Participative Urban Health and Healthy Aging in the Age of AI

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2022, held in Paris, France, in June 2022. The 15 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover topics such as design, development, deployment, and evaluation of AI for health, smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, and coaching and health telematics systems

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

A Design Exploration of Affective Gaming

Physiological sensing has been a prominent fixture in games user research (GUR) since the late 1990s, when researchers began to explore its potential to enhance and understand experience within digital game play. Since these early days, it has been widely argued that “affective gaming”—in which gameplay is influenced by a player’s emotional state—can enhance player experience by integrating physiological sensors into play. In this thesis, I conduct a design exploration of the field of affective gaming by first, systematically exploring the field and creating a framework (the affective game loop) to classify existing literature; and second by presenting two design probes, to probe and explore the design space of affective games contextualized within the affective game loop: In the Same Boat and Commons Sense. The systematic review explored this unique design space of affective gaming, opening up future avenues for exploration. The affective game loop was created as a way to classify the physiological signals and sensors most commonly used in prior literature within the context of how they are mapped into the gameplay itself. Findings suggest that the physiological input mappings can be more action-based (e.g., affecting mechanics in the game such as the movement of the character) or more context-based (e.g., affecting things like environmental or difficulty variables in the game). Findings also suggested that while the field has been around for decades, there is still yet to be any commercial successes, so does physiological interaction really heighten player experience? This question instigated the design of the two probes, exploring ways to implement these mappings and effectively heighten player experience. In the Same Boat (Design Probe One) is an embodied mirroring game designed to promote an intimate interaction, using players’ breathing rate and facial expressions to control movement of a canoe down a river. Findings suggest that playing In the Same Boat fostered the development of affiliation between the players, and that while embodied controls were less intuitive, people enjoyed them more, indicating the potential of embodied controls to foster social closeness in synchronized play over a distance. Commons Sense (Design Probe Two) is a communication modality intended to heighten audience engagement and effectively capture and communicate the audience experience, using a webcam-based heart rate detection software that takes an average of each spectator’s heart rate as input to affect in-game variables such as lighting and sound design, and game difficulty. Findings suggest that Commons Sense successfully facilitated the communication of audience response in an online entertainment context—where these social cues and signals are inherently diminished. In addition, Commons Sense is a communication modality that can both enhance a play experience while offering a novel way to communicate. Overall, findings from this design exploration shows that affective games offer a novel way to deliver a rich gameplay experience for the player

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine

Holistic System Design for Distributed National eHealth Services

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Usable Security for Wireless Body-Area Networks

We expect wireless body-area networks of pervasive wearable devices will enable in situ health monitoring, personal assistance, entertainment personalization, and home automation. As these devices become ubiquitous, we also expect them to interoperate. That is, instead of closed, end-to-end body-worn sensing systems, we envision standardized sensors that wirelessly communicate their data to a device many people already carry today, the smart phone. However, this ubiquity of wireless sensors combined with the characteristics they sense present many security and privacy problems. In this thesis we describe solutions to two of these problems. First, we evaluate the use of bioimpedance for recognizing who is wearing these wireless sensors and show that bioimpedance is a feasible biometric. Second, we investigate the use of accelerometers for verifying whether two of these wireless sensors are on the same person and show that our method is successful as distinguishing between sensors on the same body and on different bodies. We stress that any solution to these problems must be usable, meaning the user should not have to do anything but attach the sensor to their body and have them just work. These methods solve interesting problems in their own right, but it is the combination of these methods that shows their true power. Combined together they allow a network of wireless sensors to cooperate and determine whom they are sensing even though only one of the wireless sensors might be able to determine this fact. If all the wireless sensors know they are on the same body as each other and one of them knows which person it is on, then they can each exploit the transitive relationship to know that they must all be on that person’s body. We show how these methods can work together in a prototype system. This ability to operate unobtrusively, collecting in situ data and labeling it properly without interrupting the wearer’s activities of daily life, will be vital to the success of these wireless sensors

Emerging Technologies

This monograph investigates a multitude of emerging technologies including 3D printing, 5G, blockchain, and many more to assess their potential for use to further humanity’s shared goal of sustainable development. Through case studies detailing how these technologies are already being used at companies worldwide, author Sinan Küfeoğlu explores how emerging technologies can be used to enhance progress toward each of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and to guarantee economic growth even in the face of challenges such as climate change. To assemble this book, the author explored the business models of 650 companies in order to demonstrate how innovations can be converted into value to support sustainable development. To ensure practical application, only technologies currently on the market and in use actual companies were investigated. This volume will be of great use to academics, policymakers, innovators at the forefront of green business, and anyone else who is interested in novel and innovative business models and how they could help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This is an open access book