| Assistive technologies and the visually impaired: a digital ecosystem perspective | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1 | |
| David J. Calder | |||
| Assistive technology devices for the visually impaired form a small part of
a much wider support infrastructure of people and systems that cluster about a
particular disability. Various disabilities, in turn, form part of a greater
ecosystem of sometimes isolated support teams. These may cluster about a
nucleus of various specific disabilities, such as vision impairment, speech or
hearing loss, each focusing on their own particular disability category. Teams
are comprised of therapists, caregivers, trainers, as well as device
manufacturers, who design and produce computer-based systems such as mobility
aids. There is, however, little evidence of any real crossover collaboration or
communication between different disability support teams and a disparate
cottage industry of manufacturers. The author proposes a collaborative digital
ecosystem framework that may assist this challenge. Although this paper is not
a survey of all available devices, examples of some commercial systems are
cited in order to draw attention to user interface challenges that confront
both those who rely on them.... and those who design them. Keywords: ambient sound cues, assistive technology, disabled, infrared, laser, long
cane, obstacle warning displays, portable electronic device, sensory channels,
sound interface displays, ultrasonic pulse-echo, visually impaired | |||
| Haptic emulation of games: haptic Sudoku for the blind | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 2 | |
| René Gutschmidt; Maria Schiewe; Francis Zinke; Helmut Jürgensen | |||
| For blind persons, information is often presented through substitute media.
We explore the possibility of emulating visual perception through haptic
perception completely using a new haptic display and using games as a paradigm.
We describe an implementation of Sudoku which utilizes the capabilities of the
display: representing the full Sudoku square in its natural form; entering
numbers and notes in the boxes of the square; emulating visual scanning for
information through scanning by touch; interacting by finger movement
(gestures). The only non-haptic component consists of sounds played to signal
the outcome of actions. This demonstrates the advantages of the planar
touch-sensitive refreshable haptic display when compared with other interaction
modes for blind persons. Keywords: Sudoku, board games, gestural interaction, haptics, nonvisual communication,
visually impaired | |||
| Voice commands for a mobile reading device for the visually impaired | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 3 | |
| Robert Keefer; Sundaram Narayanan; Nikolaos Bourbakis | |||
| In this paper, we describe the interaction design of a mobile reader for
visually impaired users. A prototype of the design was created and tested on
eight blind users. The results of this usability test are reported here, and
demonstrate that the proposed interaction design is an improvement over
currently available interaction mechanisms. Keywords: interaction design, visually impaired, voice user interface | |||
| Identification of static and dynamic muscle activation patterns for intuitive human/computer interfaces | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 4 | |
| Fred, Jr. Clark; Dan Nguyen; Gutemberg Guerra Filho; Manfred Huber | |||
| The goal of this pilot research was to create an intuitive human-computer
interface that would allow control of a robotic arm using the electromyographic
(EMG) signals from a person's own arm movements (or muscle activations). There
is enough information contained within EMG data to accurately differentiate
between different movements based on the observed muscle strategy. After
designing an algorithm, accurate prediction of arm movements was obtained; it
determined whether the test subject's arm was moving up, down, left, right, or
closing a fist, and also what base position the test subject was in if not
moving. A successful interface was designed for using EMG data with a robotic
arm, moving the robotic arm in the same direction that the test subject's arm
moved, replicating a static position with the arm, and grabbing a piece of
Styrofoam. With further research and refinement, this library of kinesiological
movements can be expanded to encapsulate the spectrum of human arm movement. Keywords: EMG interface, HCI, movement identification | |||
| Acoustical implicit communication in human-robot interaction | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 5 | |
| Yong (Yates) Lin; Zhengyi Le; Eric Becker; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Explicit communication addresses the use of distinct language or protocol to
convey the idea. Implicit communication helps to compensate many hidden
meanings omitted from the explicit language. In some situations, implicit
communication may even take the place of explicit communication. For the
autonomous robot, implicit communication provides an alternative way to
interact with people. This paper introduces the acoustic techniques for
implicit communication in human-robot interaction, and the design of acoustical
implicit communication based robot games. Keywords: acoustic communication, human-robot interface, implicit communication | |||
| Cognitive optimization in the development of assistive living systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 6 | |
| Alan Bowling | |||
| This paper presents a preliminary exploration of the characteristics and
structure of a cognitive architecture for control of assisted living systems.
In this work the key aspects of the cognitive system considered are
self-organization, communication, and the use of a priori knowledge. These
aspects are used to explore a cognitive approach to optimization, which is
considered to be a key aspect of a cognitive system. Test problems are examined
in order to determine whether the cognitive structures proposed by
psychologists can also perform optimization. The approach followed is to gift
the cognitive optimization with a priori knowledge of how to solve optimization
problems. This involves adapting and combining traditional optimization
techniques, such as the bracketing, gradient search, and branch and bound, into
a cognitive architecture. The algorithm is implemented as different processes
that communicate and learn from each other by passing messages in order to
organize around a solution. This approach is applied to four different problems
with different levels of difficulty in order to gain insights into the
structure and characteristics of cognitive optimization. Keywords: assistive living system, cognitive control, optimization | |||
| Emotion detection via discriminative kernel method | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 7 | |
| Hua Wang; Heng Huang; Yanzi Hu; Mindi Anderson; Pamela Rollins; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Human emotion detection is of substantial importance in diverse pervasive
applications in assistive environments. Because facial expressions provide a
key mechanism for understanding and conveying emotion, automatic emotion
detection through facial expression recognition has attracted increased
attention in both scientific research and practical applications in recent
years. Traditional facial expression recognition methods normally use only one
type of facial expression data, either static data extracted from one single
face image or motion dependent data obtained from dynamic face image sequences,
but seldom employ both. In this work, we propose a novel Discriminative Kernel
Facial Emotion Recognition (DKFER) method to integrate these two types of
facial expression data using a hybrid kernel, such that the advantages of both
of them are exploited. In addition, by using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)
to transform the two types of original facial expression data into two more
discriminative lower-dimensional subspaces, the succeeding classification for
emotion detection can be carried out in a more efficient and effective way.
Encouraging experimental results in empirical studies demonstrate the practical
usage of the proposed DKFER method for emotion detection. Keywords: discriminative learning, emotion detection, facial expression recognition,
facial feature, kernel | |||
| Heart murmurs identification using random forests in assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 8 | |
| Euripides Loukis; Manolis Maragoudakis | |||
| The aging population in many countries, in combination with high government
deficits and financial resources limitations, necessitates new methods for the
home care of the elderly at reasonable costs based on the exploitation of
modern information and communication technologies (ICT). This requires the
installation of assistive environments at the homes of elderly people, which
include various types of sensors, generating biosignals of other types of
signals, which are transferred through networks to local health centers or
hospitals in order to be monitored. However, scaling up the application of such
ICT-based methods of elderly home care is going to increase tremendously the
workload of the medical staff of local health centers or hospitals. Therefore
it is of critical importance to develop capabilities for an automated first
screening of these signals and identification of abnormal elements and
diseases. In this direction the present paper proposes a system for the
automatic identification of murmurs in heart sound signals, and also for the
classification of them as systolic or diastolic, using a new generation of
advanced Random Forests classification algorithms, which are aggregating the
prediction of multiple classifiers (ensemble classification). The proposed
system has been applied and validated in a representative global dataset of 198
heart sound signals, which come both from healthy medical cases and from cases
having systolic and diastolic murmurs. Also, some alternative classifiers have
been applied to the same data for comparison purposes. It has been concluded
that the proposed systems shows a good performance, which is higher than the
examined alternative classifiers. Keywords: assistive environments, bio-signals processing, heart sounds diagnosis,
random forests | |||
| Abnormal human behavioral pattern detection in assisted living environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 9 | |
| Kyungseo Park; Yong Lin; Vangelis Metsis; Zhengyi Le; Fillia Makedon | |||
| In recent years, there is a growing interest about assisted living
environments especially for the elderly who live alone, due to the increasing
number of aged people. In order for them to live safe and healthy, we need to
detect abnormal behavior that may cause severe and emergent situations for the
elderly. In this work, we suggest a method that detects abnormal behavior using
wireless sensor networks. We model an episode that is a series of events, which
includes spatial and temporal information about the subject being monitored. We
define a similarity scoring function that compares two episodes taking into
consideration temporal aspects. We propose a way to determine a threshold to
divide episodes into two groups that reduces wrong classification. Weights on
individual functions that consist the similarity function are determined
experimentally so that they can produce the good results in terms of area under
curve in receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Keywords: abnormal behavior detection, assisted living environment, classification,
similarity function, threshold value | |||
| Activity monitoring using an intelligent mobile phone: a validation study | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 10 | |
| Yan Huang; Huiru Zheng; Chris Nugent; Paul McCullagh; Suzanne M. McDonough; Mark A. Tully; Sean O. Connor | |||
| This research examines both the practicalities and feasibility of using a
smart phone in the monitoring of gross daily activity, namely step counts. An
Adaptive Step Detection (ASD) algorithm has been proposed and evaluated, based
on where the phone is worn on the body. Experiments involved collection of data
from a participant who wore two mobile phones (placed at difference positions)
while walking on a treadmill at a controlled speed for periods of five minutes.
A video recording and pedometer were used to independently record the number of
steps in addition to a count by human observation. A step detection calibration
factor was determined via a data driven approach, i.e, for each recording, a
calibration factor was obtained by learning from two thirds of the acceleration
data gleaned from the accelerometer within the smart phone. The remainder of
the data was used to test the algorithm. The step counts from the acceleration
sensor were validated by the video recordings, which were consistent with the
pedometer and human observation. The results show that the step counts detected
by the proposed algorithm achieved accuracy of 100% when the mobile phone was
placed in the right thigh positions, and achieved above 95% accuracy when the
mobile phone was placed in the right breast pocket, bag over right shoulder and
right ankle. Keywords: acceleration signal processing, activity monitoring, adaptive step detection
algorithm, intelligent mobile phone, wearable position validation | |||
| Optimizing pervasive sensor data acquisition utilizing missing values substitution | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 11 | |
| M. Michalopoulos; C. Anagnostopoulos; Charalampos Doukas; Ilias Maglogiannis; S. Hadjiefthymiades | |||
| Acquisition of pervasive sensor data can be often unsuccessful due to power
outage at nodes, time synchronization issues, interference, network
transmission failures or sensor hardware issues. Such failures can lead to
inadequate data delivery to the monitoring applications resulting in erroneous
conclusions. This paper presents a missing values substitution framework that
addresses the aforementioned issue. The presented framework has been evaluated
within a pervasive sensor monitoring environment that collects and transmits
patient health related data and results have been presented. Keywords: healthcare data transmission, missing values substitution, pervasive sensors | |||
| An agent-based application of personal health record in homecare | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 12 | |
| V. Koufi; F. Malamateniou; G. Vassilacopoulos | |||
| Homecare is an important component of the continuum of care as it provides
the potential to improve quality of life and quality of healthcare delivery
while containing costs. Personal Health Record (PHR) systems constitute a
technological infrastructure that can support greater flexibility for
healthcare professionals and patients, thus allowing for more effective
homecare services. In particular, PHRs are intended to reach patients outside
of care settings, influence their behaviors, and satisfy their demand for
greater information and access. To this end, PHR technology needs to evolve
well beyond providing a consolidated patient record, in ways that make it more
widely applicable and valuable to health systems. The development of
applications and tools on top of PHR systems can allow the PHR to function as a
platform for patients to exchange information and interact with the health
system (e.g., scheduling appointments electronically). This paper presents a
prototype PHR-based system that aims at supporting chronic disease management.
The system has been developed on the grounds of a service-oriented architecture
where healthcare process automation is realized by means of dynamic,
patient-related workflows. Keywords: homecare, personal health record, software agents, workflow systems | |||
| Pervasive technology to facilitate wellness | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 13 | |
| P. J. McCullagh; M. Beattie; C. D. Nugent | |||
| In this paper we evaluate the state of the art in systems with the ability
to monitor health and wellness. We report on three categories of system: home
telehealth monitoring, accelerometer based systems for classifying movement and
state, and systems designed to provide feedback for athletes and sports
enthusiasts. As these latter two approaches become pervasive, they can find
application as systems that promote wellness in the general population. This
can be particularly appropriate to the ageing population, if the systems can be
tuned to their requirements, with particular reference to usability. Keywords: feedback, home monitoring, mobile monitoring, wellness | |||
| Sensor placement and coordination via distributed multi-agent cooperative control | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 14 | |
| Alexandros Papangelis; Vangelis Metsis; John Shawe-Taylor; Fillia Makedon | |||
| This paper examines the problem of sensor placement and coordination to
maximize the sensor utilization when monitoring different types of
environments. Our assumption is that the sensors are mobile and each sensor can
have more than one type of sensing capabilities which can be active or not at
each specific moment. The goal is to maximize the amount of information
collected from the environment, given the limited amount of resources that the
total of the available sensors can provide, and at the same time to be fault
tolerant in failures of individual sensors by using a decentralized approach
that re-organizes their placement in case of failures.
We tackle this problem by employing a decentralized multi-agent coordination framework using message passing and the Max-Sum algorithm for building and maintaining a common picture of the area to be monitored. We show that by representing each sensor as an independent agent which can take decisions individually and at the same time can affect the decisions of its neighbouring sensor-agents we can provide a robust and efficient system for the monitoring of life-critical environments such as assistive environments or governmental infrastructures. Keywords: max-sum algorithm, mobile sensors, multi-agent systems, sensor placement and
coordination | |||
| A mobile robot for self-selected gait velocity assessments in assistive environments: a robotic driven approach to bring assistive technologies into established homes | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 15 | |
| Melina Brell; Jochen Meyer; Thomas Frenken; Andreas Hein | |||
| This paper presents a novel idea on how mobile robots can be used to
implement mobility assessments in home environments. The demographic change
leads to an increasing demand of care, especially for elderly people. Falls are
one major problem due to hospital stays, slow recovery time, and subsequent
impairments. Assisting technologies from the field of Ambient Assisted Living
could offer new diagnostic approaches and provide home assistance. Installing
required technologies in a home environment is often difficult and costly.
Here, mobile robots provide a new solution to bring sensors and actors into the
home environment without any installation. Especially laser range scanners for
robot navigation provide several possibilities to perform mobility assessments
at home. In this paper results of a self-selected gait velocity assessment done
with the aid of a laser range scanner are presented. The results show that it
is possible to use a laser range scanner to compute the movement trajectory of
a person and several parameters of gait. This offers new possibilities to
transfer clinical assessment into the home environment. Mobility assessments in
the domestic environment could be used for early and more objective detection
of impairments and gait disorders. Keywords: AAL, ambient assisted living, assessment, mobility, navigation, robot,
robotic measurement | |||
| Fun to develop embodied skill: how games help the blind to understand pointing | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 16 | |
| Francisco Oliveira; Heidi Cowan; Bing Fang; Francis Quek | |||
| We discuss how gaming can be used as a training strategy for students who
are blind or visually impaired (SBVI) to develop embodied skill in use of
haptic assistive technology. The technology takes the form of a haptic glove
that is designed to give SBVI access to the pointing behavior of teachers in
mathematics/science instruction that is performed in conjunction with speech
and the use of instructional graphics. Our initial studies show that
significant 'embodied skill' was required to afford fluent multimodal
communication between the instructor and student. We developed a gaming
strategy, employing flow theory to enhance the fun and engagement of the SBVI
to promote extensive perceptual training. Our results showed significant
improvement and interaction gains as the game-play progressed over multiple
sessions. Results also indicate that skills developed through game play were
persistent, and transferable to complex multimodal situated discourse
conditions. Keywords: ACM proceedings, assistive technology, embodied skill, gaming, multimodal
discourse | |||
| A new tourist audio guide service for elderly people integrated in the mobile phone: preliminary results | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 17 | |
| Unai Díaz; Álvaro García; Alejandro de Felipe | |||
| VITAL (Vital Assistance for the elderly) is a EC funded 6th Framework
program project whose objective is to develop a set of technologies and
applications with the aim to provide remote assistance to active 60+ years old
users with normal cognitive ageing to improve their social network and context
interaction, preventing them of being isolated and improving their quality of
life. Within this context, the application known as Tourist Audio Guide is an
innovative application for elderly tourists at their destination. The basic
approach is to develop an audio guide that can be downloaded in a mobile phone
to perform a simulation as close as possible to a human guide in the sense that
the users will receive most of the information about a topic in "real time",
allowing them to hear the explanations while they focus their attention on the
"real thing". This paper describes the evaluation of the first prototype of
this device with a small group of elderly users from the Community of San
Sebastian (Spain), enhancing the problems and needs for further development
addressed by them, which will be taken into account for a future improvement of
the system's feasibility, usability and acceptability. Keywords: VITAL, elderly, mobile services, user-centered design | |||
| A privacy-preserving protocol for finding the nearest doctor in an emergency | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 18 | |
| Georgios Drosatos; Pavlos S. Efraimidis | |||
| In this work, we define the Nearest Doctor Problem (NDP) for finding the
closest doctor in case of an emergency and present a secure multi-party
computation for solving it. The solution is based on a privacy-preserving
cryptographic protocol and makes use of the current location of each
participating doctor. The protocol is efficient and protects the privacy of the
location of all doctors. A prototype implementing the proposed solution for a
community of doctors that use mobile devices to obtain their current location
is presented. Keywords: location privacy, peer-to-peer network, personal data, privacy-preserving
protocol | |||
| Health monitoring using gait phase effects | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 19 | |
| Richard Byrne; Parisa Eslambolchilar; Andrew Crossan | |||
| The need to monitor patients after they leave the hospital or clinics is of
growing concern and doctors may need the facility to monitor certain patients
more than others. For example patients with high blood pressure are sometimes
fitted with a mobile monitor which can be used to track the patients blood
pressure over time. Patients suffering from depression, however, may also need
to be monitored to ensure that they are in a happy emotional state. In this
paper we introduce an alternative approach to mood detection and tracking based
on built-in accelerometer sensors found in common mobile phones. Our method can
be seen to compliment the need to monitor such patients allowing for doctors to
get in touch with them when their mood has altered. We build a system based on
neural networks which takes the gait information and learns the associated mood
of the user. This trained model is then used to detect the mood of the
individuals. We demonstrate preliminary results on mood detection using a
mobile prototype system. Keywords: gait, gait phase, gait phase effects, health monitoring, mood detection,
mood tracking, tracking | |||
| Sensor based micro context for mild dementia assistance | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 20 | |
| J. Biswas; K. Sim; W. Huang; A. Tolstikov; A. Aung; M. Jayachandran; V. Foo; P. Yap | |||
| Due to decline in their cognitive function, elderly people with mild
dementia living alone at home are at risk of making errors in their activities
of daily living (ADLs). In order to help such people, most activity recognition
systems for assistive living in smart homes attempt to classify activities from
coarse grained context such as location or time of day. Location by itself
however, does not provide adequate context information for the recognition of
ADLs and instrumental ADLs. It does not help to know that a person is in the
kitchen if we are interested in knowing whether or not he has taken his meal
(ADL) or prepared it (iADL). Additional information about the activity is
needed. In this paper micro-context is introduced as a key aspect both for
activity recognition as well as for prompted correction. Initial results from
our laboratory experiments are presented herein, and it is shown that
micro-context is useful for both activity recognition and prompted error
correction. Keywords: activities of daily living (ADLs), ambient intelligence, assistance for
ADLs, prompts and reminders, sensor based activity recognition | |||
| Computer based cognitive training for patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 21 | |
| Zafeiropoulos Stavros; Kounti Fotini; Tsolaki Magda | |||
| Brain activation through computer training of attention and executive
function could stimulate brain plasticity in patients with Mild Cognitive
Impairment (MCI). Aim: The study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a
computer based training on visual spatial abilities, visual attention,
executive function and visual memory, in MCI patients. Method: The participants
were 59 MCI patients, age 68.08 (7.25), education 9.17 (3.93), and MMSE 27.73
(1.35), classified in one experimental (N=30) and one control group (N=29). The
groups were matched in age (p= 0.60), education (p= 0.06), drugs (0.51) and
gender (p= 0.52). The experimental group attended 20 weekly sessions in a
period of 6 months, including tasks of visual attention, visual spatial
abilities, visual memory, and executive function. The control group did not
participate in any type of intervention and was in a waiting list.
Neuropsychological assessment was performed at baseline and at the end of the
training. Results: At baseline, there were no between groups differences in
cognitive abilities. At the end of the training, between groups comparison
yielded differences in favor of the experimental group in attention (p≤
0.00), verbal fluency (p= 0.00), visual memory (p= 0.01), verbal memory
(p=0.00) and learning through feedback (p=0.00). Within group analysis of the
experimental group's performance has shown improvement in attention (p=0.00)
and daily function (p=0.00). Controls have shown an improvement in perseverant
responses and cognitive flexibility (p≤0.00) and naming (p=0.02), and
deterioration in abilities of attention (p≤0.00). Conclusion: Computer
cognitive training helped the experimental group to improve attention abilities
and the improvement was generalized in verbal memory and in ADL as well. Keywords: MCI, assistive technology, cognitive training, dementia | |||
| ConstructFinder: web site interaction made easier | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 22 | |
| Thomas Beer; Ilvio Bruder; Martina Weicht | |||
| This paper introduces ConstructFinder, a Firefox add-on to find semantic
constructs in web pages. It uses the Unstructured Information Management
Architecture (UIMA), developed by IBM, to analyse web sites in order to find
semantic units like search fields or login forms. These constructs are then
highlighted for easy visual access as well as focussed for screen reader users.
Using the ConstructFinder in Firefox allows easier access to semantic constructs in cluttered web sites -- both for sighted and for visually impaired computer users. Keywords: Firefox add-on, UIMA, screen reader, structural analysis, web sites | |||
| Blink and wink detection for mouse pointer control | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 23 | |
| Eric Missimer; Margrit Betke | |||
| A Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) system that is designed for individuals
with severe disabilities to simulate control of a traditional computer mouse is
introduced. The camera-based system monitors a user's eyes and allows the user
to simulate clicking the mouse using voluntary blinks and winks. For users who
can control head movements and can wink with one eye while keeping their other
eye visibly open, the system allows complete use of a typical mouse, including
moving the pointer, left and right clicking, double clicking, and
click-and-dragging. For users who cannot wink but can blink voluntarily the
system allows the user to perform left clicks, the most common and useful mouse
action. The system does not require any training data to distinguish open eyes
versus closed eyes. Eye classification is accomplished online during real-time
interactions. The system had an accuracy of 8027/8306 = 96.6% in classifying
sub-images with open or closed eyes and successfully allows the users to
simulate a traditional computer mouse. Keywords: assistive technology, eye image analysis, mouse replacement system, video
based human computer interface | |||
| Shape recognition, with applications to a passive assistant | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 24 | |
| Antonella Di Lillo; Giovanni Motta; Kevin Thomas; James A. Storer | |||
| We address the problem of retrieving an object description, in the form of a
silhouette, from a database of shapes, in a way that is robust with respect to
translation, rotation, scale change, and distortion. Algorithms to solve this
problem can be a key step in passive assistant software that receives
information from available sensors and databases, and provides useful
information about the local environment to a visually disabled user (where the
assistant input may be in the form of audio). Experiments show significant
gains in retrieval accuracy over previous work. Keywords: image processing, passive assistant, shape recognition | |||
| Experiments with computer vision methods for fall detection | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 25 | |
| Zhong Zhang; Eric Becker; Roman Arora; Vassilis Athitsos | |||
| The goal of a fall detection system is to automatically detect cases where a
human falls and may have been injured. A natural application of such a system
is in home monitoring of patients and elderly persons, so as to automatically
alert relatives and/or authorities in case of an injury caused by a fall. This
paper describes experiments with three computer vision methods for fall
detection in a simulated home environment. The first method makes a decision
based on a single frame, simply based on the vertical position of the image
centroid of the person. The second method makes a threshold-based decision
based on the last few frames, by considering the number of frames during which
the person has been falling, the magnitude (in pixels) of the fall, and the
maximum velocity of the fall. The third method is a statistical method that
makes a decision based on the same features as the previous two methods, but
using probabilistic models as opposed to thresholds for making the decision.
Preliminary experimental results are promising, with the statistical method
attaining relatively high accuracy in detecting falls while at the same time
producing a relatively small number of false positives. Keywords: Gaussian model, fall detection, non-parametric model | |||
| Development of holistic physical therapy management system using multimodal sensor network | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 26 | |
| Aung Aung Phyo Wai; Jit Biswas; Foo Siang Fook; Lin Jinhong Kenneth; Sanjib Kumar Panda; Philip Yap | |||
| Rehabilitation with physical therapy exercises is important to maintain and
regain desirable physical strength to patients who underwent surgery or suffer
temporary physical impairments. This process generally requires the patient to
perform exercises regularly and correctly with assistance from therapist at a
rehabilitation clinic. But this approach results in costly, resource intensive
and subjective assessments in managing physical therapy exercises. In order to
alleviate these drawbacks, holistic physical therapy management system for
tele-rehabilitation is proposed leveraging on multimodal sensor network,
intelligent motion analysis, collaborative user interactions and communication
framework. With employing proposed system in patients' home and rehabilitation
clinic, exercises monitoring, assessment and interaction with multiple patients
and a therapist can be established in convenient and cost-effective manners. Keywords: multimodal sensor network, physical therapy, physical therapy management
system, rehabilitation | |||
| Extending event-driven experiments for human activity for an assistive environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 27 | |
| Eric Becker; Roman Arora; Scott Phan; Jyothi K. Vinjumur; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Many different aspects go into the generation of the data and methods needed
to recognize human activity within an ambient assistive living environment. The
Heracleia @Home apartment has been configured to include both wireless sensor
networks as well as wired sensors of multiple types to capture information
about subjects in the living space. The responses of these sensors are then
analyzed to create key episodic events that occur at each time and place. Once
these sensors are equipped to recognize a set of events, the data can then be
processed by applying a Hidden Markov Model approach and by an adaptation of
the Baum-Welch algorithm to identify different human activities within the
assistive living environment. An application has been created to help manage
and track the different sensors placed within the environment. Keywords: Baum-Welch modification, assistive environments, database, episodic events,
events of interest, human activity, wireless sensor networks | |||
| From dialogue management to pervasive interaction based assistive technology | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 28 | |
| Yong (Yates) Lin; Kyungseo Park; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Dialogue management system is originated when human-computer interaction
(HCI) was dominated by a single computer. With the development of sensor
networks and pervasive techniques, the HCI has to adapt into pervasive
environments. Pervasive interaction is a form of HCI derived under the context
of pervasive computing. This paper introduces a pervasive interaction based
planning and reasoning system for individuals with cognitive impairment, for
their activities of daily living. Our system is a fusion of speech prompt,
speech recognition as well as events from sensor networks.
The system utilizes Markov decision processes for activity planning, and partially observable Markov decision processes for action planning and executing. Multimodal and multi-observation is the characteristics of a pervasive interaction system. Experimental results demonstrate the flexible effect the reminder system works for activity planning. Keywords: POMDP, assistive environment, multimodal, pervasive interaction | |||
| The security and privacy implications of using social networks to deliver healthcare | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 29 | |
| Carrie Gates; Matt Bishop | |||
| Healthcare technologies have tended to focus on electronic health records
and devices (e.g., devices within the home for patients or handheld devices for
nurses and physicians), and the interaction between the two. However, no one to
date has investigated how social networking technologies might be used to
provide an assistive environment for patients who participate in group therapy.
In this paper we propose such an environment and go on to discuss the privacy
requirements and security implications in developing an appropriate support
mechanism. Keywords: healthcare technologies, privacy, security, social networks | |||
| An authentication model for delegation, attribution and least privilege | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 30 | |
| Ebrima N. Ceesay; Coimbatore Chandersekaran; William R. Simpson | |||
| The need to share information while maintaining privacy and security is a
growing problem in health, finance, defense, and other distributed
environments. Mitigating threats in a distributed computing environment is a
difficult task and requires constant vigilance and defense-in-depth. Most
systems lack a secure model that guarantees an end-to-end security. In this
paper, we devise a model that mitigates a number of threats to the distributed
computing pervasive in corporate and institutional information technology
enterprises. This authentication process is part of a larger information
assurance systemic approach that requires that all active entities (users,
machines and services) are named, and credentialed. Authentication is bilateral
using PKI credentialing, and authorization is based upon Security Assertion
Markup Language (SAML) attribution statements. Communication across domains is
handled as a federation activity using WS-* protocols. We present the
architectural model, elements of which are currently being demonstrated and
tested in a functional prototype in a boundary protected area processing
center. The architecture is also applicable to a private cloud. Keywords: WS-*, attribution, authentication, authorization, credentialing, delegation,
least privilege, public key infrastructure, security assertion markup language
(SAML) | |||
| Threat analysis of online health information system | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 31 | |
| Azadeh Nematzadeh; L. Jean Camp | |||
| Electronic health records are increasingly used to enhance availability,
recovery, and transfer of health records. Newly developed online health systems
such as Google-Health create new security and privacy risks. In this paper, we
elucidate a clear threat model for online health information systems. We
distinguish between privacy and security threats. In response to these risks,
we propose a traitor-tracing solution, which embeds proof to trace an attacker
who leaks data from a repository. We argue that the application of
traitor-tracing techniques to online health systems can align incentives and
decrease risks. Keywords: information health systems, legal aspects, privacy, traitor-tracing schemes | |||
| Misco: a MapReduce framework for mobile systems | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 32 | |
| Adam Dou; Vana Kalogeraki; Dimitrios Gunopulos; Taneli Mielikainen; Ville H. Tuulos | |||
| The proliferation of increasingly powerful, ubiquitous mobile devices has
created a new and powerful sensing and computational environment. Software
development and application deployment in such distributed mobile settings is
especially challenging due to issues of failures, concurrency, and lack of easy
programming models. We present a framework which provides a powerful software
abstraction that hides many of such complexities from the application
developer. We design and implement a mobile MapReduce framework targeted at any
device which supports Python and network connectivity. We have implemented our
system on a testbed of Nokia N95 8GB smartphones and demonstrated the
feasibility and performance of our approach. Keywords: distributed real-time systems, map reduce, mobile systems | |||
| Applying data warehousing technique in pervasive assistive environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 33 | |
| Shahina Ferdous; Leonidas Fegaras; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification
(Auto-ID) Technology, which is most commonly used now days in healthcare for
tracking and identifying objects. In the context of assistive environment,
statistical query analysis over the history of Data generated from RFID
Applications as well as real time monitoring of the patients or the elderly
people (people who need assistance) are really important. But Data generated
from these types of healthcare applications can be very large, if each
individual object becomes RFID-Tagged. As a result, the RFID technology is also
imposing a greater challenge to provide efficient query responses over these
Data. In this paper, we show how to apply traditional Data Warehousing
techniques to model these massive amounts of RFID Data. In short, we describe
how to construct an RFID Warehouse so that important query analyses can be
performed very efficiently. We also show how to process a continuous stream of
RFID Data to answer real time queries using Sliding Window techniques. By the
help of using synthetic Datasets, we conclude that querying over Data Warehouse
is much faster than traditional Relational DBMS. We also find that the
aforesaid performance improvement is expected to be much higher as the size of
the Dataset increases. Keywords: RFID cuboids and hyper cubes, RFID data warehouse, active and passive RFID,
assistive environments, cleansed RFID data set | |||
| An exploration of real-time environmental interventions for care of dementia patients in assistive living | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 34 | |
| Lisa Rebenitsch; Charles B. Owen; Reza Ferrydiansyah; Corey Bohil; Frank Biocca | |||
| Patients in the early stages of dementia are often subject to a variety of
dangerous symptoms and behaviors including depression, wandering, and
aggression. These conditions severely influence both quality of life and the
degree of caretaker intervention that is necessary. Non-pharmacological
interventions can alleviate these symptoms in some cases and are preferred as
an alternative to medication when possible. This paper explores alternatives to
the traditional definition of intervention, wherein the involvement of a
caregiver is assumed, using a new modality wherein interventions are
automatically instigated in response to conditions detected by physiological
and behavioral measures. The environment is automatically manipulated in these
methods in response to detected symptoms, intervening without the immediate
assistance of a caregiver. Keywords: assistive living, behavioral interventions, psychophysiology | |||
| An interactive user interface system for Alzheimer's intervention | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 35 | |
| Fillia Makedon; Rong Zhang; Georgios Alexandrakis; Charles B. Owen; Heng Huang; Andrew J. Saykin | |||
| Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurological affliction that impacts primarily
the aged due to brain tissue deterioration. It has been shown that this
deterioration can be slowed down by engaging the person with daily interactive
activities that include gaming, social interaction, memory exercises and
physical activity. In this paper, we describe ZPLAY, a game-based user
interface system which is designed to be web-based and to provide intervention
therapy for AD. ZPLAY has two versions: the @lab version which is designed for
diagnosis and used to measure different brain activation responses of AD and
the @home version which is used to promote subject engagement and
rehabilitation in a home environment in-between visits to the clinic. Keywords: Alzheimer's, Dementia, data stream synchronization, functional near infrared
(fNIR) imaging, game design, human computer interaction, machine learning,
motion capture, physical therapy, rehabilitation | |||
| Using mobile phones to improve medication compliance and awareness for cardiac patients | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 36 | |
| Islam Qudah; Peter Leijdekkers; Valerie Gay | |||
| Improving cardiac patients' medication compliance is a major factor in
reducing mortality rate and reducing hospitalization rate. This paper describes
a novel medication compliance management system. Its novelty lies in the
combination of functionalities that helps the patient to comply with their
medication regimen, together with a personal health monitoring system that
monitors their health and collects vital signs data using a mobile phone and
wireless bio sensors. The system is designed to collect and analyse medication
compliance, side effects and symptom responses and transfers the collected data
in real time to a web based system for remote monitoring by caregivers and
health professionals. Health professionals can use the system to assess the
effect of the medication regimen on their patients' health and adapt it to
reduce side effects and maximise the patient's wellbeing. Keywords: ambulatory monitoring, cardiac rehabilitation, medication compliance,
tele-monitoring | |||
| Web based medicine intake tracking application | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 37 | |
| Jyothi K. Vinjumur; Eric Becker; Shahina Ferdous; Georgios Galatas; Fillia Makedon | |||
| One of the issues in healthcare systems or medical information systems is
the reduction of medical errors to ensure patient safety. Inside an assistive
environment, we apply RFID tags to monitor drug taking pattern and its
consequences are reported to the care giver. This paper talks about an
application which tracks the medicine intake pattern for the elderly using RFID
readers and tags, motion sensors, and a wireless sensor mote. With the adoption
of this ambient assistive technology in healthcare systems, the concept of
heterogeneous sensor data management becomes an issue. In this paper, using a
Web Based Caregiver Module makes the process of monitoring medicine intake for
health-related matters of the elderly living alone simpler and easier. We also
propose to use an energy efficient technique by using multiple sensor devices
which employ a sequence of in-network data fusion as needed. Keywords: RFID, assistive environments, data fusion, energy efficiency, hidden Markov
model | |||
| FoodManager: a cooking, eating and appliance controlling support system for the elderly | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 38 | |
| Rosa Iglesias; Ibai Ibarguren; Nuria Gómez de Segura; Julen Ugalde; Leticia Coello; Miren Iturburu | |||
| These days, many support systems are being developed to improve independence
and quality of life of elderly and impaired people at home. Most of them have
been hitherto focused on providing home healthcare-related services, and little
attention has been paid to cooking and eating activities. On the one hand, the
role of supporting eating activities is likely to become increasingly
important. Since old age is often associated with memory impairments, it would
be useful to provide them with menus including a variety of healthier meals.
Furthermore, it is of paramount importance that these suggested meals are built
up based on disease pathologies, health condition and user preferences. On the
other hand, comprehensive cooking guidelines and food and shopping list
handling are also needed. With regard to cooking directions, it seems desirable
that users do not need to manage complex household appliances like the oven.
This can be achievable thanks to the technologies developed in the area of Home
Automation.
In this paper, a cooking support system, namely FoodManager, is discussed. This was designed and developed to deal with all the requirements described above. Its interface design and navigation was specially designed for the elderly. Testing performed with ten elderly people (ages from 58 to 81) provided some understanding about its usability and simplicity to use. Keywords: ambient assisted living, cooking, eating, elderly people, smart kitchen | |||
| BlueS: semantic caching approaches for data reuse in smart environments data management in healthcare scenarios | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 39 | |
| Andre Peters; Dortje Löper; Andreas Heuer | |||
| Pervasive technologies are essential at any field of healthcare issues.
Especially the growing number elderly necessitates the development of measures
to support care-dependent people at their private homes. One important research
field are so called Smart-Rooms, local agglomerations of smart appliances,
whose composition is prone to frequent, unforeseeable, and substantial changes.
These compositions are able to react on the user's needs by interaction of
individual appliances. Normally, these environments are equipped with smart
sensors to infer the activities of the user. In case the environments know the
current activity they can try to infer the next possible actions the user will
take, thus assist the user pro-active. On the other side, these environments
should be able to manage information or data the user 1 is interested in.
Therefore it is necessary to offer solutions for data access and information
exchange in ubiquitous environments with respect to the users needs and skills.
Therefore, we present BlueS (Bluetooth-Services), our service based solution
for data access and information exchange in spontaneous linked smart
environments, e.g. Bluetooth networks. In this paper we want to focus on smart
caching approaches for data reuse. A full description of BlueS can be found in
[10]. Keywords: distributed data management, mobile databases, pervasive computing, semantic
caching | |||
| Communicating through preferences | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 40 | |
| Nicolas Spyratos; Dimitris Kotzinos | |||
| This paper is concerned with the creation and management of events in a
community of persons with common interests. We introduce concepts and tools for
performing the following activities by members of the community: (a) proposing
events in which the members of the community can participate (b) expressing
preferences over a set of proposed events (c) choosing the events that best fit
the community with respect to the expressed preferences and (d) announcing to
the community the chosen events that are to take place. We focus on the design
of communication and collaborative decision making, and we outline the design
of an online system that supports these activities. Our proposal can be seen as
a generalization of existing tools like Doodle, an online system for setting up
meeting times. Keywords: communication, event, keywords, meeting, preference | |||
| Context-aware optimized information dissemination in large scale vehicular networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 41 | |
| Yves Vanrompay; Ansar-UI-Haque Yasar; Davy Preuveneers; Yolande Berbers | |||
| Context-aware inter-vehicular communication is considered to be vital for
inducing intelligence through the use of embedded computing devices inside
vehicles. Vehicles in a scalable environment may disseminate information about
certain road traffic conditions, traffic incidents, free parking space or other
relevant information to the neighboring vehicles in the vicinity. In this
paper, we optimize the dissemination of such context information by predicting
traffic patterns in a geographical region, including traffic hotspots. We
optimized the relevance backpropagation algorithm with prediction capabilities
to efficiently disseminate information. We evaluate our approach with the
OMNET++ network simulator using realistic large scale data sets. Our
experimental results show that by optimizing information dissemination we
significantly improve the Network Traffic, availability and relevant
information delivery in a large scale vehicular network. Keywords: context-awareness, inter-vehicular, optimization, predictions, scalability | |||
| A secure ubiquitous healthcare system based on IMS and the HL7 standards | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 42 | |
| Stefanos A. Nikolidakis; Emmanouil Georgakakis; Vasileios Giotsas; Dimitrios D. Vergados; Christos Douligeris | |||
| Body sensors are small devices close or attached to the human body that
gather information regarding vital signs (e.g. body temperature, blood
pressure, heartbeat rate etc.) or other physiological data. The Health Level
Seven (HL7) has published the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) which is a
document markup standard that specifies the structure and semantics of a
clinical document. CDA documents are encoded in Extensible Markup Language
(XML) and are used for exchanging documents in heterogeneous environments. In
this paper we are introducing an architecture to enable the collection of
medical data in real time from body sensors, with the use of a hand held device
(e.g. PDA) and their secure transmission to a central party, essentially a
hospital, from where medical personnel will be able to access it, and assess
the patients health status. When it comes to exchanging critical medical
information the need for QoS (Quality of Service) is imperative. The IP
(Internet Protocol) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) can be used to provide Internet
services (including realtime multimedia services) with QoS, and integrate
different services as well. The data gathered by the sensors are transmitted to
the PDA. They are converted to CDA format, digitally signed, encrypted and then
transmitted over IMS to the hospital from where data can be accessed by doctors
using their own PDAs'. Keywords: IP multimedia subsystem, health level 7, pervasive healthcare, wearable
sensor networks | |||
| An overview of body sensor networks in enabling pervasive healthcare and assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 43 | |
| Charalampos Liolios; Charalampos Doukas; George Fourlas; Ilias Maglogiannis | |||
| The use of sensor networks for healthcare, well-being, and working in
extreme environments has long roots in the engineering sector in medicine and
biology community. With the growing needs in ubiquitous communications and
recent advances in very-low-power wireless technologies, there has been
considerable interest in the development and application of wireless networks
around humans. With the maturity of wireless sensor networks, body area
networks (BANs), and wireless BANs (WBANs), recent efforts in promoting the
concept of body sensor networks (BSNs) aim to move beyond sensor connectivity
to adopt a system-level approach to address issues related to biosensor design,
interfacing, and embodiment, as well as ultra low-power processing /
communication, power scavenging, autonomic sensing, data mining, inferencing,
and integrated wireless sensor microsystems. As a result, the system
architecture based on WBAN and BSN is becoming a widely accepted method of
organization for ambulatory and ubiquitous monitoring systems. This review
paper presents an up-to-date report of the current research and enabling
applications and addresses some of the challenges and implementation issues. Keywords: body sensor networks, healthcare applications, ubiquitous computing,
wireless body area networks | |||
| Optimizing trajectories of mobile beacons to localize sensor networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 44 | |
| Awais Iqbal; Lanjiang Zhou; Manfred Huber; Gergely Záruba | |||
| This paper deals with localizing nodes in a sensor network. More precisely,
we consider the situation where sensor nodes localize themselves off a mobile
beacon node traveling over the deployment area. We describe a genetic approach
to derive semioptimal paths for a mobile beacon, where the optimal path is
defined as the beacon trajectory resulting in the highest overall localization
precision for sensor nodes, with certain constraints on path length. For this,
we assume that the beacon periodically broadcasts its location. The sensors can
extract this location information as well as the signal strength from received
packets to estimate their location. In such localization scenarios, the
trajectory of the beacon heavily affects the accuracy of location estimate. To
evaluate paths, we employ Cramer Rao bounds (CRB) which provide an unbiased
evaluation regardless of the location estimation algorithm. A genetic approach
is employed to evolve paths toward an optimal trajectory, with a C++ simulator
calculating sensor node CRB estimates as the objective function. We provide a
description of the approach and provide insights on what the influence of our
genetic algorithm is on the accumulative overall localization CRB. Keywords: distributed localization, genetic algorithm, sensor network | |||
| Android vs Windows Mobile vs Java ME: a comparative study of mobile development environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 45 | |
| Tor-Morten Grønli; Jarle Hansen; Gheorghita Ghinea | |||
| In this paper we look at three mobile development environments: Windows
Mobile, Java ME and Android. Through platform comparison, the different
environments are examined closely and strengths and weaknesses are brought to
life. In all three environments example applications are written to compare the
environments in action on respective devices. Environment specific deployment
files are created to illustrate amount of boilerplate code and overhead during
deployment. Different key areas such as implementation aspects, performance
aspects and quality assurance are compared to give an in depth overview of the
status of the different platforms. Our results show that although the three
environments are similar in some aspects they still represent three distinctive
fields each with their respective characteristics. Through our code examples
and platform comparison we come to the conclusion that the Windows Mobile and
Android platform provides a better development environment, whereas Java ME
still struggles with poor emulator support and incompatible implementations.
The main features they have in common are also seen in trends directly visible
in the programming languages such as unit testing, language features and end
user distribution strategies. Big differences are highlighted when inspecting
community environments, hardware abilities and platform maturity. This will
have large influence on the choice of development platform for creating novel
assistive environment applications. Keywords: Android, Java ME, Windows Mobile, mobile development environment,
programming languages | |||
| Modeling reliability for wireless sensor node coverage in assistive testbeds | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 46 | |
| Zhengyi Le; Eric Becker; Dimitrios G. Konstantinides; Chirs Ding; Fillia Makedon | |||
| Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a prevailing technology in assistive
environments. Assistive environments may include both home and work spaces such
as factories, military installations, industrial spaces, and offices. Critical
quality-of-service properties of WSN are reliability, availability, and
serviceability. This paper focuses on reliability for healthcare applications.
Reliable WSN-based monitoring services can prevent accidents, improve the
quality of life, and even help with early health diagnosis and treatments.
However, because patients/the elderly may have cognitive or other health
problems, the reliability is the dominant factor of quality of services of WSN.
This paper presents an approach to analyze the reliability of a WSN with the
most popular tree structures. The analysis is based on two distribution models,
exponential distribution and Weibull distribution. The simulation results also
give options to users on the cost vs. reliability issue. Keywords: assistive system, fault tolerance, network, quality of service, risk
management, sensor node management, system lifetime, wireless sensor network | |||
| Affect- and behaviour-related assistance for families in the home environment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 47 | |
| Christian Peter; Gerald Bieber; Bodo Urban | |||
| The ABRA System for affect- and behaviour-related assistance for families in
the home environment is a modular system, comprising components for assessing a
person's state, for communicating and displaying relevant information, and for
social togetherness. The technology platform is being developed to study novel
approaches to social inclusion, particularly for elderly, and new,
senior-friendly interaction and display techniques. This paper describes a
first implementation of a bimodal sensing module for assessing a person's
wellbeing, combined with an assistance and communication module for enhanced
social inclusion and sense of safety. Keywords: AAL, activity monitoring, affect, cognition, pervasive assistance, sensor
fusion, social inclusion, social network, user state detection, wellness
technologies | |||
| Assessing accelerometer based gait features to support gait analysis for people with complex regional pain syndrome | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 48 | |
| Mingjing Yang; Huiru Zheng; Haiying Wang; Sally McClean; Jane Hall; Nigel Harris | |||
| In this paper, we explored the feasibility of analysing gait patterns during
the Short Physical Performance Battery test by using an accelerometer to record
the movement of the subject. 12 subjects with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
(CRPS) and 10 control subjects were recruited in this study. 21 gait features
including temporal, frequency, regularity and symmetric information were
extracted from each recording. The differences of each feature value on control
subjects and patient subjects were assessed and compared. Features were
selected based on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) ranking. Multilayer
perceptron neural-networks were employed to differentiate between the normal
and abnormal gait patterns. The result shows when using five features the best
classification accuracy (97.5%) was achieved. It is feasible to discriminate
the patients with CRPS from the control subjects using a small set of gait
features extracted from walking acceleration data recorded during the SPPB
test. Keywords: accelerometer, complex regional pain syndrome, feature extraction, gait
analysis | |||
| Human-computer interaction and the older adult: an example using user research and personas | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 49 | |
| Francisco Nunes; Paula Alexandra Silva; Filipe Abrantes | |||
| This paper reports on the outcomes of the first phase of the eCAALYX project
-- an European project which aim is to develop a complete solution that
improves the quality of life of the older adult with chronic conditions by
monitoring his health and by improving the communication with his caretakers.
Specifically, the authors are responsible for creating a TV user interface for
older adults with chronic conditions.
The work described followed a multi-disciplinary approach strongly influenced by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies. The main contributions of this paper are two-fold and materialize into i) a user research study that covers aspects such as perception, cognition, mental and psychosocial changes that occur with age and ii) an example-based description of the process of creating personas. John, the diabetic persona, is the example provided that abstracts the process followed to generate the remaining personas in the project. Keywords: human-computer interaction, personas, user research | |||
| Mobile physical activity recognition of stand-up and sit-down transitions for user behavior analysis | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 50 | |
| Gerald Bieber; Philipp Koldrack; Christopher Sablowski; Christian Peter; Bodo Urban | |||
| Sufficient physical activity is required for everybody, especially for
elderly people. Monitoring of physical activity is possible in daily life by
using mobile sensors such as acceleration sensors. The recognition of periodic
activity types like walking, cycling, car driving etc. is easy to perform.
However, the identification of transitions between physical activities is
difficult, because those events are nonrecurring and unique. The estimation
about the share of standing or sitting during work is interesting for the
design of the modern workplace. Human ergonomics demand for a limitation of
standing work; this may even be enforced by the legal protection of working
mothers to improve the working condition. The recognition of standing and
sitting is furthermore useful within the home living area design. Hereby a
detection of staying, sitting and walking supports the assessment of the
activities of daily life. This paper addresses the methodology of mobile
physical activity recognition of transitions between sitting and standing by
using only one three-dimensional acceleration sensor. The recognition is
performed by using a synthetic kernel signal and a correlation of the
measurement signal. For the evaluation, a detection application has been
developed which uses the build-in sensors of a standard mobile phone. The
evaluation included 12 subjects and the result shows that mobile recognition of
activity transitions is possible. Keywords: DiaTrace, acceleration sensor, activity monitoring, assistive technologies,
physical activity transitions, user state detection | |||
| A deterministic large-scale device-free passive localization system for wireless environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 51 | |
| Moustafa Seifeldin; Moustafa Youssef | |||
| The widespread usage of wireless local area networks and mobile devices has
fostered the interest in localization systems for wireless environments. The
majority of research in the context of wireless-based localization systems has
focused on device-based active localization, in which a device is attached to
tracked entities. Recently, device-free passive localization (DfP) has been
proposed where the tracked entity is neither required to carry devices nor
participate actively in the localization process. DfP systems are based on the
fact that RF signals are affected by the presence of people and objects in the
environment.
Previous studies have focused on small areas with direct line of sight (LOS) and/or controlled environments. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and analysis of Nuzzer, a large-scale non-LOS DfP localization system, which tracks a single entity in real environments, rich in multipath. Without any additional hardware, Nuzzer makes use of the already-installed wireless data networks to monitor and process changes in the received signal strength (RSS) at one or more monitoring points transmitted from access points. The Nuzzer system enables many applications which support the elderly, including smart homes automation which can be used to assist the elderly, and intrusion detection which is used to protect the elderly's homes. We present deterministic techniques for DfP localization and evaluate their performance in a building, rich in multipath, with an area of 750 square meters. Our results show that the Nuzzer system gives device-free location estimates with less than 7 meters median distance error using only two monitoring laptops and three access points. This indicates the suitability of Nuzzer to a number of application domains. Keywords: device-free localization, passive radio map | |||
| Analysis of requirements and specifications for a monitoring system to support the self-management of dementia patients at home | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 52 | |
| Stefanos Xefteris; Maria Haritou; Konstantinos Tserpes; Alessandro Serretti; Josep Ramon Llopart; Raffaella Calati; Theodora Varvarigou | |||
| Telemedicine systems are nowadays making significant advances in healthcare
by decentralising it, offering innovative services to patients and doctors
worldwide, and making medical practice more efficient and cost-effective in a
plethora of its subfields. There is although a field that has not yet been
successfully coped with, even though it induces a significant burden, both
socially and financially. This field includes patients suffering from dementia,
as well as their carers, who run the risk of developing depression symptoms
themselves and often face social withdrawal and heavy additional private costs.
ALADDIN is a technology platform that intends to progress "state-of-the-art" in
integration of existing technological solutions. In order to develop and
validate an innovative monitoring system for health promotion, risk assessment,
prevention and sustainable impact of self management tools and education for
patients suffering from dementia and their care-givers. In this paper the
authors present the envisaged services of the ALADDIN platform, the user
requirements and ALADDIN's functional specifications. Keywords: Dementia, assisted living, cognitive states, e-health and assistive
infrastructures, non-obtrusive monitoring, quality of life, risk analysis | |||
| Applications of sensing platforms with wearable computers | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 53 | |
| Vitali Loseu; Hassan Ghasemzadeh; Sarah Ostadabbas; Nikhil Raveendranathan; Jacques Malan; Roozbeh Jafari | |||
| Use of mobile sensor-based platforms for human monitoring is an ever-growing
area of research. These system are able to provide objective, quantitative
measurements over a time period without being restricted to a clinical
settings. However, these platforms also face some challenges in terms of
wearability. Wearability concerns force sensor nodes to decrease in size and
employ wireless communication. Both of these constraints pose a serious design
challenge for realistic applications. In this paper, we present a variety of
sensing platforms from inertial tracking with an accelerometer system to
emotion recognition with a large set of physiological sensors. We aim to show
that body sensor network's properties and design patterns can be useful not
only in a traditional accelerometer based system applications, but also in
applications that are better suited with other sensor modalities. Keywords: EEG, EMG, body sensor networks, haptics, inertial tracking, physiological
sensors | |||
| Linear frequency estimation technique for reducing frequency based signals | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 54 | |
| Jonathan Woodbridge; Alex Bui; Majid Sarrafzadeh | |||
| This paper presents a linear frequency estimation (LFE) technique for data
reduction of frequency-based signals. LFE converts a signal to the frequency
domain by utilizing the Fourier transform and estimates both the real and
imaginary parts with a series of vectors much smaller than the original signal
size. The estimation is accomplished by selecting optimal points from the
frequency domain and interpolating data between these points with a first order
approximation. The difficulty of such a problem lies in determining which
points are most significant. LFE is unique in the fact that it is generic to a
wide variety of frequency-based signals such as electromyography (EMG), voice,
and electrocardiography (ECG). The only requirement is that spectral
coefficients are spatially correlated. This paper presents the algorithm and
results from both EMG and voice data. We complete the paper with a description
of how this method can be applied to pattern types of recognition, signal
indexing, and compression. Keywords: compression, data reduction, pattern recognition, signal indexing | |||
| Low complexity sensors for body area networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 55 | |
| Harinath Garudadri; Pawan K. Baheti; Somdeb Majumdar | |||
| In this work, we present signal processing approaches to offload complexity
from resource constrained sensor nodes to gateway/receiver nodes with better
power, memory and CPU budgets. We consider the resources in commercially
available cell phone platforms to fill the role of both gateway and receiver
nodes in emerging Body Sensor Networks, with applications in healthcare. We
leverage Compressed Sensing (CS), wherein signals can be reconstructed fairly
accurately with high probability from significantly fewer measurements than
that suggested by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling rate, albeit with additional
complexity at the receiver. This enables receiver nodes with better resource
budgets to leverage computationally intensive signal processing algorithms in
lieu of on-board processing at the sensor node. We show that aliasing can be
avoided at the sensor by trading analog domain complexity for a modest increase
in digital domain complexity with synthetic examples and real-time pulse
oximeter implementation. We describe ways to leverage receiver resources for
mitigating packet losses and sensing artifacts and present experimental results
with ECG. Finally, we motivate multi-sensor fusion at the receiver and show
that CS paradigm can be used to reduce sensor complexity with sloppy clock
management schemes. Keywords: aliasing, body area networks, compressed sensing, low power sensor nodes | |||
| Opportunistic strategies for lightweight signal processing for body sensor networks | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 56 | |
| Edmund Seto; Eladio Martin; Allen Yang; Posu Yan; Raffaele Gravina; Irving Lin; Curtis Wang; Michael Roy; Victor Shia; Ruzena Bajcsy | |||
| We present a mobile platform for body sensor networking based on a
smartphone for lightweight signal processing of sensor mote data. The platform
allows for local processing of data at both the sensor mote and smartphone
levels, reducing the overhead of data transmission to remote services. We
discuss how the smartphone platform not only provides the ability for wearable
signal processing, but it allows for opportunistic sensing strategies, in which
many of the onboard sensors and capabilities of modern smartphones may be
collected and fused with body sensor data to provide environmental and social
context. We propose that this can help refine data reduction at the local
level. We describe three examples related to health and wellness, to which our
system has been applied. Keywords: body area networks, energy expenditure, health monitoring, opportunistic
sensing, physical activity, wearable computing, wireless sensors | |||
| Time-domain heart rate variability analysis with the SPINE-HRV toolkit | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 57 | |
| Alessandro Andreoli; Raffaele Gravina; Roberta Giannantonio; Paola Pierleoni; Giancarlo Fortino | |||
| We present a toolkit for the time-domain Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
analysis, namely SPINE-HRV (Signal Processing In Node Environment-HRV). The HRV
is based on the analysis (time and frequency domain) of the R-peak to R-peak
intervals (RR-interval). The toolkit is composed of a wearable Heart Activity
Monitoring System (HAMS) to acquire the RR-interval (RRi), and a processing
application developed using the SPINE framework. The HAMS system consists of a
wireless chest band, a wireless wearable sensor node and a base station. The
RRi signal is processed using the SPINE framework at the base station side
through a time-domain analysis of HRV. The analysis provides seven common
parameters known in medical literature to help cardiologists in the diagnosis
related to several heart diseases. Keywords: HRV, SPINE, body sensor networks, domain specific frameworks, health care | |||
| Tracking your steps on the track: body sensor recordings of a controlled walking experiment | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 58 | |
| Jefrey Lijffijt; Panagiotis Papapetrou; Jaakko Hollmén | |||
| Monitoring human motion has recently received great attention and can be
used in many applications, such as human motion prediction. We present the
collected data set from a body sensor network attached to the human body. The
set of sensors consists of accelerometers measuring acceleration in three
directions that are attached to the upper and lower back as well as the knees
and ankles. In addition, pressures on the insoles are measured with four
pressure sensors inside each shoe. Two types of motion are considered: walking
backwards on a straight line and walking forwards on a figure-8 path. Finally,
we study and present basic statistics of the data. Keywords: acceleration, body sensor network, time series | |||
| Benchmarking dynamic time warping for music retrieval | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 59 | |
| Jefrey Lijffijt; Panagiotis Papapetrou; Jaakko Hollmén; Vassilis Athitsos | |||
| We study the performance of three dynamic programming methods on music
retrieval. The methods are designed for time series matching but can be
directly applied to retrieval of music. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) identifies
an optimal alignment between two time series, and computes the matching cost
corresponding to that alignment. Significant speed-ups can be achieved by
constrained Dynamic Time Warping (cDTW), which narrows down the set of
positions in one time series that can be matched with specific positions in the
other time series. Both methods are designed for full sequence matching but can
also be applied for subsequence matching, by using a sliding window over each
database sequence to compute a matching score for each database subsequence. In
addition, SPRING is a dynamic programming approach designed for subsequence
matching, where the query is matched with a database subsequence without
requiring the match length to be equal to the query length. SPRING has a lower
computational cost than DTW and cDTW. Our database consists of a set of MIDI
files taken from the web. Each MIDI file has been converted to a 2-dimensional
time series, taking into account both note pitches and durations. We have used
synthetic queries of fixed size and different noise levels. Surprisingly, when
looking for the top-K best matches, all three approaches show similar behavior
in terms of retrieval accuracy for small values of K. This suggests that for
the specific application area, a computationally cheaper method, such as
SPRING, is sufficient to retrieve the best top-K matches. Keywords: dynamic time warping, query-by-humming, time series | |||
| Dynamic background modeling for a safe road design | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 60 | |
| Anastasios Doulamis | |||
| In this paper we propose a new dynamic algorithm able to automatically
identify the background from images under severe changes of the environmental
conditions. The algorithm exploits motion estimation techniques and background
subtraction methods. The proposed scheme is implemented in road construction
application scenarios under outdoor environments in which the camera vision is
dramatically varied with respect to the weather conditions. Despite such
variations, the background can be automatically detected improving the tracking
performance for the vehicles and just assisting survey engineers in defining
possible errors in the design yielding as deviations between the actual and the
ideal trajectory of the vehicle over a turn. Experimental results in real-life
road surveillance systems reveal the efficiency of the proposed scheme
regardless of significant background changes. In addition, the proposed
algorithm requires low computational complexity. Keywords: dynamic background updating, motion estimation, road design, tracking,
vehicles | |||
| Integrating RFID on event-based hemispheric imaging for internet of things assistive applications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 61 | |
| V. Kolias; I. Giannoukos; C. Anagnostopoulos; I. Anagnostopoulos; V. Loumos; E. Kayafas | |||
| Automatic surveillance of a scene in a broad sense comprises one of the core
modules of pervasive applications. Typically, multiple cameras are installed in
an area to identify events through image processing techniques, which however
present limitations in terms of object occlusion, noise, lighting conditions,
image resolution and computational cost. To overcome such limitations and
increase recognition accuracy, the video sensor output can be complemented by
Radio Frequency Identification technology, which is ideal for the unique
identification of objects. In this paper we examine the feasibility of
integrating RFID with hemispheric imaging video cameras. After a brief
description and discussion of related research regarding RFID location, video
surveillance and their integration, we examine the factors that would render
such a system feasible in terms of hardware, software and their environments.
The advantages and limitations of each technology and their integration are
also presented to conclude that their combination could lead to a robust
detection of objects and their interactions within an environment. Finally,
this work ends with the presentation of some possible applications of such
integration. Keywords: RFID, hemispheric imaging, internet of things (IoT), pervasive systems,
surveillance | |||
| Iterative motion estimation constrained by time and shape for detecting persons' falls | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 62 | |
| Nikolaos Doulamis | |||
| The quality of life for the ageing population is associated with the ability
of the elderly people living independently. Fall is a major health hazard for
the elders when they live independently. How to effectively assess, response
and assist those elderly patients in trouble becomes an important research
topic in medical elderly care services. This paper presents the visual fall
detection subsystem developing the framework of ISISEMD project. The system is
able to detect person falls by taking into consideration only camera
information. The system is able to perform tracking of the person using
advanced image processing and computer vision algorithms event in complex and
dynamic background situations. The traditional approaches for detecting a human
fall is based on the use of specialized devices, e.g., accelerometers, which is
not a convenient framework, especially for persons with mild Dementia. Methods
for automatic defection of person fall from camera cues uses motion information
of the human object. However, using only motion information, we are not able to
accurately detect a fall event. This is mainly due to the fact that a fall is
encountered at different directions with respect to the camera position. In
addition, motion information is a noise sensitive process. For this reason,
accurate foreground object detection is required. However, foreground detection
using the traditional background subtraction methods suffers from the dynamic
changes of the background. To address these obstacles, we proposed in this
paper a combined framework for fall alert based on joint estimation of
foreground object and motion scene activity. In particular, motion information
is estimated over a set of "good image pixels" to eliminate the noise
sensitivity. Additionally, foreground object are extracted using frame
differencing and a set of rules that express shape constraints, time continuity
and the detection motion information in the scene. Experimental results on lad
conditions indicate a accurate detection of a person fall. Keywords: event driven video analysis, foreground detection, motion estimation | |||
| Multi-modal sensing smart spaces embedded with WSN based image camera | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 63 | |
| Sun-Min Hwang; Kyu-Jin Kim; Md. Motaharul Islam; Eui-Nam Huh; W. Huang; V. Foo; A. Tolstikov; Aung Aung; M. Jayachandran; J. Biswas | |||
| In this paper we discuss the use of low frame rate image cameras on a WSN in
order to gather micro-context information in the context of smart homes and
smart living spaces for the elderly. These simple devices are an attractive
alternative to their more heavy duty counterparts since they can gather ambient
image data at a rate that is amenable to the ambient space that they are in
without much infrastructural support or modification. We propose their use in a
multi-modal sensing environment where information from other ambient sensors
may be mixed and matched in order to provide intelligence about the space and
the activities of the subjects within the space. Their compelling use case,
which includes their light weight and ease of mobility makes them a good
candidate for a multi-modal sensing smart space. In this paper we introduce our
work on architecture of the smart space and the implementation of the feature
extraction using the image camera. Keywords: feature extraction, multi-modal, recognition, sensor image camera | |||
| Video-surveillance and context aware system for activity recognition | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 64 | |
| Xanthi Kolovou; Ilias Maglogiannis | |||
| Fall detection is the main issue in design an AAL system for elderly. This
paper describes an algorithm for vision and audio fall detection. The main
problem with video surveillance is the distinction of a fall from similar daily
activities such as lying down, kneeling, standing up, walking or falling. The
goal of this research is to design a reliable fall detection system which not
only relies on video analysis, but also uses the information from environment
of the patient to create context information. Keywords: fall detection, sound analysis, video processing | |||
| Computer aided sensor placement and automatic state definition | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 65 | |
| Alexandros Papangelis; Georgios Galatas; Shahina Ferdous; Sarantos Kapidakis; Fillia Makedon | |||
| The design of an Finite State Machine for human activity recognition heavily
depends on the type, number and deployment of the sensors used. In this work we
propose a tool that automatically creates the FSM, independently of the type
and number of sensors or the environment where these are deployed in. This tool
allows the users to define the areas of interest in an assistive living
environment. Keywords: assistive environment, decision support, graphical tool, information fusion,
sensor placement | |||
| An industrial video surveillance system for quality assurance of a manufactory assembly | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 66 | |
| Emmanouel Sardis; Athanasios Voulodimos; Vasilios Anagnostopoulos; Constantinos Lalos; Anastasios Doulamis; Dimitrios Kosmopoulos | |||
| In this paper, we present the research achievements of a computer vision
system that surveys the behavior of workers in an industrial environment. The
proposed system applies weakly supervised learning algorithms able to detect
objects, then to extract the behaviors of workers with respect to the
predefined assembly construction for a task and adopts adaptation mechanisms
able to dynamically modified the performance of a system with respect to the
environmental changes. The proposed architecture has been tested on real-life
applications. Keywords: behavior recognition, object tracking and detection, relevance feedback,
surveillance | |||
| EEG: pattern classification during emotional picture processing | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 67 | |
| Timo Schuster; Sascha Gruss; Henrik Kessler; Andreas Scheck; Holger Hoffmann; Harald Traue | |||
| In this work we describe the processing and classifying of EEG-data that was
acquired under emotional conditions. In the context of assistive environment
technology it is one of the most important challenges to get information about
a persons emotional state. To get this information, psychophysiological data
was recorded while stimulating subjects with emotional pictures. Afterwards a
classifier was trained to differentiate between physiological patterns of
negative, positive and neutral conditions. The classification results show an
accuracy of about 72%. Keywords: EEG, brain-computer-interaction, classification, emotion recognition | |||
| Individual emotional profiles in Wizard-of-Oz-experiments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 68 | |
| Steffen Walter; David Hrabal; Andreas Scheck; Henrik Kessler; Gregor Bertrand; Florian Nothdurft; Wolfgang Minker; Harald Traue | |||
| One of the most important and difficult fields in research of assistive
environment technology is the recognition of emotional and motivational user's
states. Emotion studies in the past show, that there are only a few universal
interindividual valid psychobiological profiles states, which are stable
associated with a user's emotional state. In this approach we look for
intraindividual valid psychobiological patterns of emotions and motivations. In
order to predict such states separate for different subjects we introduced a
calibration procedure for each of the 20 subjects. We expect higher emotion
recognition rates than preceding studies focusing on universal patterns on
sample data. First results will be presented at the conference. Keywords: Wizard-of-Oz-experiments, emotional calibration, individual emotional states | |||
| INDIGO project: personality and dialogue enabled cognitive robots | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 69 | |
| Vangelis Karkaletsis; Stasinos Konstantopoulos; Dimitris Bilidas; Dimitrios Vogiatzis | |||
| This demonstration aims to show specific technological advancements that
enable cognitive based robots to perceive and understand natural human behavior
as well as to act in ways that are familiar to humans. The demonstration is
built around a museum guide use-case, where a simulated robotic guide is
operating in a virtual environment. During the demonstration visitors are able
to interact with the simulated robot using natural language. At the same time,
videos of a real robot operating in a real museum are also demonstrated. Keywords: cognitive architecture, dialogue systems, natural language processing,
reasoning systems and machine learning for assistive environments, signal and
image processing for ambient intelligence and pervasive computing, usability
and HCI interfaces | |||
| Reinforcement learning of interface mapping for interactivity enhancement of robot control in assistive environments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 70 | |
| Jartuwat Rajruangrabin; Dan O. Popa | |||
| The supervisory control of robots is a very demanding application. In the
context of robots control in assistive environments, it is important that the
robot user is able to give commands to robots in a way that is easy and
intuitive. There are several tasks that can be achieved using robots under
assistive environments. It is challenging to efficiently control multiple
robots / robots with degrees of freedom with a simple/intuitive interface by a
single operator. In this proposal, we propose the use of Reinforcement Learning
for intuitive interface mapping. Based on interaction with the environments, we
can determine the optimal interface mapping through the process of
Reinforcement Learning. The novelty of this paper is the use of changing reward
functions based on qualitative performance evaluation for the Reinforcement
Learning algorithm. In this paper, we show that the use of proposed reward
functions can result in optimal/intuitive interface mapping for multiple robots
/ robots with degrees of freedom control applications. Keywords: human-robot interface, reinforcement learning | |||
| Breach of internet privacy through the use of cookies | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 71 | |
| Anderson A. L. Queiroz; Ruy J. G. B. de Queiroz | |||
| This paper describes the issue of invasion of privacy on the Internet using
the techniques of cookies, as subtle means to commit such a crime. The issue of
data privacy and information of millions of internet users becomes increasingly
critical in terms of maintaining social order, for large corporations that
dominate the World Wide Web is one of the main beneficiaries of these illegal
practices that are happening daily. Keywords: cookies, crime, internet, invasion, privacy | |||