Parkinson's Disease Management through ICT

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that manifests with motor and non-motor symptoms. PD treatment is symptomatic and tries to alleviate the associated symptoms through an adjustment of the medication. As the disease is evolving and this evolution is patient specific, it could be very difficult to properly manage the disease.The current available technology (electronics, communication, computing, etc.), correctly combined with wearables, can be of great use for obtaining and processing useful information for both clinicians and patients allowing them to become actively involved in their condition.Parkinson's Disease Management through ICT: The REMPARK Approach presents the work done, main results and conclusions of the REMPARK project (2011 – 2015) funded by the European Union under contract FP7-ICT-2011-7-287677. REMPARK system was proposed and developed as a real Personal Health Device for the Remote and Autonomous Management of Parkinson’s Disease, composed of different levels of interaction with the patient, clinician and carers, and integrating a set of interconnected sub-systems: sensor, auditory cueing, Smartphone and server. The sensor subsystem, using embedded algorithmics, is able to detect the motor symptoms associated with PD in real time. This information, sent through the Smartphone to the REMPARK server, is used for an efficient management of the disease

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

Parkinson's Disease Management through ICT

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that manifests with motor and non-motor symptoms. PD treatment is symptomatic and tries to alleviate the associated symptoms through an adjustment of the medication. As the disease is evolving and this evolution is patient specific, it could be very difficult to properly manage the disease.The current available technology (electronics, communication, computing, etc.), correctly combined with wearables, can be of great use for obtaining and processing useful information for both clinicians and patients allowing them to become actively involved in their condition.Parkinson's Disease Management through ICT: The REMPARK Approach presents the work done, main results and conclusions of the REMPARK project (2011 – 2015) funded by the European Union under contract FP7-ICT-2011-7-287677. REMPARK system was proposed and developed as a real Personal Health Device for the Remote and Autonomous Management of Parkinson’s Disease, composed of different levels of interaction with the patient, clinician and carers, and integrating a set of interconnected sub-systems: sensor, auditory cueing, Smartphone and server. The sensor subsystem, using embedded algorithmics, is able to detect the motor symptoms associated with PD in real time. This information, sent through the Smartphone to the REMPARK server, is used for an efficient management of the disease

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Remotely Piloted Aircraft: The impact of audiovisual feedback and workload on operator performance

Remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) offer new possibilities to a growing civilian field. However, unlike pilots of conventionally piloted aircraft, the remote pilot operates in a sensory deprived environment. A reduction in available sensory cues present unique human factors challenges, hence the aim of the present study was to understand the impact of real-time auditory feedback from the RPA on operator performance. Experiment 1 tested conventional pilots manually flying a small multi-rotor RPA under two visual operating conditions. Experiment 2 introduced a non-pilot participant group in an automated configuration. Experiment 3 retained the methodology of the second, but presented an adaptable auditory feedback component, with incremental volumes above and below a comfortable sound level. Key findings revealed transitional instances of auditory feedback being perceived as either sound (i.e., useful information, and/or arousing) or noise (i.e., sound that is unwanted), with results broadly aligned with predicted values associated with behavioural models of performance such as the Maximal Adaptability Model. In addition, no statistical significant differences in task performance (automated flight conditions) between the pilot and non-pilot participants were evident. Together, these findings suggest the ability to include or remove the availability of sensory cueing for remote pilots should be dependent on the stage of flight and associated workload. In addition, they raise questions about the restrictions imposed on who is permitted to operate an RPA. Practically, this gives credence to the inclusion of adaptable sensory cueing in future systems. Furthermore, consideration should be given to licensing operators without conventional flying experience for more complex, automated RPAS operations

How the visual environment shapes attention: The role of context in attention guidance

In our environment, visual stimuli typically appear within the context of other stimuli, which are usually not arranged randomly but follow regularities. These regularities can be very useful for the visual system to overcome the problem of limited encoding capacity by guiding attention to stimuli which are relevant for behavior. There is growing evidence that observers use repeated contexts for guiding attention in visual search, and there is evidence that observers adapt to dynamical changes in their visual environment. However, contexts in our natural environment often come with features predicting reward, and little is known about the influence of such reward-predicting contexts on attention guidance. In addition, it is unclear how observers adapt their behavior to context features that are not relevant for the task, and little is known about individual differences in the effects of contexts. These research gaps are addressed in the present dissertation. In five studies, the present dissertation investigates how different types of contextual regularities are integrated into behavior and how these regularities guide visual attention. Study I showed that observers use knowledge they have acquired in former encounters with similar scenes to predict the most promising item to attend to in an upcoming scene. In a visual search task in the laboratory, participants responded faster in visual contexts that repeated compared to contexts that were novel. In addition, they also moved their eyes more efficiently to the target when they encountered repeated contexts. These results suggest that participants use repeated visual contexts to learn to predict the target location. Study I also revealed that visual contexts are especially used for specifying promising items when they predict a high reward. Context features predicting a high reward boosted the performance advantages observed with repeated contexts. This result suggests that the prediction of reward facilitates the generation of expectations about potential target locations. Study II demonstrated that expectations about potential target locations were quite persistent, since performance benefits were observed even after many encounters with repeated contexts. Further experiments showed that participants could use even a very limited part of the visual contexts to learn to predict the target location (Study III) and that observers used also contexts that changed dynamically for specifying promising items to attend to (Study IV). These results suggest that observers use regularities in the visual context to generate expectations about promising items in their visual environment. Finally, the last study of this dissertation (Study V) investigated how contexts of social perception are used for specifying relevant visual information. Results showed that observers differ in how they use contexts for specifying relevant visual information and suggested that an observer’s personality might be one factor explaining these differences. In sum, the five studies of the present dissertation demonstrate that the visual system is remarkably sensitive to regularities in the visual context. It is quite efficient in extracting repeated contexts to guide attention to relevant locations when contexts are encountered again (Studies I and II), and it only needs a very limited amount of repeating contextual information to take advantage from the contexts (Study III). It also considers rewards that are signaled by features of the contexts to prioritize processing of high reward contexts. The visual system further adapts to dynamical changes in the contexts (Study IV) and uses contexts of social perception for prioritizing information, dependent on the observer’s personality (Study V). The present dissertation thus highlights that the visual context is crucial for guiding our attention in numerous situations that we encounter every day. Fortunately, we can take advantage of the visual context, which allows our visual system to cope with its limited processing capacity

Wearable Sensors in the Evaluation of Gait and Balance in Neurological Disorders

The aging population and the increased prevalence of neurological diseases have raised the issue of gait and balance disorders as a major public concern worldwide. Indeed, gait and balance disorders are responsible for a high healthcare and economic burden on society, thus, requiring new solutions to prevent harmful consequences. Recently, wearable sensors have provided new challenges and opportunities to address this issue through innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Accordingly, the book “Wearable Sensors in the Evaluation of Gait and Balance in Neurological Disorders” collects the most up-to-date information about the objective evaluation of gait and balance disorders, by means of wearable biosensors, in patients with various types of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and cerebellar ataxia. By adopting wearable technologies, the sixteen original research articles and reviews included in this book offer an updated overview of the most recent approaches for the objective evaluation of gait and balance disorders

Augmenting low-fidelity flight simulation training devices via amplified head rotations

Due to economic and operational constraints, there is an increasing demand from aviation operators and training manufacturers to extract maximum training usage from the lower fidelity suite of flight simulators. It is possible to augment low-fidelity flight simulators to achieve equivalent performance compared to high-fidelity setups but at reduced cost and greater mobility. In particular for visual manoeuvres, the virtual reality technique of head-tracking amplification for virtual view control enables full field-of-regard access even with limited field-of-view displays. This research quantified the effects of this technique on piloting performance, workload and simulator sickness by applying it to a fixed-base, low-fidelity, low-cost flight simulator. In two separate simulator trials, participants had to land a simulated aircraft from a visual traffic circuit pattern whilst scanning for airborne traffic. Initially, a single augmented display was compared to the common triple display setup in front of the pilot. Starting from the base leg, pilots exhibited tighter turns closer to the desired ground track and were more actively conducting visual scans using the augmented display. This was followed up by a second experiment to quantify the scalability of augmentation towards larger displays and field of views. Task complexity was increased by starting the traffic pattern from the downwind leg. Triple displays in front of the pilot yielded the best compromise delivering flight performance and traffic detection scores just below the triple projectors but without an increase in track deviations and the pilots were also less prone to simulator sickness symptoms. This research demonstrated that head augmentation yields clear benefits of quick user adaptation, low-cost, ease of systems integration, together with the capability to negate the impact of display sizes yet without incurring significant penalties in workload and incurring simulator sickness. The impact of this research is that it facilitates future flight training solutions using this augmentation technique to meet budgetary and mobility requirements. This enables deployment of simulators in large numbers to deliver expanded mission rehearsal previously unattainable within this class of low-fidelity simulators, and with no restrictions for transfer to other training media

A Person-Centric Design Framework for At-Home Motor Learning in Serious Games

abstract: In motor learning, real-time multi-modal feedback is a critical element in guided training. Serious games have been introduced as a platform for at-home motor training due to their highly interactive and multi-modal nature. This dissertation explores the design of a multimodal environment for at-home training in which an autonomous system observes and guides the user in the place of a live trainer, providing real-time assessment, feedback and difficulty adaptation as the subject masters a motor skill. After an in-depth review of the latest solutions in this field, this dissertation proposes a person-centric approach to the design of this environment, in contrast to the standard techniques implemented in related work, to address many of the limitations of these approaches. The unique advantages and restrictions of this approach are presented in the form of a case study in which a system entitled the "Autonomous Training Assistant" consisting of both hardware and software for guided at-home motor learning is designed and adapted for a specific individual and trainer. In this work, the design of an autonomous motor learning environment is approached from three areas: motor assessment, multimodal feedback, and serious game design. For motor assessment, a 3-dimensional assessment framework is proposed which comprises of 2 spatial (posture, progression) and 1 temporal (pacing) domains of real-time motor assessment. For multimodal feedback, a rod-shaped device called the "Intelligent Stick" is combined with an audio-visual interface to provide feedback to the subject in three domains (audio, visual, haptic). Feedback domains are mapped to modalities and feedback is provided whenever the user's performance deviates from the ideal performance level by an adaptive threshold. Approaches for multi-modal integration and feedback fading are discussed. Finally, a novel approach for stealth adaptation in serious game design is presented. This approach allows serious games to incorporate motor tasks in a more natural way, facilitating self-assessment by the subject. An evaluation of three different stealth adaptation approaches are presented and evaluated using the flow-state ratio metric. The dissertation concludes with directions for future work in the integration of stealth adaptation techniques across the field of exergames.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

The interplay between selective attention and working memory: A behavioural, neural and computational perspective

Selective attention (SA), the process by which information is prioritized for processing according to its relevance to current goals, and working memory (WM), the temporary storage and/or manipulation of information in mind, are considered to be important building blocks in human cognition. Both are essential for coordinating thought and action, and both are foundational for the emergence of other more complex executive functions, like planning and problem solving. The complicated interplay between SA and WM has been investigated across a growing number of experimental studies, with attentional processes influencing various stages of WM, and vice versa. Behavioural evidence suggests that SA can bias processing of information as we anticipate, encode and maintain contents in memory, whilst WM can serve to maintain a template as we search. Neuroimaging studies have observed a highly similar frontoparietal network subserving both processes, indicating anatomical and functional overlap in their corresponding neural mechanisms. Nevertheless, despite substantial evidence for cognitive and neural overlap, almost everything we know about the relationship between SA and WM is derived using group-average performance. In reality, some individuals may rely on shared sub-processes to perform tasks more so than others. In this thesis we extended previous work by understanding this individual variability. The first experimental chapter describes the development of two behavioural paradigms tapping SA and WM. These paradigms are better suited to address this question, relative to previous experimental approaches, because they are matched on task-specific features while being independently scalable in terms of difficulty. The second experimental chapter used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with these tasks to identify the neural correlates of individual differences in the strength of SA-WM coupling across participants. The third experimental chapter builds upon the neuroimaging study and addresses whether computational models trained to perform the same set of tasks share any mechanistic properties observed in the human brain, providing a useful framework in which predictions about the relationship between cognitive processes can be readily tested. Lastly, in the final experiment we used cognitive training to test whether altering SA would lead to changes in the related WM system, and whether these gains are modulated by baseline individual differences in the strength of their coupling. Together, along with an opening General Introduction and concluding Discussion, these chapters explore heterogeneity in the relationship between SA and WM from multiple perspectives, integrating advances in human cognition, neuroimaging and computational modelling.Cambridge Trust Chinese Scholarship Counci