Rehabilitation Engineering

Population ageing has major consequences and implications in all areas of our daily life as well as other important aspects, such as economic growth, savings, investment and consumption, labour markets, pensions, property and care from one generation to another. Additionally, health and related care, family composition and life-style, housing and migration are also affected. Given the rapid increase in the aging of the population and the further increase that is expected in the coming years, an important problem that has to be faced is the corresponding increase in chronic illness, disabilities, and loss of functional independence endemic to the elderly (WHO 2008). For this reason, novel methods of rehabilitation and care management are urgently needed. This book covers many rehabilitation support systems and robots developed for upper limbs, lower limbs as well as visually impaired condition. Other than upper limbs, the lower limb research works are also discussed like motorized foot rest for electric powered wheelchair and standing assistance device

Stress Reduction Using Bilateral Stimulation in Virtual Reality

The goal of this research is to integrate Virtual Reality (VR) with the bilateral stimulation used in EMDR as a tool to relieve stress. We created a 15 minutes relaxation training program for adults in a virtual, relaxing environment in form of a walk in the woods. The target platform for the tool is HTC Vive, however it can be easily ported to other VR platforms. An integral part of this tool is a set of sensors, which serves as physiological measures to evaluate the effectiveness of such system. What is more, the system integrate visual (passing sphere), auditory (surround sound) and tactile signals (vibration of controllers). A pilot treatment programme, incorporating the above mentioned VR system, was carried out. Experimental group consisting of 28 healthy adult volunteers (office workers), participated in three different sessions of relaxation training. Before starting, baseline features such as subjectively perceived stress, mood, heart rate, galvanic skin response and muscle response were registered. The monitoring of physiological indicators is continued during the training session and one minute after its completion. Before and after the session, volunteers were asked to re-fill questionnaires regarding the current stress level and mood. The obtained results were analyzed in terms of variability over time: before, during and after the session

Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations

The dissertation examines the issues related to the human resource management in emergency situations and introduces the measures helping to solve these issues. The prime aim is to analyse complexly a human resource management, built environment resilience management life cycle and its stages for the purpose of creating an effective Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations Model and Intelligent System. This would help in accelerating resilience in every stage, managing personal stress and reducing disaster-related losses. The dissertation consists of an Introduction, three Chapters, the Conclusions, References, List of Author’s Publications and nine Appendices. The introduction discusses the research problem and the research relevance, outlines the research object, states the research aim and objectives, overviews the research methodology and the original contribution of the research, presents the practical value of the research results, and lists the defended propositions. The introduction concludes with an overview of the author’s publications and conference presentations on the topic of this dissertation. Chapter 1 introduces best practice in the field of disaster and resilience management in the built environment. It also analyses disaster and resilience management life cycle ant its stages, reviews different intelligent decision support systems, and investigates researches on application of physiological parameters and their dependence on stress. The chapter ends with conclusions and the explicit objectives of the dissertation. Chapter 2 of the dissertation introduces the conceptual model of human resource management in emergency situations. To implement multiple criteria analysis of the research object the methods of multiple criteria analysis and mahematics are proposed. They should be integrated with intelligent technologies. In Chapter 3 the model developed by the author and the methods of multiple criteria analysis are adopted by developing the Intelligent Decision Support System for a Human Resource Management in Emergency Situations consisting of four subsystems: Physiological Advisory Subsystem to Analyse a User’s Post-Disaster Stress Management; Text Analytics Subsystem; Recommender Thermometer for Measuring the Preparedness for Resilience and Subsystem of Integrated Virtual and Intelligent Technologies. The main statements of the thesis were published in eleven scientific articles: two in journals listed in the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science, one in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, four in peer-reviewed conference proceedings referenced in the Thomson Reuters ISI database, and three in peer-reviewed conference proceedings in Lithuania. Five presentations were given on the topic of the dissertation at conferences in Lithuania and other countries

Assessment of the patient’s emotional response with the RobHand rehabilitation platform: A case series study

Producción CientíficaCerebrovascular accidents have physical, cognitive and emotional effects. During rehabilitation, the main focus is placed on motor recovery, yet the patient’s emotional state should also be considered. For this reason, validating robotic rehabilitation systems should not only focus on their effectiveness related to the physical recovery but also on the patient’s emotional response. A case series study has been conducted with five stroke patients to assess their emotional response towards therapies using RobHand, a robotic hand rehabilitation platform. Emotional state was evaluated in three dimensions (arousal, valence and dominance) using a computer-based Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) test. It was verified that the emotions induced by the RobHand platform were successfully distributed in the three-dimensional emotional space. The increase in dominance and the decrease in arousal during sessions reflects that patients had become familiar with the rehabilitation platform, resulting in an increased feeling of control and finding the platform less attractive. The results also reflect that patients found a therapy based on a virtual environment with a realistic scenario more pleasant and attractive.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - (projects PID2019-111023RB-C33 and RTC2019-007350-1

Automatic emotion recognition in clinical scenario: a systematic review of methods

none4Automatic emotion recognition has powerful opportunities in the clinical field, but several critical aspects are still open, such as heterogeneity of methodologies or technologies tested mainly on healthy people. This systematic review aims to survey automatic emotion recognition systems applied in real clinical contexts, to deeply analyse clinical and technical aspects, how they were addressed, and relationships among them. The literature review was conducted on: IEEEXplore, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed, ACM. Inclusion criteria were the presence of an automatic emotion recognition algorithm and the enrollment of at least 2 patients in the experimental protocol. The review process followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Moreover, the works were analysed according to a reference model to deeply examine both clinical and technical topics. 52 scientific papers passed inclusion criteria. Most clinical scenarios involved neurodevelopmental, neurological and psychiatric disorders with the aims of diagnosing, monitoring, or treating emotional symptoms. The most adopted signals are video and audio, while supervised shallow learning is mostly used for emotion recognition. A poor study design, tiny samples, and the absence of a control group emerged as methodological weaknesses. Heterogeneity of performance metrics, datasets and algorithms challenges results comparability, robustness, reliability and reproducibility.openPepa, Lucia; Spalazzi, Luca; Capecci, Marianna; Ceravolo, Maria GabriellaPepa, Lucia; Spalazzi, Luca; Capecci, Marianna; Ceravolo, Maria Gabriell