EMon : embodied monitorization

Serie : Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5859The amount of seniors in need of constant care is rapidly rising: an evident consequence of population ageing. There are already some monitorization environments which aim to monitor these persons while they remain at home. This, however, although better than delocalizing the elder to some kind of institution, may not still be the ideal solution, as it forces them to stay inside the home more than they wished, as going out means lack of accompaniment and a consequent sensation of fear. In this paper we propose EMon: a monitorization device small enough to be worn by its users, although powerful enough to provide the higher level monitorization systems with vital information about the user and the environment around him. We hope to allow the representation of an intelligent environment to move with its users, instead of being static, mandatorily associated to a single physical location. The first prototype of EMon, as presented in this paper, provides environmental data as well as GPS coordinates and pictures that are useful to describe the context of its user

Sampling Frequency Evaluation on Recurrent Neural Networks Architectures for IoT Real-time Fall Detection Devices

Falls are one of the most frequent causes of injuries in elderly people. Wearable Fall Detection Systems provided a ubiquitous tool for monitoring and alert when these events happen. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are algorithms that demonstrates a great accuracy in some problems analyzing sequential inputs, such as temporal signal values. However, their computational complexity are an obstacle for the implementation in IoT devices. This work shows a performance analysis of a set of RNN architectures when trained with data obtained using different sampling frequencies. These architectures were trained to detect both fall and fall hazards by using accelerometers and were tested with 10-fold cross validation, using the F1-score metric. The results obtained show that sampling with a frequency of 25Hz does not affect the effectiveness, based on the F1-score, which implies a substantial increase in the performance in terms of computational cost. The architectures with two RNN layers and without a first dense layer had slightly better results than the smallest architectures. In future works, the best architectures obtained will be integrated in an IoT solution to determine the effectiveness empirically.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Use of portable devices and confocal Raman spectrometers at different wavelength to obtain the spectral information of the main organic components in tomatoes (Solanum Lycopersicum) fruits

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) fruit samples, in two ripening stages, ripe (red) and unripe (green), collected from a cultivar in the North of Spain (Barrika, Basque Country), were analyzed directly, without any sample pretreatment, with two different Raman instruments (portable spectrometer coupled to a micro-videocamera and a confocal Raman microscope), using two different laser excitation wavelengths (514 and 785 nm, only for the confocal microscope). The combined use of these laser excitation wavelengths allows obtaining, in a short period of time, the maximum spectral information about the main organic compounds present in this fruit. The major identified components of unripe tomatoes were cutin and cuticular waxes. On the other hand, the main components on ripe tomatoes were carotenes, polyphenoles and polysaccharides. Among the carotenes, it was possible to distinguish the presence of lycopene from b-carotene with the help of both excitation wavelengths, but specially using the 514 nm one, which revealed specific overtones and combination tones of this type of carotene.This work has been financially supported by Research Project S-PE11-UN128 of the Basque Country government. Technical and support provided by SGIker (UPV/EHU, MICINN, GV/EJ, ESF) is gratefully acknowledged

An update on the management of anticoagulated patients programmed for dental extractions and surgery

Oral anticoagulants (OACs) antagonizing vitamin K - fundamentally sodium warfarin and acenocoumarol - are widely used for preventing arterial thromboembolism in patients with atrial fibrillation and/or heart valve prostheses, and for the treatment and prevention of deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. The handling of these drugs requires correct monitorization and dose adjustment to obtain the desired therapeutic effect while minimizing the adverse effects associated both with excessive anticoagulation (which leads to bleeding) and with insufficient antithrombotic action (which can produce thrombosis). This is particularly important when patients must be subjected to surgical procedures such as tooth extractions. In this context, a number of management recommendations are available. The present study offers an update on the recommendations for the management of anticoagulated patients programmed for tooth extractions. In recent years, most studies do not recommend reducing or interrupting anticoagulation, or replacing it with heparin, prior to tooth extraction - provided therapeutic international normalized ration (INR) levels are maintained, with emphasis on the application of local measures such as antifibrinolytic agents, for the control of hemostasia

An orientation method with prediction and anticipation features

Nowadays, progress is constant and inherent to a living society. This may occur in different arenas, namely in mathematical evaluation and healthcare. Assistive technologies are a topic under this evolution, being extremely important in helping users with diminished capabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual). These technologies assist people in tasks that were difficult or impossible to execute. A common diminished task is orientation, which is crucial for the user autonomy. The adaptation to such technologies should require the minimum effort possible in order to enable the person to use devices that convey assistive functionalities. There are several solutions that help a human being to travel between two different locations, however their authors are essentially concerned with the guidance method, giving special attention to the user interface. The CogHelper system aims to overcome these systems by applying a framework of Speculative Computation, which adds a prediction feature for the next user movement giving an anticipation ability to the system. Thus, an alert is triggered before the user turn towards an incorrect path. The travelling path is also adjusted to the user preferences through a trajectory mining module.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013. The work of João Ramos is supported by a doctoral the FCT grant SFRH/BD/89530/2012. The work of Tiago Oliveira is also supported by the FCT grant with the reference SFRH/BD/85291/2012info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Horizons and Perspectives eHealth

EHealth platform represents the combined use of IT technologies and electronic communications in the health field, using data (electronically transmitted, stored and accessed) with a clinical, educational and administrative purpose, both locally and distantly. eHealth has the significant capability to increase the movement in the direction of services centered towards citizens, improving the quality of the medical act, integrating the application of Medical Informatics (Medical IT), Telemedicine, Health Telematics, Telehealth, Biomedical engineering and Bioinformatics. Supporting the creation, development and recognition of a specific eHealth zone, the European Union policies develop through its programs FP6 and FP7, European-scale projects in the medical information technologies (the electronic health cards, online medical care, medical web portals, trans-European nets for medical information, biotechnology, generic instruments and medical technologies for health, ICT mobile systems for remote monitoring). The medical applications like electronic health cards ePrescription, eServices, medical eLearning, eSupervision, eAdministration are integral part of what is the new medical branch-eHealth, being in a continuous expansion due to the support from the global political, financial and medical organizations; the degree of implementation of the eHealth platform varying according to the development level of the communication infrastructure, allocated funds, intensive political priorities and governmental organizations opened to the new IT challenges.eHealth, telemedicine, telehealth, bioinformatics, telematics

Modelling stress recognition in conflict resolution scenarios

The current trend in Online Dispute Resolution focuses mostly on the development of technological tools that allow parties to solve conflicts through telecommunication means. However, this tendency leaves aside key issues, namely the context information that was previously available in traditional Alternative Dispute Resolution processes. The main weakness of this approach is that conflict resolution may become focused solely on objective issues. In order to overcome this inconvenience, we move forward to incorporate context and behavioural information in an Online Dispute Resolution platform. In particular, we consider the estimation of the level of stress and the prediction of the stress state evolution. As a result, the conflict resolution platform or the mediator may predict to what extent a party is affected by a particular matter, allowing one to adapt the conflict resolution strategy to a specific scenario in real time

Light Aviation And Flight Safety: Monitoring System For Unpressurised Cabins. Physiological Parameters Monitorization

Light aviation pilots are exposed to many different environmental situations due to non-pressurized aircraft cabins. Those variations can push the human body to some limits, which associated with psychological factors may culminate in incidents or even fatalities. Really, a literature review on this theme suggests that a significant part of the incidents and fatalities within the light aviation that uses non-pressurized aircraft cabins are related to the human factor. This analysis might bring up a concealed but significant and worrying phenomenon in terms of flight safety: changes of pilot performance in the amendment of physiological parameters concerning to different pressure variations during the various flight stages. Flying is a reality that, although being used mostly for fast passenger and cargo transportation, also it is requested for leisure purposes by a very heterogeneous pool of pilots. This may be a concerning situation due to the disparity of human body (individual) reactions to flight conditions. Nature, both of environmental factors (like as pressure, temperature and humidity) or of human physiological behavior during different flight phases, is unpredictable. Therefore, it is very difficult to establish safety boundaries in this specific context. This work main objective is to analyze the influence of flight environmental conditions on pilot's physiological parameters and thus on tasks performance during different flight situations (or scenarios). In order to perform this analysis a portable and ergonomic monitoring system was built. This equipment records both the cerebral oximetry to study the phenomenon of hypoxia and its importance, and electrocardiography (ECG) and electroencephalography (EEG) parameters in order to establish a correlation among pressure variations, amount of mental workload, and several individual physiological parameters during different flight stages. The specific purpose of this study is how to define physiological limits for each pilot, calibrated through simulation tests contemplating different flight scenarios, in order to create in the next future a on board alert system to prevent possible incidents and fatalities. Also we suggest potential restrictions on European pilots licensing legislation for light aviation, based on some physiological boundaries, as a positive contribution to a safer flight environment