Neuro-electronic technology in medicine and beyond

This dissertation looks at the technology and social issues involved with interfacing electronics directly to the human nervous system, in particular the methods for both reading and stimulating nerves. The development and use of cochlea implants is discussed, and is compared with recent developments in artificial vision. The final sections consider a future for non-medicinal applications of neuro-electronic technology. Social attitudes towards use for both medicinal and non-medicinal purposes are discussed, and the viability of use in the latter case assessed

Ocular-based automatic summarization of documents: is re-reading informative about the importance of a sentence?

Automatic document summarization (ADS) has been introduced as a viable solution for reducing the time and the effort needed to read the ever-increasing textual content that is disseminated. However, a successful universal ADS algorithm has not yet been developed. Also, despite progress in the field, many ADS techniques do not take into account the needs of different readers, providing a summary without internal consistency and the consequent need to re-read the original document. The present study was aimed at investigating the usefulness of using eye tracking for increasing the quality of ADS. The general idea was of that of finding ocular behavioural indicators that could be easily implemented in ADS algorithms. For instance, the time spent in re-reading a sentence might reflect the relative importance of that sentence, thus providing a hint for the selection of text contributing to the summary. We have tested this hypothesis by comparing metrics based on the analysis of eye movements of 30 readers with the highlights they made afterward. Results showed that the time spent reading a sentence was not significantly related to its subjective value, thus frustrating our attempt. Results also showed that the length of a sentence is an unavoidable confounding because longer sentences have both the highest probability of containing units of text judged as important, and receive more fixations and re-fixations

Autonomous characters in virtual environments: The technologies involved in artificial life and their affects on perceived intelligence and playability of computer games

Computer games are viewed by academics as un֊grounded hack and patch experiments. "The industry lacks the formalism and requirement for a "perfect" solution often necessary in the academic world " [Woob]. Academic Artifical Intelligence (AI) is often viewed as un-implementable and narrow minded by the majority of ทon-AI programmer. "Historically, AI tended to be focused, containing detailed problems and domain-specific techniques. This focus makes for easier study - or engineering - of particular solutions. " [СһаОЗ .By implementing several well known AI techniques into the same gaming environment and judging users reactions this project aims to make links between the academic nature of AI, as well as investigate the nature of practical implementation in a gaming environment. An online Java implemented version of the 1970'ร classic Space Invaders has been developed and tested, with the Aliens being controlled by 6 different approaches to modelling AI functions. In total information from 334 individuals games was recorded. Different types of games AI can create highly varied gaming experience as highlighted by the range of values and high standard deviation values seen in the results. The link between complex behaviour, complex control systems and perceived intelligence was not supported. A positive correlation identified between how fun the users found the game and how intelligent they perceived the Aliens to be, would seem to be logical. As games get visually more and more impressive, the need for intelligent characters cannot be denied because it is one of the few way in which games can set themselves apart from the competition. Conclusions identified that computer games must remain focussed on their end- goal, that of producing a fun game. Whilst complex and clever AI can help to achieve it, the AI itself can never overshadow the end result

Neuromorphic electronics for real-time biomedical image processing

Published versio

Human Movement Control

Control theory is used to design automatic systems, which are able to maintain a desired behaviour despite of the disturbances. It is present in different machines we use every day; in fact, technical systems in our homes and all the industries are hard to imagine today without these concepts. Moreover, the same theories can be used for modelling life processes as a collection of inputs, outputs, plants and control loops. Feedback is one of the main concepts behind control; in particular, several examples of physiological control mechanisms for regulating life aspects can be found in the human anatomy, for example, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, body movements, the equilibrium, etc. Those processes can be damaged by the aging effects, diseases, accidents or when the mechanism has been broken and cannot be recovered naturally; consequently, it will be required external assistance. A relative new field in control theory is related with developing technology for helping with physiological and medicals problems. However, in comparison with machines, those physiological processes are highly nonlinear, with delays and slow responses. Another problem is when human becomes the operators using their capacities of decision making to close the control loop, as they are prone to errors and mistakes. For those reasons, the biomedical system needs to be carefully designed and several aspects have to be considered. This chapter gives a small review of some internal and external control processes within the human body and discusses how to interact with them for designing biomedical devices. Under this design scheme, a practical application of a smart electric wheelchair for assisting persons with strong disabilities is presented. These assistive robotic systems are in close contact with the user, and thus, it is determinant to have a user-friendly relation between the human and the interface. Therefore, intuitive interfaces were included in the design and an intelligent navigation assistant to guarantee a collision-free path

Authenticated Digital Avatars on Metaverse by Cyber Security Procedures

Metaverse is the  next generation Internet, aims to build a fully immersive, hyper spatiotemporal and self sustaining virtual shared space for humans to play, work, shop and socialize. In metaverse, users are  represented as digital avatars and using identity, user can shuttle across various virtual worlds (i.e., sub-metaverses) to experience a digital life, as well as make digital creations and economic interactions supported by physical infrastructures and the metaverse engine. Virtual reality headsets are the main devices used to access the Metaverse. Privacy and security concerns of the metaverse. The users need to verify their identity to log into the metaverse platforms, and the security of this phase becomes vital. In this paper, the user authentication methods such as Information-based authentication, biometric based authentication, and multi-model methods are reviewed and compared in terms of users security but in some cases these methods are failed to secure from cyber attacks. In this paper, we proposed,Token-based authentication method to enhance the security for the users to access and work on  the virtual environment

Intelligent Systems

This book is dedicated to intelligent systems of broad-spectrum application, such as personal and social biosafety or use of intelligent sensory micro-nanosystems such as "e-nose", "e-tongue" and "e-eye". In addition to that, effective acquiring information, knowledge management and improved knowledge transfer in any media, as well as modeling its information content using meta-and hyper heuristics and semantic reasoning all benefit from the systems covered in this book. Intelligent systems can also be applied in education and generating the intelligent distributed eLearning architecture, as well as in a large number of technical fields, such as industrial design, manufacturing and utilization, e.g., in precision agriculture, cartography, electric power distribution systems, intelligent building management systems, drilling operations etc. Furthermore, decision making using fuzzy logic models, computational recognition of comprehension uncertainty and the joint synthesis of goals and means of intelligent behavior biosystems, as well as diagnostic and human support in the healthcare environment have also been made easier

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion