348 research outputs found
The use of principles and techniques derived from meditation for the design and creation of co-participatory musical systems
For this thesis, a detailed study was undertaken to determine whether techniques derived from traditional meditation systems can be applied to co-participatory music systems in order to enhance their accessibility, interactivity, and experiential impact, In order to adequately address this subject, a number of investigative steps have been taken. First, a workable list of definitions for what meditation actually is was made by comparing the practices and philosophies of a number of traditional meditation forms. The conclusions derived from this stage of the discussion served to create a definitive blueprint for meditation and served as a theoretical foundation for the rest of the dissertation. The second stage was to see how these definitions manifest in the meditation form; of the modem world. This approach provided insight into how changed cultural perspectives exert a major influence on the effectiveness andlor appropriateness of certain traditional techniques. In addition to modern meditation practices, the definitions from chapter two were also examined from the perspective of modem science, another important aspect of modern culture. The observations from this chapter served as the basis for chapter four, in which the experiential, symbolic and conventional features of Western Art Music were examined. This was to provide some points of reference with which to consider the possibility of using meditation techniques to enhance the musical experience . In chapter five, an examination was made of a number of composers and artists and their relevant works who have devised methods by which some of the more restrictive aspects of West em Art Music can be overcome or bypassed, so as to gain access to the full potential of that musical experience . This stage of the discussion provided a practical framework with which to discuss the background, design and realization of my own wod. ~ connected to this research, collectively called the Wheel of Life project. One of the main aims of this creative project has been to subvert many of the anachronistic conventions of Western Art Music, particularly conventions such as performer/audience separation and overly rigid or ambiguous musical structures. By doing this, it is hoped th3t musical systems can be created that allow the participant to engage in a much more personally meaningful and actively creative experience
State of the art of audio- and video based solutions for AAL
Working Group 3. Audio- and Video-based AAL ApplicationsIt is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate). Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals (e.g., speech recordings). Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary 4 debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach.
This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users.
The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted.
The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed.publishedVersio
Biomedical and Human Factors Requirements for a Manned Earth Orbiting Station
This report is the result of a study conducted by Republic Aviation Corporation in conjunction with Spacelabs, Inc.,in a team effort in which Republic Aviation Corporation was prime contractor. In order to determine the realistic engineering design requirements associated with the medical and human factors problems of a manned space station, an interdisciplinary team of personnel from the Research and Space Divisions was organized. This team included engineers, physicians, physiologists, psychologists, and physicists. Recognizing that the value of the study is dependent upon medical judgments as well as more quantifiable factors (such as design parameters) a group of highly qualified medical consultants participated in working sessions to determine which medical measurements are required to meet the objectives of the study. In addition, various Life Sciences personnel from NASA (Headquarters, Langley, MSC) participated in monthly review sessions. The organization, team members, consultants, and some of the part-time contributors are shown in Figure 1. This final report embodies contributions from all of these participants
State of the Art of Audio- and Video-Based Solutions for AAL
It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed
Sound based social networks
The sound environment is an eco of the activity and character of each
place, often carrying additional information to that made available to the eyes
(both new and redundant). It is, therefore, an intangible and volatile acoustic
fingerprint of the place, or simply an acoustic snapshot of a single event. Such
rich resource, full of meaning and subtleness, Schaeffer called Soundscape.
The exploratory research project presented here addresses the Soundscape
in the context of Mobile Online Social Networking, aiming at determining the
extent of its applicability regarding the establishment and/or strengthening of
new and existing social links. Such research goal demanded an interdisciplinary
approach, which we have anchored in three main stems: Soundscapes,
Mobile Sound and Social Networking. These three areas pave the scientific
ground for this study and are introduced during the first part of the thesis. An
extensive survey of the state-of-the-arte projects related with this research is
also presented, gathering examples from different but adjacent areas such as
mobile sensing, wearable computing, sonification, social media and contextaware
computing. This survey validates that our approach is scientifically opportune
and unique, at the same time.
Furthermore, in order to assess the role of Soundscapes in the context
of Social Networking, an experimental procedure has been implemented
based on an Online Social Networking mobile application, enriched with environmental
sensing mechanisms, able to capture and analyze the surrounding
Soundscape and users' movements. Two main goals guided this prototypal
research tool: collecting data regarding users' activity (both sonic and kinetic)
and providing users with a real experience using a Sound-Based Social Network,
in order to collect informed opinions about this unique type of Social
Networking. The application – Hurly-Burly – senses the surrounding Soundscape
and analyzes it using machine audition techniques, classifying it according
to four categories: speech, music, environmental sounds and silence. Additionally, it determines the sound pressure level of the sensed Soundscape
in dB(A)eq. This information is then broadcasted to the entire online social
network of the user, allowing each element to visualize and audition a representation
of the collected data. An individual record for each user is kept
available in a webserver and can be accessed through an online application,
displaying the continuous acoustic profile of each user along a timeline graph.
The experimental procedure included three different test groups, forming each
one a social network with a cluster coefficient equal to one.
After the implementation and result analysis stages we concluded that
Soundscapes can have a role in the Online Social Networking paradigm, specially
when concerning mobile applications. Has been proven that current offthe-
shelf mobile technology is a promising opportunity for accomplishing this
kind of tasks (such as continuous monitoring, life logging and environment
sensing) but battery limitations and multitasking's constraints are still the bottleneck,
hindering the massification of successful applications. Additionally,
online privacy is something that users are not enthusiastic in letting go: using
captured sound instead of representations of the sound would abstain users
from utilizing such applications. We also demonstrated that users who are
more aware of the Soundscape concept are also more inclined to assume it
as playing an important role in OSN. This means that more pedagogy towards
the acoustic phenomenon is needed and this type of research gives a step
further in that direction.O ambiente sonoro de um lugar é um eco da sua atividade e carácter,
transportando, na maior parte da vezes, informação adicional àquela que é
proporcionada à visão (quer seja redundante ou complementar). É, portanto,
uma impressão digital acústica - tangível e volátil - do lugar a que pertence,
ou simplesmente uma fotografia acústica de um evento pontual. A este opulento
recurso, carregado de significados e subtilezas, Schafer chamou de
Paisagem-Sonora. O projeto de investigação de carácter exploratório que
aqui apresentamos visa o estudo da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes
Sociais Móveis Em-Linha, procurando entender os moldes e limites da
sua aplicação, tendo em vista o estabelecimento e/ou reforço de novos ou
existente laços sociais, respectivamente. Para satisfazer este objectivo foi
necessária uma abordagem multidisciplinar, ancorada em três pilares principais:
a Paisagem-Sonora, o Som Móvel e as Redes Sociais. Estas três áreas
determinaram a moldura científica de referência em que se enquadrou esta
investigação, sendo explanadas na primeira parte da tese. Um extenso levantamento
do estado-da-arte referente a projetos relacionados com este estudo
é também apresentado, compilando exemplos de áreas distintas mas adjacentes,
tais como: Computação Sensorial Móvel, Computação Vestível, Sonificação,
Média Social e Computação Contexto-Dependente. Este levantamento
veio confirmar quer a originalidade quer a pertinência científica do projeto
apresentado.
Posteriormente, a fim de avaliar o papel da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto
das Redes Sociais, foi posto em prática um procedimento experimental
baseado numa Rede Social Sonora Em-Linha, desenvolvida de raiz para dispositivos
móveis e acrescida de mecanismos sensoriais para estímulos ambientais,
capazes de analisar a Paisagem-Sonora envolvente e os movimentos
do utilizador. Dois objectivos principais guiaram a produção desta ferramenta
de investigação: recolher dados relativos à atividade cinética e sonora dos utilizadores e proporcionar a estes uma experiência real de utilização
uma Rede Social Sonora, de modo a recolher opiniões fundamentadas sobre
esta tipologia específica de socialização. A aplicação – Hurly-Burly – analisa
a Paisagem-Sonora através de algoritmos de Audição Computacional, classificando-
a de acordo com quatro categorias: diálogo (voz), música, sons ambientais
(“ruídos”) e silêncio. Adicionalmente, determina o seu nível de pressão
sonora em dB(A)eq. Esta informação é então distribuída pela rede social
dos utilizadores, permitindo a cada elemento visualizar e ouvir uma representação
do som analisado. É mantido num servidor Web um registo individual
da informação sonora e cinética captada, o qual pode ser acedido através de
uma aplicação Web que mostra o perfil sonoro de cada utilizador ao longo do
tempo, numa visualização ao estilo linha-temporal. O procedimento experimental
incluiu três grupos de teste distintos, formando cada um a sua própria
rede social com coeficiente de aglomeração igual a um. Após a implementação
da experiência e análise de resultados, concluímos que a Paisagem-
Sonora pode desempenhar um papel no paradigma das Redes Sociais Em-
Linha, em particular no que diz respeito à sua presença nos dispositivos móveis.
Ficou provado que os dispositivos móveis comerciais da atualidade
apresentam-se com uma oportunidade promissora para desempenhar este
tipo de tarefas (tais como: monitorização contínua, registo quotidiano e análise
sensorial ambiental), mas as limitações relacionadas com a autonomia
energética e funcionamento em multitarefa representam ainda um constrangimento
que impede a sua massificação. Além disso, a privacidade no mundo
virtual é algo que os utilizadores atuais não estão dispostos a abdicar: partilhar
continuamente a Paisagem-Sonora real em detrimento de uma representação
de alto nível é algo que refrearia os utilizadores de usar a aplicação.
Também demonstrámos que os utilizadores que mais conhecedores do fenómeno
da Paisagem-Sonora são também os que consideram esta como importante
no contexto das Redes Sociais Em-Linha. Isso significa que uma atitude
pedagógica em relação ao fenómeno sonoro é essencial para obter dele
o maior ganho possível. Esta investigação propõe-se a dar um passo em
frente nessa direção
- …