10,909 research outputs found
General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity
and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming
increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition
knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances
is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal
plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays,
many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy
intake as well as users’ physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day.
However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build
other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve
as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture,
we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software
architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can
generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and
with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different
HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional
coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the
kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.
Keywords: telemonitoring; healthy habits; virtual coaches; system
Extracting tennis statistics from wireless sensing environments
Creating statistics from sporting events is now widespread with most eorts to automate this process using various sensor devices. The problem with many of these statistical applications is that they require proprietary applications to process the sensed data and there is rarely an option to
express a wide range of query types. Instead, applications
tend to contain built-in queries with predened outputs. In
the research presented in this paper, data from a wireless
network is converted to a structured and highly interoperable format to facilitate user queries by expressing high level queries in a standard database language and automatically generating the results required by coaches
DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report
The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students
Toward a generic personalized virtual coach for self-management: a proposal for an architecture
Keywords–virtual coach; personalization; coaching strategy; data science; model based software development
Design and prototype of a train-to-wayside communication architecture
Telecommunication has become very important in modern society and seems to be almost omnipresent, making daily life easier, more pleasant and connecting people everywhere. It does not only connect people, but also machines, enhancing the efficiency of automated tasks and monitoring automated processes. In this context the IBBT (Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology) project TRACK (TRain Applications over an advanced Communication networK), sets the definition and prototyping of an end-to-end train-to-wayside communication architecture as one of the main research goals. The architecture provides networking capabilities for train monitoring, personnel applications and passenger Internet services. In the context of the project a prototype framework was developed to give a complete functioning demonstrator. Every aspect: tunneling and mobility, performance enhancements, and priority and quality of service were taken into consideration. In contrast to other research in this area, which has given mostly high-level overviews, TRACK resulted in a detailed architecture with all different elements present
Elckerlyc in practice - on the integration of a BML Realizer in real applications
Building a complete virtual human application from scratch is a daunting task, and it makes sense to rely on existing platforms for behavior generation. When building such an interactive application, one needs to be able to adapt and extend the capabilities of the virtual human offered by the platform, without having to make invasive modications to the platform itself. This paper describes how Elckerlyc, a novel platform for controlling a virtual human, offers these possibilities
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