Assistive Technology and Biomechatronics Engineering

This Special Issue will focus on assistive technology (AT) to address biomechanical and control of movement issues in individuals with impaired health, whether as a result of disability, disease, or injury. All over the world, technologies are developed that make human life richer and more comfortable. However, there are people who are not able to benefit from these technologies. Research can include development of new assistive technology to promote more effective movement, the use of existing technology to assess and treat movement disorders, the use and effectiveness of virtual rehabilitation, or theoretical issues, such as modeling, which underlie the biomechanics or motor control of movement disorders. This Special Issue will also cover Internet of Things (IoT) sensing technology and nursing care robot applications that can be applied to new assistive technologies. IoT includes data, more specifically gathering them efficiently and using them to enable intelligence, control, and new applications

Silent-speech enhancement using body-conducted vocal-tract resonance signals

The physical characteristics of weak body-conducted vocal-tract resonance signals called non-audible murmur (NAM) and the acoustic characteristics of three sensors developed for detecting these signals have been investigated. NAM signals attenuate 50 dB at 1 kHz; this attenuation consists of 30-dB full-range attenuation due to air-to-body transmission loss and 10 dB/octave spectral decay due to a sound propagation loss within the body. These characteristics agree with the spectral characteristics of measured NAM signals. The sensors have a sensitivity of between 41 and 58 dB [V/Pa] at I kHz, and the mean signal-to-noise ratio of the detected signals was 15 dB. On the basis of these investigations, three types of silent-speech enhancement systems were developed: (1) simple, direct amplification of weak vocal-tract resonance signals using a wired urethane-elastomer NAM microphone, (2) simple, direct amplification using a wireless urethane-elastomer-duplex NAM microphone, and (3) transformation of the weak vocal-tract resonance signals sensed by a soft-silicone NAM microphone into whispered speech using statistical conversion. Field testing of the systems showed that they enable voice impaired people to communicate verbally using body-conducted vocal-tract resonance signals. Listening tests demonstrated that weak body-conducted vocal-tract resonance sounds can be transformed into intelligible whispered speech sounds. Using these systems, people with voice impairments can re-acquire speech communication with less effort. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.ArticleSPEECH COMMUNICATION. 52(4):301-313 (2010)journal articl

Accurate neonatal heart rate monitoring using a new wireless, cap mounted device

© 2020 The Authors. Acta Paediatrica published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation Acta Paediatrica Aim: A device for newborn heart rate (HR) monitoring at birth that is compatible with delayed cord clamping and minimises hypothermia risk could have advantages over current approaches. We evaluated a wireless, cap mounted device (fhPPG) for monitoring neonatal HR. Methods: A total of 52 infants on the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and immediately following birth by elective caesarean section (ECS) were recruited. HR was monitored by electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse oximetry (PO) and the fhPPG device. Success rate, accuracy and time to output HR were compared with ECG as the gold standard. Standardised simulated data assessed the fhPPG algorithm accuracy. Results: Compared to ECG HR, the median bias (and 95% limits of agreement) for the NICU was fhPPG −0.6 (−5.6, 4.9) vs PO −0.3 (−6.3, 6.2) bpm, and ECS phase fhPPG −0.5 (−8.7, 7.7) vs PO −0.1 (−7.6, 7.1) bpm. In both settings, fhPPG and PO correlated with paired ECG HRs (both R2=0.89). The fhPPG HR algorithm during simulations demonstrated a near-linear correlation (n=1266, R2=0.99). Conclusion: Monitoring infants in the NICU and following ECS using a wireless, cap mounted device provides accurate HR measurements. This alternative approach could confer advantages compared with current methods of HR assessment and warrants further evaluation at birth

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 297)

This bibliography lists 89 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in April, 1987