7,311 research outputs found
Bioengineered Textiles and Nonwovens – the convergence of bio-miniaturisation and electroactive conductive polymers for assistive healthcare, portable power and design-led wearable technology
Today, there is an opportunity to bring together creative design activities to exploit the responsive and adaptive ‘smart’ materials that are a result of rapid development in electro, photo active polymers or OFEDs (organic thin film electronic devices), bio-responsive hydrogels, integrated into MEMS/NEMS devices and systems respectively. Some of these integrated systems are summarised in this paper, highlighting their use to create enhanced functionality in textiles, fabrics and non-woven large area thin films. By understanding the characteristics and properties of OFEDs and bio polymers and how they can be transformed into implementable physical forms, innovative products and services can be developed, with wide implications. The paper outlines some of these opportunities and applications, in particular, an ambient living platform, dealing with human centred needs, of people at work, people at home and people at play. The innovative design affords the accelerated development of intelligent materials (interactive, responsive and adaptive) for a new product & service design landscape, encompassing assistive healthcare (smart bandages and digital theranostics), ambient living, renewable energy (organic PV and solar textiles), interactive consumer products, interactive personal & beauty care (e-Scent) and a more intelligent built environment
Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology
INE/AUTC 10.0
A comprehensive survey of wireless body area networks on PHY, MAC, and network layers solutions
Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted
Low-Cost Sensors and Biological Signals
Many sensors are currently available at prices lower than USD 100 and cover a wide range of biological signals: motion, muscle activity, heart rate, etc. Such low-cost sensors have metrological features allowing them to be used in everyday life and clinical applications, where gold-standard material is both too expensive and time-consuming to be used. The selected papers present current applications of low-cost sensors in domains such as physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and affective technologies. The results cover various aspects of low-cost sensor technology from hardware design to software optimization
Comparison and Characterization of Android-Based Fall Detection Systems
Falls are a foremost source of injuries and hospitalization for seniors.
The adoption of automatic fall detection mechanisms can noticeably reduce the response
time of the medical staff or caregivers when a fall takes place. Smartphones are being
increasingly proposed as wearable, cost-effective and not-intrusive systems for fall detection.
The exploitation of smartphones’ potential (and in particular, the Android Operating System)
can benefit from the wide implantation, the growing computational capabilities and the
diversity of communication interfaces and embedded sensors of these personal devices.
After revising the state-of-the-art on this matter, this study develops an experimental
testbed to assess the performance of different fall detection algorithms that ground their
decisions on the analysis of the inertial data registered by the accelerometer of the
smartphone. Results obtained in a real testbed with diverse individuals indicate that the
accuracy of the accelerometry-based techniques to identify the falls depends strongly on
the fall pattern. The performed tests also show the difficulty to set detection acceleration
thresholds that allow achieving a good trade-off between false negatives (falls that remain
unnoticed) and false positives (conventional movements that are erroneously classified as
falls). In any case, the study of the evolution of the battery drain reveals that the extra
power consumption introduced by the Android monitoring applications cannot be neglected
when evaluating the autonomy and even the viability of fall detection systems.Ministerio de EconomÃa y Competitividad TEC2009-13763-C02-0
Multimodal, Embodied and Location-Aware Interaction
This work demonstrates the development of mobile, location-aware, eyes-free applications which utilise multiple sensors to provide a continuous, rich and embodied interaction. We bring together ideas from the fields of
gesture recognition, continuous multimodal interaction, probability theory and audio interfaces to design and develop location-aware applications and embodied interaction in both a small-scale, egocentric body-based case and a large-scale, exocentric `world-based' case.
BodySpace is a gesture-based application, which utilises multiple sensors and pattern recognition enabling the human body to be used as the interface for an application. As an example, we describe the development of a gesture controlled music player, which functions by placing the device at different parts of the body. We describe a new approach to the segmentation and recognition of gestures for this kind of application and show how simulated physical model-based interaction techniques and the use of real world constraints can shape the gestural interaction.
GpsTunes is a mobile, multimodal navigation system equipped with inertial control that enables users to actively explore and navigate through an area in an augmented physical space, incorporating and displaying uncertainty resulting from inaccurate sensing and unknown user intention. The system propagates uncertainty appropriately via Monte Carlo sampling and output is displayed both visually and in audio, with audio rendered via granular synthesis. We demonstrate the use of uncertain prediction in the real world and show that appropriate display of the full distribution of potential future user positions with respect to sites-of-interest can improve the quality
of interaction over a simplistic interpretation of the sensed data. We show that this system enables eyes-free navigation around set trajectories or paths unfamiliar to the user for varying trajectory width and context. We demon-
strate the possibility to create a simulated model of user behaviour, which may be used to gain an insight into the user behaviour observed in our field trials. The extension of this application to provide a general mechanism for
highly interactive context aware applications via density exploration is also presented. AirMessages is an example application enabling users to take an embodied approach to scanning a local area to find messages left in their
virtual environment
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