613 research outputs found

    Biosensing and Actuation—Platforms Coupling Body Input-Output Modalities for Affective Technologies

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    Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affective experience is well-established, how to best address movement and engagement beyond measuring cues and signals in technology-driven interactions has been unclear. In a joint industry-academia effort, we aim to remodel how affective technologies can help address body and emotional self-awareness. We present an overview of biosignals that have become standard in low-cost physiological monitoring and show how these can be matched with methods and engagements used by interaction designers skilled in designing for bodily engagement and aesthetic experiences. Taking both strands of work together offers unprecedented design opportunities that inspire further research. Through first-person soma design, an approach that draws upon the designer’s felt experience and puts the sentient body at the forefront, we outline a comprehensive work for the creation of novel interactions in the form of couplings that combine biosensing and body feedback modalities of relevance to affective health. These couplings lie within the creation of design toolkits that have the potential to render rich embodied interactions to the designer/user. As a result we introduce the concept of “orchestration”. By orchestration, we refer to the design of the overall interaction: coupling sensors to actuation of relevance to the affective experience; initiating and closing the interaction; habituating; helping improve on the users’ body awareness and engagement with emotional experiences; soothing, calming, or energising, depending on the affective health condition and the intentions of the designer. Through the creation of a range of prototypes and couplings we elicited requirements on broader orchestration mechanisms. First-person soma design lets researchers look afresh at biosignals that, when experienced through the body, are called to reshape affective technologies with novel ways to interpret biodata, feel it, understand it and reflect upon our bodies

    Mobihealth: mobile health services based on body area networks

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    In this chapter we describe the concept of MobiHealth and the approach developed during the MobiHealth project (MobiHealth, 2002). The concept was to bring together the technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs), wireless broadband communications and wearable medical devices to provide mobile healthcare services for patients and health professionals. These technologies enable remote patient care services such as management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies. Because the patient is free to move anywhere whilst wearing the MobiHealth BAN, patient mobility is maximised. The vision is that patients can enjoy enhanced freedom and quality of life through avoidance or reduction of hospital stays. For the health services it means that pressure on overstretched hospital services can be alleviated

    A multimodal conversational coach for active ageing based on sentient computing and m-health

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    As Life Expectancy Increases, It Has Become More Necessary To Find Ways To Support Healthy Ageing. A Number Of Active Ageing Initiatives Are Being Developed Nowadays To Foster Healthy Habits In The Population. This Paper Presents Our Contribution To These Initiatives In The Form Of A Multimodal Conversational Coach That Acts As A Coach For Physical Activities. The Agent Can Be Developed As An Android App Running On Smartphones And Coupled With Cheap Widely Available Sport Sensors In Order To Provide Meaningful Coaching. It Can Be Employed To Prepare Exercise Sessions, Provide Feedback During The Sessions, And Discuss The Results After The Exercise. It Incorporates An Affective Component That Informs Dynamic User Models To Produce Adaptive Interaction Strategies.Spanish project, Grant/Award Number:TEC2017-88048-C2-2-R and TRA2016-78886-C3-1-

    Dry EEG Electrodes

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    Electroencephalography (EEG) emerged in the second decade of the 20th century as a technique for recording the neurophysiological response. Since then, there has been little variation in the physical principles that sustain the signal acquisition probes, otherwise called electrodes. Currently, new advances in technology have brought new unexpected fields of applications apart from the clinical, for which new aspects such as usability and gel-free operation are first order priorities. Thanks to new advances in materials and integrated electronic systems technologies, a new generation of dry electrodes has been developed to fulfill the need. In this manuscript, we review current approaches to develop dry EEG electrodes for clinical and other applications, including information about measurement methods and evaluation reports. We conclude that, although a broad and non-homogeneous diversity of approaches has been evaluated without a consensus in procedures and methodology, their performances are not far from those obtained with wet electrodes, which are considered the gold standard, thus enabling the former to be a useful tool in a variety of novel applications.This work was supported by Nicolo Association for the R+D+i in Neurotechnologies for disability, the research project P11-TIC-7983, Junta of Andalucia (Spain) and the Spanish National Grant TIN2012-32030, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). We also thank Erik Jung, head of the Medical Microsystems working group, at the Department of System Integration & Interconnection Technologies, Fraunhofer IZM (Berlin), for his support

    Live Biofeedback as a User Interface Design Element: A Review of the Literature

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    With the advances in sensor technology and real-time processing of neurophysiological data, a growing body of academic literature has begun to explore how live biofeedback can be integrated into information systems for everyday use. While researchers have traditionally studied live biofeedback in the clinical domain, the proliferation of affordable mobile sensor technology enables researchers and practitioners to consider live biofeedback as a user interface element in contexts such as decision support, education, and gaming. In order to establish the current state of research on live biofeedback, we conducted a literature review on studies that examine self and foreign live biofeedback based on neurophysiological data for healthy subjects in an information systems context. By integrating a body of highly fragmented work from computer science, engineering and technology, information systems, medical science, and psychology, this paper synthesizes results from existing research, identifies knowledge gaps, and suggests directions for future research. In this vein, this review can serve as a reference guide for researchers and practitioners on how to integrate self and foreign live biofeedback into information systems for everyday use

    Empowering and assisting natural human mobility: The simbiosis walker

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    This paper presents the complete development of the Simbiosis Smart Walker. The device is equipped with a set of sensor subsystems to acquire user-machine interaction forces and the temporal evolution of user's feet during gait. The authors present an adaptive filtering technique used for the identification and separation of different components found on the human-machine interaction forces. This technique allowed isolating the components related with the navigational commands and developing a Fuzzy logic controller to guide the device. The Smart Walker was clinically validated at the Spinal Cord Injury Hospital of Toledo - Spain, presenting great acceptability by spinal chord injury patients and clinical staf

    Silent Speech Interfaces for Speech Restoration: A Review

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    This work was supported in part by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) under Grant PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The work of Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship (IJCI-2017-32926).This review summarises the status of silent speech interface (SSI) research. SSIs rely on non-acoustic biosignals generated by the human body during speech production to enable communication whenever normal verbal communication is not possible or not desirable. In this review, we focus on the first case and present latest SSI research aimed at providing new alternative and augmentative communication methods for persons with severe speech disorders. SSIs can employ a variety of biosignals to enable silent communication, such as electrophysiological recordings of neural activity, electromyographic (EMG) recordings of vocal tract movements or the direct tracking of articulator movements using imaging techniques. Depending on the disorder, some sensing techniques may be better suited than others to capture speech-related information. For instance, EMG and imaging techniques are well suited for laryngectomised patients, whose vocal tract remains almost intact but are unable to speak after the removal of the vocal folds, but fail for severely paralysed individuals. From the biosignals, SSIs decode the intended message, using automatic speech recognition or speech synthesis algorithms. Despite considerable advances in recent years, most present-day SSIs have only been validated in laboratory settings for healthy users. Thus, as discussed in this paper, a number of challenges remain to be addressed in future research before SSIs can be promoted to real-world applications. If these issues can be addressed successfully, future SSIs will improve the lives of persons with severe speech impairments by restoring their communication capabilities.Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship IJCI-2017-3292

    Review on Smart Electro-Clothing Systems (SeCSs)

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    This review paper presents an overview of the smart electro-clothing systems (SeCSs) targeted at health monitoring, sports benefits, fitness tracking, and social activities. Technical features of the available SeCSs, covering both textile and electronic components, are thoroughly discussed and their applications in the industry and research purposes are highlighted. In addition, it also presents the developments in the associated areas of wearable sensor systems and textile-based dry sensors. As became evident during the literature research, such a review on SeCSs covering all relevant issues has not been presented before. This paper will be particularly helpful for new generation researchers who are and will be investigating the design, development, function, and comforts of the sensor integrated clothing materials

    Studies on the impact of assistive communication devices on the quality of life of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

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    Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Biomédicas (Neurociências), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Medicina, 2016Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neuromuscular disease with rapid and generalized degeneration of motor neurons. Patients with ALS experiment a relentless decline in functions that affect performance of most activities of daily living (ADL), such as speaking, eating, walking or writing. For this reason, dependence on caregivers grows as the disease progresses. Management of the respiratory system is one of the main concerns of medical support, since respiratory failure is the most common cause of death in ALS. Due to increasing muscle weakness, most patients experience dramatic decrease of speech intelligibility and difficulties in using upper limbs (UL) for writing. There is growing evidence that mild cognitive impairment is common in ALS, but most patients are self-conscious of their difficulties in communicating and, in very severe stages, locked-in syndrome can occur. When no other resources than speech and writing are used to assist communication, patients are deprived of expressing needs or feelings, making decisions and keeping social relationships. Further, caregivers feel increased dependence due to difficulties in communication with others and get frustrated about difficulties in understanding partners’ needs. Support for communication is then very important to improve quality of life of both patients and caregivers; however, this has been poorly investigated in ALS. Assistive communication devices (ACD) can support patients by providing a diversity of tools for communication, as they progressively lose speech. ALS, in common with other degenerative conditions, introduces an additional challenge for the field of ACD: as the disease progresses, technologies must adapt to different conditions of the user. In early stages, patients may need speech synthesis in a mobile device, if dysarthria is one of the initial symptoms, or keyboard modifications, as weakness in UL increases. When upper limbs’ dysfunction is high, different input technologies may be adapted to capture voluntary control (for example, eye-tracking devices). Despite the enormous advances in the field of Assistive Technologies, in the last decade, difficulties in clinical support for the use of assistive communication devices (ACD) persist. Among the main reasons for these difficulties are lack of assessment tools to evaluate communication needs and determine proper input devices and to indicate changes over disease progression, and absence of clinical evidence that ACD has relevant impact on the quality of life of affected patients. For this set of reasons, support with communication tools is delayed to stages where patients are severely disabled. Often in these stages, patients face additional clinical complications and increased dependence on their caregivers’ decisions, which increase the difficulty in adaptation to new communication tools. This thesis addresses the role of assistive technologies in the quality of life of early-affected patients with ALS. Also, it includes the study of assessment tools that can improve longitudinal evaluation of communication needs of patients with ALS. We longitudinally evaluated a group of 30 patients with bulbar-onset ALS and 17 caregivers, during 2 to 29 months. Patients were assessed during their regular clinical appointments, in the Hospital de Santa Maria-Centro Hospitalar Lisboa_Norte. Evaluation of patients was based on validated instruments for assessing the Quality of Life (QoL) of patients and caregivers, and on methodologies for recording communication and measuring its performance (including speech, handwriting and typing). We tested the impact of early support with ACD on the QoL of patients with ALS, using a randomized, prospective, longitudinal design. Patients were able to learn and improve their skills to use communication tools based on electronic assistive devices. We found a positive impact of ACD in psychological and wellbeing domains of quality of life in patients, as well as in the support and psychological domains in caregivers. We also studied performance of communication (words per minute) using UL. Performance in handwriting may decline faster than performance in typing, supporting the idea that the use of touchscreen-based ACD supports communication for longer than handwriting. From longitudinal recordings of speech and typing activity we could observe that ACD can support tools to detect early markers of bulbar and UL dysfunction in ALS. Methodologies that were used in this research for recording and assessing function in communication can be replicated in the home environment and form part of the original contributions of this research. Implementation of remote monitoring tools in daily use of ACD, based on these methodologies, is discussed. Considering those patients who receive late support for the use of ACD, lack of time or daily support to learn how to control complex input devices may hinder its use. We developed a novel device to explore the detection and control of various residual movements, based on sensors of accelerometry, electromyography and force, as input signals for communication. The aim of this input device was to develop a tool to explore new communication channels in patients with generalized muscle weakness. This research contributed with novel tools from the Engineering field to the study of assistive communication in patients with ALS. Methodologies that were developed in this work can be further applied to the study of the impact of ACD in other neurodegenerative diseases that affect speech and motor control of UL
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