies. The
devices and services available to the user are likely to change over time
depending on a person's capabilities or location within the home and the
current devices and services available. The resulting interaction methods can
therefore also change in accordance with the room location, available devices
or displays, or preferred modalities. Home care systems therefore need to offer
configuration possibilities that support this change. Computer systems offer
methods and tools to support configuration in the short term, but do not
provide mechanisms for supporting configuration over both short and long term.
This paper presents an approach that addresses this issue in the home care
domain by integrating methods for interaction requirements engineering with
system support for turning those requirements into a working configuration.
Both the methods and system support are designed to address a gradual process
of change -- 'interaction evolution' in home care. We present the key features
of our approach using a home care scenario and consider our progress to date in
implementing and validating the approach. Keywords: ageing population, context-aware, dynamic system, evaluation criteria,
evolution, home care system, interaction, requirements engineering, user
preferences | |||
| A medical diagnostic and treatment advice system for the provision of home care | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 46 | |
| V. Koufi; F. Malamateniou; G. Vassilacopoulos | |||
| Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise, involving broad
range of healthcare services provided by many individuals and organizations.
Apart from the provision of healthcare services to patients during
hospitalization, the ability to assist people who have healthcare needs at
their homes (e.g. the elderly) has become an increasingly critical issue. Home
care may involve, among others, provision of medical advice as well as
detection and handling of critical situations. Provision of such personalized
medical care services to patients requires readily access to integrated
healthcare services ubiquitously. Although Grid technology can support the
integration of healthcare services across settings of care and among providers
of care, it doesn't make it available at the point of care (i.e. at a patient's
home) which is often an environment with poor network and IT infrastructure.
The integration of mobile and wireless devices with Grid technology can provide
ubiquitous and pervasive access to Grid services. This paper presents
MASPortal, a Grid portal application for the assistance of people who are in
need of home care. MASPortal is designed for use with wireless Personal Digital
Assistants (PDAs) and provides remote access to an automated medical diagnostic
and treatment advice system via an adaptive and easy to use interface. In
particular, it facilitates collection of information from several sources in
order to compose the context of the patient needing assistance. Given this
context and a medical knowledge base, the patient's medical condition is
assessed and medical advice is provided or in the case of an emergency the
relevant healthcare processes are triggered. MASPortal has been implemented
with a multi-layered security infrastructure in order to ensure secure access
to healthcare processes and sensitive patient data. Keywords: access control, grid database services, healthcare process, homecare,
knowledge base, medical advice, pervasive access, wireless client | |||
| Locomotion monitoring using body sensor networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 47 | |
| Jaime Barnes; Roozbeh Jafari | |||
| Research indicates that various disorders in aging ranging from mild
cognitive impairment to dementia and Alzheimer's could be diagnosed early based
on the study of locomotion. Sensor platforms integrated into clothing provide
the possibility of reliable locomotion monitoring. In this work, we describe a
system using inexpensive, off-the-shelf inertial sensors to analyze locomotion.
We present our measurements for coordination and consistency and discuss the
preliminary results of our efforts to establish a baseline for these
measurements for normal adult locomotion. Keywords: body sensor networks, gait analysis, locomotion monitoring | |||
| A wearable wireless platform for fall and mobility monitoring | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 48 | |
| Pepijn van de Ven; Alan Bourke; John Nelson; Gearóid Ó. Laighin | |||
| In this paper a new wearable wireless fall and mobility monitoring platform
is presented. The platform was developed as part of a European Commission
funded project called CAA-LYX. The fall and mobility sensor is based on the use
of a tri-axial accelerometer. With the accelerometer, impacts are recorded and
together with mobility data, also obtained from the accelerometers, fall events
are identified. Fall event data, but also raw accelerometer signals, can be
conveyed to a mobile phone or PC using a Bluetooth connection. In laboratory
based fall trials with young healthy subjects a PC was used to store all data
coming from the fall and mobility sensors. A mobile phone was used in an
experiment with elderly people performing normal activities of daily living,
where only the user status was conveyed to a server and raw accelerometer data
were stored locally. With the phone, the whole system is wearable and can relay
alarms to a care taker wherever the user may be. During the experiments, in
which a total of 165 simulated ADL, 264 simulated falls and 833 hours of real
ADL were collected, the fall and mobility sensor demonstrated its ability to
accurately identify fall events. Keywords: fall sensing, mobility monitoring, wireless communications | |||
| Towards precision monitoring of elders for providing assistive services | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 49 | |
| Athanasios Bamis; Dimitrios Lymberopoulos; Thiago Teixeira; Andreas Savvides | |||
| The in-house monitoring of elders using intelligent sensors is a very
desirable service that has the potential of increasing autonomy and
independence while minimizing the risks of living alone. Because of this
promise, the efforts of building such systems have been spanning for decades,
but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Driven by the recent
technology advances in many of the required components, in this paper we
present a scalable framework for detailed behavior interpretation of elders. We
report on our early deployment experiences and present our current progress in
three main components: sensors, middleware and behavior interpretation
mechanisms that aim to make effective monitoring and assistive services a
reality. Keywords: assisted living, human activity monitoring, sensor networks | |||
| Analyzing motoric and physiological data in describing upper extremity movement in the aged | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 50 | |
| Gaurav N. Pradhan; Navzer Engineer; Mihai Nadin; Balakrishnan Prabhakaran | |||
| Cognitive functions, motoric expression, and changes in physiology are often
studied separately, with little attention to the relationships, or
correlations, among these entities. In this study, we implement an integrated
approach by combining motion capture (action) and EMG (physiological)
parameters as synchronized data streams resulting from the action and
associated physiological data. Our experiments were designed to measure the
preparatory movement capabilities of the upper extremities. In particular,
measurement of changes in preparatory activity during the aging process are of
interest to us, as the attempt is to develop means to compensate for loss of
adaptive capabilities that aging entails. To achieve this goal, it is necessary
to quantify preparation phases (timing and intensity). We measured motion
capture and EMG parameters when subjects raised their arms without constraint
(condition one) and raised their arms while holding a ball (second condition).
Furthermore, on comparing aging and young participants, we confirmed that with
aging the temporal relationships between actual movement and the preceding EMG
signal change. Keywords: electromyogram, factor analysis, feature extraction, integration analysis,
motion capture, multivariate analysis of variance | |||
| Application of a telemedicine system for the needs of prehospital emergency medicine at the area of Thrace-Greece | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 51 | |
| Athanasios Kessatis; Chrissoula J. Stathi; Elisseos C. Mavratzotis; Sofia P. Papanastasiou | |||
| The present study presents the development of a complete service of
prehospital emergency medicine (PEM). This service aims to introduce a system
which will include:
Immediate localization of NCEM ambulances and their guidance to patient's point. Patient's follow up during the transportation to the hospital via transmission of biomedical signals to NCEM and to the Emergency Department (ED) of the hospital. The above described system consists of three entities that interact: 1. Vehicles of NCEM (ambulances) 2. The NCEM operating room of Thrace 3. The hospital that accepts the patients. This system also is divided into two subsystems: A) Vehicle control subsystem. This subsystem works using the GIS. GIS requires three basic technological units: Telematic units on the vehicles which are GPS, PDA device, GSM/GPRS systems. An operating center which will use digital maps of the district of Thrace and proper software for the communication with the vehicles. A geographic data base able for continuously updates data transmitted from the vehicles. B) Biomedical signal transmission subsystem. This subsystem requires the following technological support: * Telemedicine units on the vehicles (device for monitoring clinical data and a laptop or tablet PC). * Control and signal operation center with a server PC which be the NCEM's operating room in Thrace. * The ED at the hospital with a PC. Keywords: GSM/GPRS systems, prehospital emergency medicine, telematic | |||
| Interactive doctor-patient system of the pain relief cabinet: General Hospital of Komotini-Greece | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 52 | |
| Elisseos C. Mavratzotis; Chrissoula J. Stathi; Sofia P. Papanastasiou | |||
| Palliative care in Greece and concretely at the area of Rodopi, has three
main restrictions:
* There is no direct communication between the patient and the doctor.
* Care-giving is totally based on a patient's relatives.
* There is no organized structure to support (visit-educate-advise) a patient's
environment. The interactive Doctor-Patient system of the pain relief cabinet is composed of two entities: 1. Pain relief cabinet 2. Patient's home. Three times per day the patient or the caregiver completes on a personal digital assistant (PDA) a simple numerical pain scale and answers to some simple (close type) questions about other symptoms. The doctors of the cabinet receive the data for each patient via the "General Packet Radio Service" (GPRS) technology. This system will provide daily and continuously information about a patients' condition. Also the doctor will be able to interfere to a patients' medication. The goals of the project are: * More effective pain management * In-time help for the patient's symptoms * Proper medication use * Capability of patient removal from the hospital's district * Evaluation of the caregiver's burden * Statistical analyses of the saved data and future research on pain relief and application of cost-effective solutions. Keywords: interactive doctor-patient system, pain management, palliative care, proper
medication use | |||
| Identification technologies to support Alzheimer contexts | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 53 | |
| J. Bravo; R. Hervás; R. Gallego; G. Casero; M. Vergara; T. Carmona; C. Fuentes; D. Gachet; S. Nava; G. Chavira; V. Villarreal | |||
| Alzheimer's disease makes great demands on care by assistants, due to the
fact that they cannot distract their attention from patients while they are at
the same time managing records. For that reason, technologies to complement
this process need to be adapted. In this work we present a proposal to adapt
identification technologies: Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) and Near
Field Communications (NFC), focusing especially on the last one. We fuse both
technologies and apply them to an Alzheimer's day center. Patients are tagged
with two kinds of labels: 13.56Mhz.Mifare for NFC and UHF for RFID. With the
first one we tag the context, which means patients, devices (displays, exercise
books, etc) and places. With a simple interaction, which involves touching tags
with mobile phones, it is possible to manage the information easily. Moreover,
with RFID, we localize each patient by the simple act of their passing by an
antenna placed in the doors. Keywords: NFC, mobile and ubiquitous computing, natural interaction | |||
| Wireless sensor networks supporting context-aware reasoning in assisted living | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 54 | |
| Alessandra Mileo; Davide Merico; Roberto Bisiani | |||
| The large increase in aging population implies that automatic home
monitoring will represent a major challenge for the near future. In this paper
we describe an "intelligent" home environment in which modern Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSN) technologies allow constant monitoring of a patient in a
context-aware setting. Data collected and manipulated by the WSN support
reasoning aimed at understanding the evolution of patient's health state and
home environment, even when a limited number of unobtrusive, heterogeneous
sensors is available. Keywords: ambient intelligence, assisted living, context-awareness, wireless sensor
networks | |||
| Keyframe detection in visual lifelogs | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 55 | |
| Michael Blighe; Aiden Doherty; Alan F. Smeaton; Noel E. O'Connor | |||
| The SenseCam is a wearable camera that passively captures images. Therefore,
it requires no conscious effort by a user in taking a photo. A Visual Diary
from such a source could prove to be a valuable tool in assisting the elderly,
individuals with neurodegenerative diseases, or other traumas. One issue with
Visual Lifelogs is the large volume of image data generated. In previous work,
we segmented a day's worth of images into more manageable segments, i.e. into
distinct events or activities. However, each event could still consist of
80-100 images, thus, in this paper we propose a novel approach to selecting the
key images within an event using a combination of MPEG-7 and Scale Invariant
Feature Transform (SIFT) features. Keywords: health management, keyframe selection, visual diary | |||
| Enhanced individualized learning environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 56 | |
| Gheorghe Scutaru; Elena Cocorada; Mariela Pavalache; Anna Marina Scapolla; Massimo Mustica; Dominic Kristaly | |||
| This paper presents the main outputs, and their pedagogical fundaments, of
the Socrates/Minerva project Individualized Learning Enhanced by Virtual
Reality IDENTITY 229930-CP-1-2006-1-RO-MINERVA-M. The overall project objective
is to produce a high level quality learning environment in an academic European
network ensuring an open access to improved educational resources, as well as
to the best practices. The main project outputs, short described in this
article, are: The Enhanced Individualized Learning Environment (EILE) and The
VR-Learning Resources Centre (VR-LRC). Keywords: individualized learning, remote experiments, virtual reality | |||
| A lean online approach to human factors research | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 57 | |
| Kenneth Treharne; Darius Pfitzner; Richard Leibbrandt; David Powers | |||
| Arranging sufficient research participation within time and resource
constraints is seldom an easy feat. Often, such constraints are a detriment to
thorough empirical evaluation of human-computer interfaces. Our objective is to
develop the means to test and construct human models which when applied to
interface and system development, result in efficient human computer
interactions. We report an online platform for experiment delivery to diverse
locations with an emphasis on alternative non-monetary rewards for
participation. Such a platform meets research goals within constraints as it
necessitates a simple web server and web programming. Also addressed are the
omnipotent issues of ethics, privacy and data integrity that arise in similar
proposals. Keywords: participation reward, web delivery | |||
| A pervasive wiki application based on VoiceXML | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 58 | |
| Constantinos Kolias; Vassilis Kolias; Ioannis Anagnostopoulos; Georgios Kambourakis; Eleftherios Kayafas | |||
| In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an audio wiki
application accessible via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the
Internet for educational purposes. The application exploits mature World Wide
Web Consortium standards such as VoiceXML, Speech Synthesis Markup Language
(SSML) and Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS). The purpose of such
an application is to assist visually impaired, technologically uneducated, and
underprivileged people in accessing information originally intended to be
accessed visually via a Personal Computer. Users may access wiki content via
wired or mobile phones, or via a Personal Computer using a Web Browser or a
Voice over IP service. This feature promotes pervasiveness to educational
material to an extremely large population, i.e. those who simply own a
telephone line. Keywords: VoiceXML, audio information system, information system, wiki | |||
| Collaborative e-learning environments enhanced by wiki technologies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 59 | |
| Ioannis Giannoukos; Ioanna Lykourentzou; Giorgos Mpardis; Vassilis Nikolopoulos; Vassili Loumos; Eleftherios Kayafas | |||
| E-learning environments have met rapid technological advancements in the
previous years. Nevertheless, current e-learning techniques do not adequately
support student interaction and collaboration, resulting in decreased student
progress and motivation. In this paper, a blended technique combining
collaborative forums and wiki technologies is proposed. Through collaborative
forums, students discuss course related topics assigned by the tutors to
produce new educational material. This material is then stored in the wiki
platform for further use. The proposed technique was applied on an e-learning
course provided by the National Technical University of Athens and its
effectiveness was evaluated using student activity data and questionnaire
analysis. Results showed that the technique adequately supported teamwork,
increasing student motivation and progress while simultaneously producing
satisfactory level educational material. Keywords: collaborative learning, e-learning, wikis | |||
| PETA: a pedagogical embodied teaching agent | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 60 | |
| David Powers; Richard Leibbrandt; Martin Luerssen; Trent Lewis; Mike Lawson | |||
| We describe a hybrid real and virtual system that monitors and teaches
children in an everyday classroom environment without requiring any special
virtual reality set ups or any knowledge that there is a computer involved.
This system is truly pervasive in that it interacts with a child who is playing
with normal physical toys using speech. A simulated virtual head provides a
focus and the opportunity for microphonological language teaching, whilst a
simulated world allows the teacher to demonstrate using her set of blocks --
much as a teacher might demonstrate at the front of the class. However this
system allows individual students, or pairs of students, to interact with the
task in a computer-free way and receive feedback from PETA, the Teaching Head,
as if from their own private tutor. Keywords: affect-awareness, call, embodied conversational agents, human-computer
interfaces, second language teaching | |||
| Portal-type applications for web campus | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 61 | |
| Massimo Mustica; Gabriela Moraru; Costin Grigorescu; Dominic Mircea Kristaly | |||
| In this paper, we describe a system platform developed for e-Learning
purpose. The platform was developed within the Leonardo da Vinci project,
VetTrend. The system of applications is constructed around a central portal
(uPortal) and permits access of a large type of users. Courses could be
developed and integrated inside the platform by the teachers. The students will
be able to view this courses and communicate each other, or with the teachers,
using the integrated software tools. The main purpose of this system is to
gather the information together and to facilitate the users' communication. Keywords: communication, e-learning, platform, portal | |||
| Simulation-based UMTS e-learning software | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 62 | |
| Florin Sandu; Szilárd Cserey; Titus Constantin Balan; Mihai Romanca | |||
| This paper describes a soft-switch-based mobile network simulator developed
for the purpose of e-Learning. The main goal of this simulation-based
e-Learning software is to show and illustrate the behavior of the specific
mobile communications network elements. The case studies presented are oriented
on UMTS 3GPP's Release 4 network architecture. Keywords: 3G mobile telecom, 3GPP release 4, UMTS, discrete event simulation systems,
protocol monitors and emulators, virtual network adapters | |||
| A learning resources centre for simulation and remote experimentation in electronics | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 63 | |
| Andrea Bagnasco; Paolo Buschiazzo; Domenico Ponta; Marina Scapolla | |||
| Laboratory activities are essential components of engineering education and
professional practices. Nowadays, simulation-based laboratory and
Internet-controlled remote laboratories are available in many educational
institutions: this new scenario offers the potential for a deeper integration
of practice with traditional lectures, and for a much wider and more efficient
use of laboratories. Furthermore, it opens the road for the integration of
laboratories into distance learning activities. In the paper, after a review of
the current offer of both simulated and remote experiments, we present our
approach to treat them as standard learning objects and to store them in a
repository that has been developed on purpose. Last, we propose an integrated
environment for an efficient exploitation of the experiments packaged as
learning objects. Keywords: learning objects, remote laboratory, virtual laboratory | |||
| Newsletter engine application | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 64 | |
| Sorin-Aurel Moraru; Catalin Bujdei; Lothar Krupka; Ion Truican; Costin Grigorescu | |||
| In this paper, we present a newsletter engine application, with which
newsletters can be created and sent to different subscribers. The application
permits to users to create or delete newsletter articles, to select a visual
template of the newsletter's layout and to send the newsletters to its
subscribers. Keywords: article, communication, marketing, newsletter, templates | |||
| Web 2.0 technologies in web application development | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 65 | |
| Dominic Mircea Kristaly; Francisc Sisak; Ion Truican; Sorin-Aurel Moraru; Florin Sandu | |||
| The World Wide Web today has been flooded with many new web-oriented
applications that changed the role of the user, from spectator to actor. The
websites / web-applications became friendlier, more stylish, with many new
useful features and a high level of interactivity. New web-programming
techniques were developed on the existing HTTP protocol, the old ones were
reinterpreted, to offer to the user exciting, new experiences.
The most complex web applications, in terms of programming challenges, are content management systems. A Content management system, thanks to its modularity and scalability, permits a rapid development of complex, but very easy to maintain and manage web-oriented applications (websites). The existing content management systems, however, are somewhat limited when it comes to the graphical interface with the user. Also, they impose restrictions and a creative developer must use all sorts of tricks to achieve his vision. This paper is set to present the architecture for a web-based content management system that uses the new concepts and techniques introduced by WEB 2.0. Keywords: AJAX, Butterfly, CMS, web, website | |||
| Predictable interactive control of experiments in a service-based remote laboratory | | BIBA | Full-Text | 66 | |
| Andreas Rasche; Frank Feinbube; Peter Tröger; Bernhard Rabe; Andreas Polze | |||
| Remote and virtual laboratories are commonly used in electronic engineering
and computer science to provide hands-on experience for students. Web services
have lately emerged as a standardized interfaces to remote laboratory
experiments and simulators. One drawback of direct Web service interfaces to
experiments is that the connected hardware could be damaged due to missed
deadlines of the remotely executed control applications.
Within this paper, we suggest an architecture for predictable and interactive control of remote laboratory experiments accessed over Web service protocols. We present this concept as an extension of our existing Distributed Control Lab infrastructure. Using our architecture, students can conduct complex control experiments on physical experiments remotely without harming hardware installations. | |||
| LabVIEW-based remote and mobile access to real and emulated experiments in electronics | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 67 | |
| Florin Sandu; Paul Nicolae; Eleftherios Kayafas; Sorin Aurel Moraru | |||
| In the frame of the E.U. "Leonardo da Vinci" project it was accomplished the
research and development of several solutions for the distance (and mobile)
access to remote reconfigurable laboratory work-benches for e-Learning within
electrical engineering education. The authors implemented session-based
step-by-step- / auto-mated- (synchronous or asynchronous) test &
measurement sequences with remote access -- fixed (to rich content) or mobile
(with content-to-terminal adaptation), oriented on equipment (with instrument
virtualization) or on application with a high degree of visualization (ranging
from web-cam monitoring to "hyper-schematics"). The hardware, netware and
software developed (in co-design based on Hewlett-Packard "Measurement
Subsystems Architecture") is ranging from proprietary solutions to highest
degrees of standardized interfacing (mainly IEEE 488.2 "GPIB"), SCPI
instrumentation control, dedicated drivers or Interchange-able Virtual
Instruments, IVI, and "Measurement Studios" software. From the industrial
informatics point of view, the present paper is oriented on case studies based
on National Instruments LabVIEW suite. Keywords: LabVIEW, e-learning, electrical engineering, remote experiment, simulation,
test & measurement, virtual instrument | |||
| Remote interfaces for monitoring, administration and tracking errors for industrial devices | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 68 | |
| Ion Truican; Stefan Dan; Dominic Mircea Kristaly; Catalin Bujdei; Georgiana Popa | |||
| The aim of this paper is to get the best benefits between a private
implementation and an open source solution to be able to have that application,
which can manage through interfaces complex systems remotely by monitoring,
administrating and tracking errors related to industrial devices. By using open
source developed solution such as phpBB forum, it is easier to focus on topics
those must be discussed or tracking the existing errors and leave away the part
related to implementation or how to do that. It is also taken in consideration
custom applications, where is possible to implement all requirements and give
the possibility to end user to monitor and administrate devices. For instance
Java Server Pages -- JSP and Java Server Faces -- JSF combined with Servlet
offer a complete solution that could be customized and improved later on in
respect to all future requirements need it by changing technologies. To have
data persistency, database servers will be used to keep track of modifications
performed by user against devices and to be able to have history about reported
errors to develop a solution which should fix wrong or unpredicted behavior of
devices.
By using applications those are running over the Internet, for remote connection, security is an important aspect which should be taken in consideration. Keywords: administration, monitor, remote interfaces, secure communication, tracking
error | |||
| A remote laboratory environment for blended learning | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 69 | |
| Fernando Coito; Luís Brito Palma | |||
| In this paper, a remote laboratory environment for blended learning is
described. The main contributions are: a) the architecture proposed that
facilitates the student-centered learning; b) an environment that improves the
student's learning process; c) the set of experiments available that can be
easily incorporated in an e-learning platform. The Labview platform was used on
the server, a data acquisition board (NI-USB-6009) interfaces with the real
setups, and the clients access remotely using a web-browser. The practice
showed that the proposed remote laboratory can be used, not only for local
experiments in a laboratory, but also for e-teaching and e-learning activities
using a remote laboratory. Keywords: blended learning, control theory, e-learning, e-teaching, experimentation,
remote laboratories | |||
| Language teaching in a mixed reality games environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 70 | |
| David M. W. Powers; Richard Leibbrandt; Darius Pfitzner; Martin Luerssen; Trent Lewis; Arman Abrahamyan; Kate Stevens | |||
| How do you develop a game that is provably educational, that is engaging
from pre-school to adult, and that independently targets different language
ability and world experience/maturity?
Our purpose is to teach students of German or English as a Second Language in the same way that a baby learns a First Language. Children acquire language automatically without overt teaching, without conjugating verbs, looking up dictionaries or taking complex classes in syntax and morphology. They acquire through being immersed in an environment in which they have to learn to communicate in the language in order to achieve a variety of social and personal goals. In this project we provide a mixed environment with real toys for the learner to play with, and a simulated environment and a simulated teacher/caregiver to interact with. Whilst young children may be happy building towers and bridges out of wooden blocks, older children and adults cannot be expected to find motivating goals from the same tasks as a baby tackles as s/he simultaneously learns about the world and his/her language, culture and society. This paper explores the methodology we are developing to independently control for degree of language knowledge and degree of world experience. Keywords: call, embodied conversational agents, exploratory learning, games,
human-computer interfaces, mixed reality environment, multi-modal
communication, puzzles, second language teaching, serious games | |||
| The design of open source educational games for secondary schools | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 71 | |
| V. Daloukas; V. Dai; E. Alikanioti; S. Sirmakessis | |||
| Moodle is online open source software aiming at course management. This
paper is focusing on the game module which has been created using php language
and consisting of eight available games, which are "Crossword", "Hangman",
"Snakes and Ladders", "Cryptex", "Millionaire", "The hidden picture", "Sudoku"
and "Book with questions". Their data derive from question banks and
dictionaries or pictionaries, created by their users, both teachers and
students. The particular game module has already been translated into 6
languages.
The rationale behind their design is to create an interactive environment for learning various subjects. The writers feel that since learners are accustomed and attracted to gaming as well as they are able to gain immediate feedback on their performance, they should be easily engaged in them. Moreover, the games' interface is simple for the teachers, thus abolishing fear of application. Keywords: Moodle, education, games | |||
| Usability and education of games through combined assessment methods | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 72 | |
| Spyridon Papaloukas; Michalis Xenos | |||
| In this paper we use evaluation methods that are mainly used in software so
as to assess the usability of a video game. More specifically we examine the
strategy game "Civilization IV" as well as the tutorial of the game. The study
is using during the process of the experiment original evaluation methods as
well as combined and the final results are of great interest. It is worth
mentioning that we have used a strategy game which is not merely educational
and evaluated to what extend it may contribute to the learning process. Keywords: assessment methods, computer games, education, evaluation, games, learning
process, usability, videogames | |||
| The trial of Galileo | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 73 | |
| George Kontellis | |||
| In this paper we present the way Computer Games can be used in the
classroom. What is the need of using Computer games during teachers courses?.
What are the goals that we hope to achieve? These answers are discussed here.
Moreover the making of a Computer game 'The trial of Galileo' used for
educational purposes is presented. Keywords: Aristotle, Galileo, Newton's laws, computer games, education, free fall,
mechanics, modified games, physics | |||
| Complete, cinematic and expressive presentation in computer game | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 74 | |
| Mavrogeorgi Nikoletta; Yannis Christodoulou | |||
| Nowadays, computer games entertain millions of computer users. They support
incredible 3D graphics that attract players. However, cinematic presentation in
computer games is missing. There are technologies and rules for camerawork and
lighting that are not exploited by game engines. In this paper, we demonstrate
some problems that computer games suffer from, at the presentation level, and
we examine a new research project, called ANSWER, as a potential solution to
those problems. ANSWER attempts to cover the expressive needs of film directors
and game animators, by providing a set of tools that will allow the description
of a game or a film at the artistic level and during its production phase. Keywords: DirectorNotation, answer, computer games, entertainment | |||
| A pervasive network architecture featuring intelligent energy management of households | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 75 | |
| Spyridon Tompros; Nikolaos Mouratidis; Michael Caragiozidis; Halid Hrasnica; Anastasius Gavras | |||
| As the problem of energy generation and use becomes apparent, technologies
for optimal energy management and rational use gain importance. The present
work illustrates an architecture that focuses on energy saving at households, a
sector accounting for the 42% of global energy consumption in the European
Union. The main part of the architecture is provided by an optimized
residential gateway, which bears appropriate home network interfaces and
service logic to allow users perform personalized, pervasive programming of the
energy consumption of home devices, such as white goods, home communication
equipment and audiovisual equipment by enabling real time monitoring of energy
consumption in both active and stand-by modes. Keywords: energy management, personalization, pervasive computing, residential gateway | |||
| Online application for simulating intelligent support for medicine intake | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 76 | |
| Mark Hoogendoorn; Michel C. A. Klein; Borre Mosch | |||
| In this paper, we present two contributions around an intelligent ambient
system to assist people in adherence to medication prescription. First, we
describe a computational model for monitoring medicine intake based on
activities of a person, which is an extension of earlier work. Second, we
present a web-based application that allows evaluating the benefits of such a
model in an intelligent ambient system. We use this application to show the
feasibility of an intelligent system for medicine intake support by comparing
situations with and without intelligent support. Keywords: RTMEMS, intelligent medication assistance, simulation | |||
| Wireless connected home with integrated secure healthcare services for elderly people | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 77 | |
| Ross Velentzas; Andy Marsh; Geyong Min | |||
| During the last decade, the size of elderly population has shown remarkable
growth, especially in the developed countries of Europe. Main reason for this
phenomenon is the improvement of the conditions of daily life at home and work,
assisted by the socio-economic progression, best quality private living
environments and the enormous development in medicine and biomedical
technologies that extended the average age of life beyond 70. In future,
further improvement and wider expansion of these principles around the globe
will intensify this "population aging" phenomenon, which according to recent
surveys by the year 2020 will contribute to reaching the record number of 1
billion people over 60 years on Earth. This paper presents a home architecture
that could be utilized to integrate healthcare devices and services as well as
identifying solutions for their secure communication within the home
environment. This work is supported by the INHOME Project EU IST-045061/STP,
http://www.ist-inhome.eu. Keywords: elderly, health, home network, security, system architecture | |||
| Optimize databases for health monitoring systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 78 | |
| Catalin Bujdei; Sorin-Aurel Moraru; Stefan Dan | |||
| In this paper, we will study and describe the methods which could be used
for optimizing the database and achieving the best performances. The optimizing
possibilities was considered for the case of systems which user wireless sensor
networks (WSN) inside the systems dedicated for monitoring the health status of
the patients. Also, this kind of optimizations could be implemented and for
other type of similar systems. The system was created also as an extension at
Leonardo da Vinci project, VetTrend. Keywords: MsSQL, SQL, index, optimize performances, tuning | |||
| Intelligent services for assisting independent living of elderly people at home | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 79 | |
| Dimitrios Vergados; Alevizos Alevizos; Anargiros Mariolis; Michael Caragiozidis | |||
| For more than a decade it has been observed that due to the continuously
augmenting elderly population, medical expenditures for home health care were
exponentially raising every year. Healthcare organizations worldwide are being
encouraged to find more efficient methods of providing high-quality care with
cost savings. Elderly people who live alone may fear of being unable to obtain
help if they are injured or ill. For many families, the specter of such an
event can dominate decisions about living arrangements. During the last
decades, this fear has generated an industry marketing house automations,
alarm-and-notification systems as well as assistive technologies and
interventions aiming in the easier and more efficient control of the living
environment as well as to the provision of specialized home-care services. In
the current paper, the most important aspects of the INHOME project
architecture for improving the quality of life of elderly people at home is
presented, which is mainly targeted in ameliorating the ways of providing
intelligent services for assisting independent living of elderly people at
home. Keywords: assisted living at home, elderly people, health, healthcare services | |||
| Wireless tilt mouse: providing mouse-type access for computer users with spinal cord injuries or disabilities | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 80 | |
| Ferrol R. Blackmon; Michael Weeks | |||
| Interaction with computers (e.g. those with Internet browsers and graphic
user interfaces, etc.) nowadays almost requires some form of cursor control,
like a mouse provides. However, the traditional mouse is not always the best
alternative for all users. To provide a better option for users with spinal
cord injuries or severe disabilities an inexpensive wireless head tilt mouse
has been constructed to provide easy access to the regular functions of a
computer mouse. Keywords: assistive interfaces, human-computer interaction | |||
| Enabling NFC technology to support activities in an Alzheimer's day center | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 81 | |
| J. Bravo; R. Hervás; R. Gallego; G. Casero; M. Vergara; T. Carmona; C. Fuentes; S. W. Nava; G. Chavira; V. Villarreal | |||
| Alzheimer's patients need a large amount of varied types of attention by
carers, due to the disorders of memory and orientation they present. Knowledge
about the particular state of each individual day-care patient is sometimes
deficient, however, as assistants have no time to supervise patients' records
because they do not wish to have their attention distracted from care. In this
work we present a proposal to solve this problem. A complement to support the
information management routine by adapting Near Field Communication Technology
is offered here... By means of touching tags with mobile phones, day center
assistants carry out this management. This is done via tags placed throughout
the context, which means on patients, places, devices and applications. With
this simple interaction, some aspects of the routine in this kind of context,
such as information about the patient's basic status, orientation, door
security, therapy and other activities can be dealt with. In addition, this
proposal concludes with an information-filtering process whose purpose is to
achieve an easy interaction method with mobile phones and provide
recommendations to assistants and family. Finally, our process offers
appropriate information to physicians. Keywords: NFC, mobile and ubiquitous computing, natural interaction | |||
| ECG signal recording, processing and transmission using a mobile phone | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 82 | |
| Georgios Giannakakis; Ivan Buliev | |||
| Telemedicine is being rapidly developed. In isolated places, i.e. islands,
mountains or ships, where access to medical services is time-consuming or
infeasible, it can prove life-saving. Powerful programming languages such as
C++ and Java are supported by the modern mobile phones, which gives a
possibility for easy developing of useful telemedicine applications. In this
paper we present an approach for distant simultaneous monitoring of several ECG
signals. The individual channel signals are packed through modulation into a
complex sound signal, which is further recorded by a mobile phone. The phone is
interfaced to the measuring device through a modified hands-free accessory.
JAVA applications allow storing the signals in multimedia files and their
transmitting to a second mobile phone via MMS or other means. A real-time ECG
monitoring is also possible. The feasibility of the signal processing
algorithms is confirmed through simulations in MATLAB. Keywords: ECG monitoring, JAVA, health, mobile phones, telemedicine | |||
| Aiding speech-impaired people using Nintendo DS game console | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 83 | |
| Mohammad Shirali-Shahreza | |||
| By rapid growth of technology in recent years, many services are provided
for disabled people. Using wireless devices such as mobile phones in healthcare
is a new idea which is gained attracted by some developers in recent years. On
the other hand, nowadays game consoles are not only for playing games, but also
have more functions such as using for education.
Considering the above mentioned facts, this paper proposes a method to aid speech-impaired children using Nintendo DS Game console. This method helps the speech-impaired children which are not capable of using sign language well to communicate with others until they learn sign language well. Because the Nintendo DS is the most popular and best selling handheld game console, this method can cover a wide range of users. Also this method can encourage the children to repeat the spoken words and learns them to read some words. Keywords: Nintendo DS, game console, health, healthcare, sign-language,
speech-impaired people | |||
| Multi-modal health and activity monitoring framework for elderly people at home | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 84 | |
| Jérémie Leguay; Bertrand Ravera; Mario Lopez-Ramos; Vincent Gay; Eric Robert | |||
| This paper presents a multi-modal health and activity monitoring framework
that enables abnormal event detection and long term evaluation of the health of
elderly people at home. We describe its integration with the ESTIA [1]
Residential Gateway and detail the demonstration scenario we developed
involving different kinds of sensing modules. Keywords: activity monitoring, service oriented architectures, wireless sensor
networks | |||
| Power control schemes in wireless sensor networks for homecare e-health applications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 85 | |
| Nikolaos A. Pantazis; Dimitrios D. Vergados; Nikolaos I. Miridakis; Dimitrios J. Vergados | |||
| Power control is an important research topic for ad-hoc Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs). In today's sophisticated and competitive wireless environment,
the control of the energy consumption in a WSN for homecare e-health makes it
possible to guarantee basic levels of system performance, such as connectivity,
throughput, delay, QoS and survivability in the presence of both
mobility-immobility and a large number of sensor nodes. Recent advances in
sensor fabrication technology, low-power digital and analogue electronics, and
low-power wireless communication systems have made it possible to develop
low-cost, robust and survivable WSNs to support activities such as assisted
living and ambient intelligence (Aml). A large variety of approaches for
intelligent energy-efficient schemes have been simulated over different
performance metrics. In this paper, various decision support schemes are
proposed evaluating the selection of different network infrastructures in terms
of routing optimization and signal strength selection. Keywords: homecare e-health, low-energy consumption, power control, wireless sensor
networks | |||
| Pervasive behavior tracking for cognitive assistance | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 86 | |
| Sylvain Giroux; Jérémy Bauchet; Hélène Pigot; Dany Lussier-Desrochers; Yves Lachappelle | |||
| The current and prospective situation of cognitively impaired people entails
great human, social, and economical costs. Smart homes can help to maintain in
place cognitively impaired people, to improve their autonomy, and accordingly
to alleviate the burden put on informal and professional caregivers. The
research performed at DOMUS lab aims at turning the whole home into a cognitive
prosthetic, especially by providing cognitive assistance. In this process,
behavior tracking is a fundamental piece. After sketching the infrastructure,
two cognitive assistants are used to illustrate how activity recognition can
help to address four kinds of cognitive deficits (initiation, attention,
planning, and memory). An experimentation of one of these assistant involving
people with intellectual deficiencies is finally shortly described. Keywords: activity recognition, cognitive deficits, experimentation, pervasive
computing, smart homes, tangible user interfaces | |||
| Detection of multiple human location and direction by integrating different kinds of sensors | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 87 | |
| Tsuyoshi Shinno; Kazunori Hashizume; Junichi Tajima; Shigeo Kaneda; Hirohide Haga | |||
| As ubiquitous services become available, information on human location and
direction have so important that many detection methods have been proposed.
However, a lot of them generate electromagnetic waves or light rays. They are
unsuited for use in detection of children's location because parents are wary
of health damage caused by radiated electromagnetic waves. The accuracy of a
lot of methods which doesn't generate electromagnetic waves is not always high
indoors. In this paper, we propose a detection method of indoor multiple human
location and direction by using a stereovision camera and direction detection
sensors. With a stereovision camera, it is possible to detect human location
with high accuracy, but individuals cannot be identified. Direction detection
sensors make it possible to identify an individual wearing them. By integrating
these sensing devices based on direction information, detection of location and
direction become possible with high accuracy. Moreover, with this method it is
possible to identify an individual. We built a prototype and conducted an
evaluation experiment. We conducted the experiment in a room divided by a
ferroconcrete wall. We conducted a total of 10 experiments, changing the number
of subjects. The experimental evaluation result shows the average error of
location was 0.11[m] and the average error of direction was 0.39[rad]. The
success rate of identifying an individual was 90[%]. Keywords: contextual awareness, individual identification, location tracking,
ubiquitous computing | |||
| Detecting mastication by using microwave Doppler sensor | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 88 | |
| Saeko Tanigawa; Hideaki Nishihara; Shigeo Kaneda; Hirohide Haga | |||
| A method of detecting mastication by using a microwave Doppler sensor is
proposed in this article. For solitary elderly people, it is important to check
whether they have taken meals regularly for health care reasons. In this
article, a method for detecting whether meals have been taken regularly that
implements privacy protection and offers hands-free operation is proposed. We
have adopted a couple of microwave Doppler sensor. Microwave Doppler sensor
detects a moving object from the difference between the sent frequency and the
received frequency. The up-and-down motion of the jaw is detected by this
sensor. A person's mastication is known to have constant periodicity. [1] Based
on the above assumption, mastication is detected from the periodicity of the
up-and-down motion of the jaw in this article. A person often moves the body
and face in addition to the jaw during the act of mastication. Therefore, it is
necessary to extract the signal caused by the movement of the jaw from the
Doppler signal obtained by the sensors. Concretely, only the signal caused by
the up-and-down motion of the jaw is extracted from the Doppler signal by using
the Wavelet transformation, and the periodicity is detected by using the
auto-correlation function. And mastication is distinguished from other
movement. In the results of an experiment using two micro wave Doppler sensors
of 10.5GHz, the accuracy was from 70 to 90%. Keywords: detecting mastication, ubiquitous computing | |||
| Automatic sign language recognition: vision based feature extraction and probabilistic recognition scheme from multiple cues | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 89 | |
| George Caridakis; Olga Diamanti; Kostas Karpouzis; Petros Maragos | |||
| This work focuses on two of the research problems comprising automatic sign
language recognition, namely robust computer vision techniques for consistent
hand detection and tracking, while preserving the hand shape contour which is
useful for extraction of features related to the handshape and a novel
classification scheme incorporating Self-organizing maps, Markov chains and
Hidden Markov Models. Geodesic Active Contours enhanced with skin color and
motion information are employed for the hand detection and the extraction of
the hand silhouette, while features extracted describe hand trajectory, region
and shape. Extracted features are used as input to separate classifiers,
forming a robust and adaptive architecture whose main contribution is the
optimal utilization of the neighboring characteristic of the SOM during the
decoding stage of the Markov chain, representing the sign class. Keywords: Markov models, feature extraction, geodesic active contour models, gesture
recognition, hidden Markov models, image segmentation, optical flow,
self-organizing maps, sign language recognition | |||
| Bimodal person-dependent emotion recognition comparison of feature level and decision level information fusion | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 90 | |
| Muharram Mansoorizadeh; Nasrollah M. Charkari | |||
| Modern HCI systems tend to build a new channel of human-computer interaction
in which the human emotion is understandable by computers. Since Humans depict
emotional behavior in combination of various modalities (e.g. facial
expression, speech articulations); The HCI should reliably perceive emotional
information from multiple channels. The goal of the paper is to propose an
approach for combining emotion related information from speech and facial
expression. Two fusion approaches (feature level and decision level) are
presented and compared with experimental results. Results show that the
decision level fusion performs better than the other systems. Keywords: bimodal emotion recognition, information fusion | |||
| An ambient agent model for automated mindreading by identifying and monitoring representation relations | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 91 | |
| Alexei Sharpanskykh; Jan Treur | |||
| In this paper an ambient agent model is presented for automated mindreading
based on monitoring a human's interaction with his or her environment. Within
this agent model, a cognitive model for the human is assumed to be available.
Monitoring foci on a human's interaction with the environment are determined
from this cognitive model by automatically deriving representation relations
for cognitive states expressed by temporal predicate logical specifications.
From these temporal expressions the events are derived that are to be
monitored, and from the monitoring information on these events the
representation expressions are verified automatically. Keywords: ambient agent model, mindreading, monitoring, representation relation,
theory of mind, verification | |||
| Model-based ambient analysis of human task execution | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 92 | |
| Fiemke Both; Mark Hoogendoorn; Jan Treur | |||
| One of the challenges for ambient intelligent agents to support a human in
demanding tasks, is to find out and be aware of what the human is exactly
doing, and how much progress is made. Of course, in principle it would be
possible to interact with the human to discover what this human is doing, but
this communication can potentially slow down or even endanger task performance.
In this paper an ambient agent model is presented that is able to obtain such
an awareness of the human's progress in task execution by performing
model-based analysis using available workflow models and available observation
information. The design of the model is based on a component-based generic
ambient agent model. Simulation experiments for a case study are discussed, and
evaluated by automated formal verification. Keywords: ambient agent, awareness, model-based reasoning, task progress, workflow
model | |||
| Estimating emotion regulation capabilities | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 93 | |
| Tibor Bosse; Frank P. J. de Lange | |||
| To improve the performance and wellbeing of humans in complex human-computer
interaction settings, ambient (or pervasive) systems need the capability to
recognize the emotions of humans, but also the ability to reason about their
emotion regulation processes. To this end, this paper introduces a
computational model to estimate and reason about emotion regulation. The model
has been implemented and tested using the high-level modeling language LEADSTO.
A first evaluation indicates that the model is successful in estimating a
person's emotion regulation dynamics, and is robust to different parameter
settings. Keywords: BDI, emotion regulation, simulation, theory of mind | |||
| Using physical activity for user behavior analysis | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 94 | |
| Gerald Bieber; Christian Peter | |||
| Physical activity is one important aspect in user behavior analysis.
Abnormal movement behavior might be an indicator for an inappropriate
lifestyle, insufficient social inclusion, or generally disadvantageous life
conditions which might call for medical treatment. Assistive technologies can
make use of information on the physical activity of e.g. residents of a nursing
home or elderly patients living alone at home. In this paper, we present a
mobile technology for identifying movement behavior in everyday life. A
three-dimensional acceleration sensor is used to determine physical activity by
domain specific feature extraction. By use of data mining techniques and a
feature set extracted from everyday usage data, we achieve a high quality and
robust classification of physical activity. This can be used for further user
behavior analysis. Especially non-linear features like step-detection,
horizontal and vertical acceleration as well as spectral analysis proved to be
very powerful. A proof-of concept prototype is described which shows the
applicability of the developed technologies in everyday life. Keywords: acceleration sensor, feature extraction, mobile assistance, pattern
recognition, physical activity monitoring | |||
| Energy saving of TV by face detection | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 95 | |
| Ryo Ariizumi; Shigeo Kaneda; Hirohide Haga | |||
| A major part of electric power is supplied by thermal power stations, which
emit carbon dioxide (CO2) while generating electricity. Today, since we consume
a lot of electricity, we are threatened by environmental problems including
global warming. One of the key points for solving these problems is developing
energy-saving appliances. Televisions, which are widely used in the home, can
achieve energy savings by reducing the brightness of the screen. However,
unless a user adjusts it, the TV maintains the same brightness. Furthermore, we
tend to watch TV while doing other activities such as using a computer or
reading a book. This means that when we do something else, we often do not look
at the TV. In this article, an energy-saving TV system based on the recognition
of users' faces is proposed. This system recognizes the face direction of the
TV user and when the user is not looking at the TV, the system will reduce the
brightness automatically. On the other hand, when the system detects users'
attention to the TV, the brightness will increase. To develop the prototype of
this system, the face detection program OpenCV is used. A hand-made signal
transmitter and signal receiver were also used to change the brightness of the
TV. As a result of an experiment with the prototype system, we could confirm a
30% reduction of the TV's watt-hours. Keywords: TV, electric consumption, energy saving, environmental problem, face
detection | |||
| Human computer interface by EOG tracking | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 96 | |
| B. Estrany; P. Fuster; A. Garcia; Y. Luo | |||
| In this paper we present a human computer interface system that explores the
ability of human interacting with machine. The interaction uses a new channel
different from the traditional one: the electrical signal produced by the
dipole generated by the human eye. This signal is called the EOG signal
(Electrooculography).
In order to build such a system, we developed a set of hardware and software that allowed us to evaluate the technical aspects that influence the acquisition and digitization of these signals. The key technical problems have been solved. The system can perform the human-computer interaction with satisfactory results. Keywords: EOG (electrooculography), eye movement tracking, human-computer interaction | |||