Fall Prediction and Prevention Systems: Recent Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions.

Fall prediction is a multifaceted problem that involves complex interactions between physiological, behavioral, and environmental factors. Existing fall detection and prediction systems mainly focus on physiological factors such as gait, vision, and cognition, and do not address the multifactorial nature of falls. In addition, these systems lack efficient user interfaces and feedback for preventing future falls. Recent advances in internet of things (IoT) and mobile technologies offer ample opportunities for integrating contextual information about patient behavior and environment along with physiological health data for predicting falls. This article reviews the state-of-the-art in fall detection and prediction systems. It also describes the challenges, limitations, and future directions in the design and implementation of effective fall prediction and prevention systems

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey

The emergence of new wearable technologies such as action cameras and smart-glasses has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the First Person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with First Person Vision recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of methods to process these videos, possibly in real-time, is expected. Current approaches present a particular combinations of different image features and quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection, activity recognition, user machine interaction and so on. This paper summarizes the evolution of the state of the art in First Person Vision video analysis between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, most commonly used features, methods, challenges and opportunities within the field.Comment: First Person Vision, Egocentric Vision, Wearable Devices, Smart Glasses, Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Human-machine Interactio

Person Re-ID by Fusion of Video Silhouettes and Wearable Signals for Home Monitoring Applications

The use of visual sensors for monitoring people in their living environments is critical in processing more accurate health measurements, but their use is undermined by the issue of privacy. Silhouettes, generated from RGB video, can help towards alleviating the issue of privacy to some considerable degree. However, the use of silhouettes would make it rather complex to discriminate between different subjects, preventing a subject-tailored analysis of the data within a free-living, multi-occupancy home. This limitation can be overcome with a strategic fusion of sensors that involves wearable accelerometer devices, which can be used in conjunction with the silhouette video data, to match video clips to a specific patient being monitored. The proposed method simultaneously solves the problem of Person ReID using silhouettes and enables home monitoring systems to employ sensor fusion techniques for data analysis. We develop a multimodal deep-learning detection framework that maps short video clips and accelerations into a latent space where the Euclidean distance can be measured to match video and acceleration streams. We train our method on the SPHERE Calorie Dataset, for which we show an average area under the ROC curve of 76.3% and an assignment accuracy of 77.4%. In addition, we propose a novel triplet loss for which we demonstrate improving performances and convergence speed

Radar and RGB-depth sensors for fall detection: a review

This paper reviews recent works in the literature on the use of systems based on radar and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for fall detection, and discusses outstanding research challenges and trends related to this research field. Systems to detect reliably fall events and promptly alert carers and first responders have gained significant interest in the past few years in order to address the societal issue of an increasing number of elderly people living alone, with the associated risk of them falling and the consequences in terms of health treatments, reduced well-being, and costs. The interest in radar and RGB-D sensors is related to their capability to enable contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, which is an advantage for practical deployment and users’ acceptance and compliance, compared with other sensor technologies, such as video-cameras, or wearables. Furthermore, the possibility of combining and fusing information from The heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical fall detection systems. Researchers from different fields can benefit from multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the latest developments in radar and RGB-D sensors that this paper is discussing

Human Body Posture Recognition Approaches: A Review

Human body posture recognition has become the focus of many researchers in recent years. Recognition of body posture is used in various applications, including surveillance, security, and health monitoring. However, these systems that determine the body’s posture through video clips, images, or data from sensors have many challenges when used in the real world. This paper provides an important review of how most essential ‎ hardware technologies are ‎used in posture recognition systems‎. These systems capture and collect datasets through ‎accelerometer sensors or computer vision. In addition, this paper presents a comparison ‎study with state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy. We also present the advantages and ‎limitations of each system and suggest promising future ideas that can increase the ‎efficiency of the existing posture recognition system. Finally, the most common datasets ‎applied in these systems are described in detail. It aims to be a resource to help choose one of the methods in recognizing the posture of the human body and the techniques that suit each method. It analyzes more than 80 papers between 2015 and 202

Activity Recognition Using Gazed Text and Viewpoint Information for User Support Systems

The development of information technology has added many conveniences to our lives. On the other hand, however, we have to deal with various kinds of information, which can be a difficult task for elderly people or those who are not familiar with information devices. A technology to recognize each person’s activity and providing appropriate support based on that activity could be useful for such people. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained activity recognition method for user support systems that focuses on identifying the text at which a user is gazing, based on the idea that the content of the text is related to the activity of the user. It is necessary to keep in mind that the meaning of the text depends on its location. To tackle this problem, we propose the simultaneous use of a wearable device and fixed camera. To obtain the global location of the text, we perform image matching using the local features of the images obtained by these two devices. Then, we generate a feature vector based on this information and the content of the text. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we performed activity recognition experiments with six subjects in a laboratory environment