AI enhanced collaborative human-machine interactions for home-based telerehabilitation

The use of robots in a telerehabilitation paradigm could facilitate the delivery of rehabilitation on demand while reducing transportation time and cost. As a result, it helps to motivate patients to exercise frequently in a more comfortable home environment. However, for such a paradigm to work, it is essential that the robustness of the system is not compromised due to network latency, jitter, and delay of the internet. This paper proposes a solution to data loss compensation to maintain the quality of the interaction between the user and the system. Data collected from a well-defined collaborative task using a virtual reality (VR) environment was used to train a robotic system to adapt to the users' behaviour. The proposed approach uses nonlinear autoregressive models with exogenous input (NARX) and long-short term memory (LSTM) neural networks to smooth out the interaction between the user and the predicted movements generated from the system. LSTM neural networks are shown to learn to act like an actual human. The results from this paper have shown that, with an appropriate training method, the artificial predictor can perform very well by allowing the predictor to complete the task within 25 s versus 23 s when executed by the human

Indian Sign Language Recognition through Hybrid ConvNet-LSTM Networks

Dynamic hand gesture recognition is a challenging task of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Vision. The potential application areas of gesture recognition include sign language translation, video gaming, video surveillance, robotics, and gesture-controlled home appliances. In the proposed research, gesture recognition is applied to recognize sign language words from real-time videos. Classifying the actions from video sequences requires both spatial and temporal features. The proposed system handles the former by the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is the core of several computer vision solutions and the latter by the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), which is more efficient in handling the sequences of movements. Thus, the real-time Indian sign language (ISL) recognition system is developed using the hybrid CNN-RNN architecture. The system is trained with the proposed CasTalk-ISL dataset. The ultimate purpose of the presented research is to deploy a real-time sign language translator to break the hurdles present in the communication between hearing-impaired people and normal people. The developed system achieves 95.99% top-1 accuracy and 99.46% top-3 accuracy on the test dataset. The obtained results outperform the existing approaches using various deep models on different datasets

Development of a Miniature Smart Home Testbed for Research and Education.

We present a cloud based smart home testbed using a miniature doll house. In particular, we use this testbed to demonstrate the energy conservation system with the interconnected network of devices, the robust security system with face recognition feature, and the home assistant robot with voice-controller. The test bed consists of a smart home server, a home controller, a smart home assistant robot, a security camera, and appliances communicating with each other using web-socket and existing Social Network Software SDKs. The proposed testbed allows research and education in areas such as smart-grid, wireless sensor networks, machine learning, pattern recognition, embedded programming, natural language processing, social media sharing etc. We also propose a security system based on face recognition. In particular, we develop this system for giving access into a home for authenticated people. The classifier is trained using a new adaptive learning method. The training data is initially collected from social networks and the accuracy of the classifier is incrementally improved as the user starts using this system. A novel method has been introduced to improve the classifier model by human interaction and social media. By using a deep learning framework - TensorFlow, it will be easy to reuse the framework to adapt with many devices and applications.Electrical Engineerin

<Articles>Maikon and Cyber-Capitalism: Some Preliminary Remarks on a History of Computerization in Japan, 1960–1990

This paper presents a preliminary sketching of research in progress, namely how computers were designed in all best interest of serving human social interaction, how they grew out of their imagined functions, becoming the revolutionary tool of cybernetic capitalism. A few years after their introduction in the United States, in early 1980s Japan, microcomputers were developed, produced en masse, and sold to their first users. But to archive their use as an extension of the factory, a tool to gain unlimited access to what Marx has called the workers “social disposable time, ” the computer machine had to be constantly interconnected to the other “limbs” of the factory machine. The creation of the first computer network in Japan, the MARS seat reservation system was based on cybernetics, creating a complex system to automatize Japanese National Railways—a threat that to its trade union was beyond comprehension. Beyond automation, in the 1980s, a student computer club at Kyoto University created PLANET, a network of different home computers (maikon) to democratize computer use. Their humanistic approach created a standardized and unified system, creating a machine which operation would revolutionize its economic base

Smart Home and Artificial Intelligence as Environment for the Implementation of New Technologies

The technologies of a smart home and artificial intelligence (AI) are now inextricably linked. The perception and consideration of these technologies as a single system will make it possible to significantly simplify the approach to their study, design and implementation. The introduction of AI in managing the infrastructure of a smart home is a process of irreversible close future at the level with personal assistants and autopilots. It is extremely important to standardize, create and follow the typical models of information gathering and device management in a smart home, which should lead in the future to create a data analysis model and decision making through the software implementation of a specialized AI. AI techniques such as multi-agent systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic will form the basis for the functioning of a smart home in the future. The problems of diversity of data and models and the absence of centralized popular team decisions in this area significantly slow down further development. A big problem is a low percentage of open source data and code in the smart home and the AI when the research results are mostly unpublished and difficult to reproduce and implement independently. The proposed ways of finding solutions to models and standards can significantly accelerate the development of specialized AIs to manage a smart home and create an environment for the emergence of native innovative solutions based on analysis of data from sensors collected by monitoring systems of smart home. Particular attention should be paid to the search for resource savings and the profit from surpluses that will push for the development of these technologies and the transition from a level of prospect to technology exchange and the acquisition of benefits.The technologies of a smart home and artificial intelligence (AI) are now inextricably linked. The perception and consideration of these technologies as a single system will make it possible to significantly simplify the approach to their study, design and implementation. The introduction of AI in managing the infrastructure of a smart home is a process of irreversible close future at the level with personal assistants and autopilots. It is extremely important to standardize, create and follow the typical models of information gathering and device management in a smart home, which should lead in the future to create a data analysis model and decision making through the software implementation of a specialized AI. AI techniques such as multi-agent systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic will form the basis for the functioning of a smart home in the future. The problems of diversity of data and models and the absence of centralized popular team decisions in this area significantly slow down further development. A big problem is a low percentage of open source data and code in the smart home and the AI when the research results are mostly unpublished and difficult to reproduce and implement independently. The proposed ways of finding solutions to models and standards can significantly accelerate the development of specialized AIs to manage a smart home and create an environment for the emergence of native innovative solutions based on analysis of data from sensors collected by monitoring systems of smart home. Particular attention should be paid to the search for resource savings and the profit from surpluses that will push for the development of these technologies and the transition from a level of prospect to technology exchange and the acquisition of benefits

Social issues of power harvesting as key enables of WSN in pervasive computing

Pervasive systems have gained popularity and open the door to new applications that will improve the quality of life of the users. Additionally, the implementation of such systems over an infrastructure of Wireless Sensor Networks has been proven to be very powerful. To deal with the WSN problems related to the battery of the elements or nodes that constitute the WSN, Power Harvesting techniques arise as good candidates. With PH each node can extract the energy from the surrounding environment. However, this energy source could not be constant, affecting the continuity and quality of the services provided. This behavior can have a negative impact on the user's perception about the system, which could be perceived as unreliable or faulty. In the current paper, some related works regarding pervasive systems within the home environment are referenced to extrapolate the conclusions and problems to the paradigm of Power Harvesting Pervasive Systems from the user perspective. Besides, the paper speculates about the approach and methods to overcome these potential problems and presents the design trends that could be followed.<br/

SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit