Contactless Haptic Display Through Magnetic Field Control

Haptic rendering enables people to touch, perceive, and manipulate virtual objects in a virtual environment. Using six cascaded identical hollow disk electromagnets and a small permanent magnet attached to an operator's finger, this paper proposes and develops an untethered haptic interface through magnetic field control. The concentric hole inside the six cascaded electromagnets provides the workspace, where the 3D position of the permanent magnet is tracked with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. The driving currents of six cascaded electromagnets are calculated in real-time for generating the desired magnetic force. Offline data from an FEA (finite element analysis) based simulation, determines the relationship between the magnetic force, the driving currents, and the position of the permanent magnet. A set of experiments including the virtual object recognition experiment, the virtual surface identification experiment, and the user perception evaluation experiment were conducted to demonstrate the proposed system, where Microsoft HoloLens holographic glasses are used for visual rendering. The proposed magnetic haptic display leads to an untethered and non-contact interface for natural haptic rendering applications, which overcomes the constraints of mechanical linkages in tool-based traditional haptic devices

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

Hand Motion and Gesture Control of Laboratory Test Equipment Using the Leap Motion Controller

In this paper, the design and development of a system to provide hand motion and gesture control of laboratory test equipment is considered and discussed. The Leap Motion controller is used to provide an input to control a laboratory power supply as part of an electronic circuit experiment. By suitable hand motions and gestures, control of the power supply is provided remotely and without the need to physically touch the equipment used. As such, it provides an alternative manner in which to control electronic equipment via a PC and is considered here within the field of human computer interaction (HCI)

An inclusive survey of contactless wireless sensing: a technology used for remotely monitoring vital signs has the potential to combating COVID-19

With the Coronavirus pandemic showing no signs of abating, companies and governments around the world are spending millions of dollars to develop contactless sensor technologies that minimize the need for physical interactions between the patient and healthcare providers. As a result, healthcare research studies are rapidly progressing towards discovering innovative contactless technologies, especially for infants and elderly people who are suffering from chronic diseases that require continuous, real-time control, and monitoring. The fusion between sensing technology and wireless communication has emerged as a strong research candidate choice because wearing sensor devices is not desirable by patients as they cause anxiety and discomfort. Furthermore, physical contact exacerbates the spread of contagious diseases which may lead to catastrophic consequences. For this reason, research has gone towards sensor-less or contactless technology, through sending wireless signals, then analyzing and processing the reflected signals using special techniques such as frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) or channel state information (CSI). Therefore, it becomes easy to monitor and measure the subject’s vital signs remotely without physical contact or asking them to wear sensor devices. In this paper, we overview and explore state-of-the-art research in the field of contactless sensor technology in medicine, where we explain, summarize, and classify a plethora of contactless sensor technologies and techniques with the highest impact on contactless healthcare. Moreover, we overview the enabling hardware technologies as well as discuss the main challenges faced by these systems.This work is funded by the scientific and technological research council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) under grand 119E39

Passive and Self-Powered Autonomous Sensors for Remote Measurements

Autonomous sensors play a very important role in the environmental, structural, and medical fields. The use of this kind of systems can be expanded for several applications, for example in implantable devices inside the human body where it is impossible to use wires. Furthermore, they enable measurements in harsh or hermetic environments, such as under extreme heat, cold, humidity or corrosive conditions. The use of batteries as a power supply for these devices represents one solution, but the size, and sometimes the cost and unwanted maintenance burdens of replacement are important drawbacks. In this paper passive and self-powered autonomous sensors for harsh or hermetical environments without batteries are discussed. Their general architectures are presented. Sensing strategies, communication techniques and power management are analyzed. Then, general building blocks of an autonomous sensor are presented and the design guidelines that such a system must follow are given. Furthermore, this paper reports different proposed applications of autonomous sensors applied in harsh or hermetic environments: two examples of passive autonomous sensors that use telemetric communication are proposed, the first one for humidity measurements and the second for high temperatures. Other examples of self-powered autonomous sensors that use a power harvesting system from electromagnetic fields are proposed for temperature measurements and for airflow speeds

Wireless body sensor networks for health-monitoring applications

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Physiological Measurement. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/29/11/R01

Safe Local Navigation for Visually Impaired Users With a Time-of-Flight and Haptic Feedback Device

This paper presents ALVU (Array of Lidars and Vibrotactile Units), a contactless, intuitive, hands-free, and discreet wearable device that allows visually impaired users to detect low- and high-hanging obstacles, as well as physical boundaries in their immediate environment. The solution allows for safe local navigation in both confined and open spaces by enabling the user to distinguish free space from obstacles. The device presented is composed of two parts: a sensor belt and a haptic strap. The sensor belt is an array of time-of-flight distance sensors worn around the front of a user's waist, and the pulses of infrared light provide reliable and accurate measurements of the distances between the user and surrounding obstacles or surfaces. The haptic strap communicates the measured distances through an array of vibratory motors worn around the user's upper abdomen, providing haptic feedback. The linear vibration motors are combined with a point-loaded pretensioned applicator to transmit isolated vibrations to the user. We validated the device's capability in an extensive user study entailing 162 trials with 12 blind users. Users wearing the device successfully walked through hallways, avoided obstacles, and detected staircases.Andrea Bocelli FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant NSF IIS1226883