Co-operative surveillance cameras for high quality face acquisition in a real-time door monitoring system

A poster session on co-operative surveillance cameras for high quality face acquisition in a real-time door monitoring syste

State of the art of audio- and video based solutions for AAL

Working Group 3. Audio- and Video-based AAL ApplicationsIt is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate). Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals (e.g., speech recordings). Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary 4 debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed.publishedVersio

Professional doctorate in health psychology thesis portfolio (Wehling : 2019)

This portfolio outlines the five competencies that formulate the Health Psychology Professional Doctorate. The competencies are outlined by the British Psychological Society (BPS, 2009) and include the following: research via the completion of an original piece of research and a systematic review of existing literature; the development and evaluation of a consultancy; the development and evaluation of a health behaviour intervention; an evaluation of a taught lecture and review of the professional skills gained whilst completing the doctorate. Throughout completing the doctorate, I evolved from landing a job as an Assistant Health Psychology Specialist at the very beginning into being promoted to a Health Psychology Specialist towards the end of my training. Before I was offered my first job in April 2015, I engaged in voluntary work with patients as well as doing an internship for an interventional trial at King’s College London, until I was offered a full-time job role in a commercial agency who were specialised in developing patient support programmes across a wide range of chronic conditions for many of the leading international pharmaceutical companies. As there was a strong focus on international collaborations both internally and with many clients being located in central Europe, my role then expanded to additionally becoming the representative Health Psychology Specialist for the German office in Frankfurt. In my role as a Health Psychology Specialist I additionally had the opportunity to deliver training sessions to postgraduate pharmacist students as part of their curriculum on various occasions, which entailed applying behavior change techniques with their patients. The focus was on underlying psychology theories to underpin the identification of factors impacting on behaviours around illness and treatment self-management and adherence, and how these may be addressed using a viable interventional approach, for example elements derived from Motivational Interviewing or Cognitive Behavioural Theory. My external consultancy project in the context of my doctorate training exposed me to the working practices in a different agency, which was important for me in order to be able to adapt to different circumstances, and to challenge me by dealing with two different clients or employers, but also to work under higher pressure, as this meant additional work for me and challenged my organisational skills. Taking my two years of experience of training in this course into account, I have definitely undergone a dramatic development as a result of the multifaceted programme curriculum– both on a professional, but also on a personal level. Professionally, I have evolved from a recent graduate with very little experience and practical skills working in the UK into a full-time working professional in a health psychology environment that encompasses the relevant aspects of the five competencies. Although I initially did not plan to pursue a career in the commercial domain, I felt increasingly comfortable in regards to my transition into a role in a fast-paced and financially driven business environment, which at times meant compromising academic quality that is common in the research domain, for work outputs that align with specific client needs and restricted time and budget-related restrictions. With the various opportunities I encountered during my time as a trainee, not only did I gain confidence in seeking out experience to enhance my professional skills and status, such as presenting at conferences or sharing my knowledge with undergraduate students, but it also provided a wide range of valuable impressions and meaningful learnings that formed my personal development and made me more open towards accepting challenging situations outside my comfort zone, especially related to networking and communicating confidently with other professionals, which was something I especially struggled with before enrolling on the course. This journey has overall been an exciting learning experience with many positive milestones I achieved during the process, for example my first publication of my systematic review. I reflect on very positively upon these two years, and I hope to evolve further in the future through becoming and working as a chartered Health Psychologist

Smart system and mobile interface for healthcare: stress and diabetes

In this thesis, a system with multi-channel measurement capabilities was designed and implemented, associated with the monitoring of stress levels, through a proposed algorithm that correlates heart rate, respiratory rate, and galvanic skin response. Experimental validation tests were carried out, as well as experiments with patients suffering from diabetes. To this end, measurements were made not only of stress-related parameters, but also of parameters such as blood glucose levels and blood pressure levels, seeking to extract correlations between stress and diabetes status. In addition, body temperature was another parameter acquired, in order to assess its importance and relation to stress and diabetes. The proposed multichannel system also features RFID technology for authentication purposes, as well as Wi-Fi access for internet connection and storage of the acquired data in a database structured for that purpose, thus enabling remote access. To allow the assessment of stress levels and diabetes progress, a mobile application was also developed, which also allows the visualisation of the analysed data.In this thesis, a system with multi-channel measurement capabilities was designed and implemented, associated with the monitoring of stress levels, through a proposed algorithm that correlates heart rate, respiratory rate, and galvanic skin response. Experimental validation tests were carried out, as well as experiments with patients suffering from diabetes. To this end, measurements were made not only of stress-related parameters, but also of parameters such as blood glucose levels and blood pressure levels, seeking to extract correlations between stress and diabetes status. In addition, body temperature was another parameter acquired, in order to assess its importance and relation to stress and diabetes. The proposed multichannel system also features RFID technology for authentication purposes, as well as Wi-Fi access for internet connection and storage of the acquired data in a database structured for that purpose, thus enabling remote access. To allow the assessment of stress levels and diabetes progress, a mobile application was also developed, which also allows the visualisation of the analysed data