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

User Driven Innovation: Incorporating Disabled Lead Users in Early Phase Product Development

How can disabled non-designers play a leading role in product development? As part of early phase product ideation, designers often rely on methods (Pahl & Beitz, 1996, Chapter 4). These methods help designers develop appropriate solutions to design problems. However, ideation processes may also involve non-designers. These could be end-users, managers, domain experts or other stakeholders. A very specific form of user involvement is through lead users. Lead users can be identified as: 1) being at the leading edge of an important market trend, and experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market, and 2) anticipating relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs. This motivates them to participate. They are often a limited group of persons with specialized skills or experiences (Urban & von Hippel, 1988). In this paper discuss the involvement of disabled lead users in early product development. We will focus on generative methods used for the creation of a wearable mobility device. The device consists, in part, of a 3D, time-of-flight DepthSense camera by Softkinetic, combined with a wearable tactile display developed by Elitac, two technology manufacturers. In addition to reflecting on our approach, we also introduce relevant research themes involving disabled lead users

Evaluation of a wearable computer system for telemonitoring in a critical environment

This paper reports on the evaluation of a wearable computer system designed for use in a critical environment, namely the intensive care unit of a hospital. The nature of the application raised ethical issues for testing in a clinical environment and standard evaluation techniques could not easily be applied. The system was therefore evaluated by clinicians in a multi-tasking environment with a simulated set of patient scenarios. Measures of suitability and wearability were applied. The results were encouraging and the system was deemed suitable for further evaluation in the clinical setting, subject to ethical approval

Affordances and Safe Design of Assistance Wearable Virtual Environment of Gesture

Safety and reliability are the main issues for designing assistance wearable virtual environment of technical gesture in aerospace, or health application domains. That needs the integration in the same isomorphic engineering framework of human requirements, systems requirements and the rationale of their relation to the natural and artifactual environment.To explore coupling integration and design functional organization of support technical gesture systems, firstly ecological psychologyprovides usa heuristicconcept: the affordance. On the other hand mathematical theory of integrative physiology provides us scientific concepts: the stabilizing auto-association principle and functional interaction.After demonstrating the epistemological consistence of these concepts, we define an isomorphic framework to describe and model human systems integration dedicated to human in-the-loop system engineering.We present an experimental approach of safe design of assistance wearable virtual environment of gesture based in laboratory and parabolic flights. On the results, we discuss the relevance of our conceptual approach and the applications to future assistance of gesture wearable systems engineering

Review of sensors for remote patient monitoring

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) of physiological measurements can provide an efficient method and high quality care to patients. The physiological signals measurement is the initial and the most important factor in RPM. This paper discusses the characteristics of the most popular sensors, which are used to obtain vital clinical signals in prevalent RPM systems. The sensors discussed in this paper are used to measure ECG, heart sound, pulse rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and respiration rate, which are treated as the most important vital data in patient monitoring and medical examination

Wearable design requirements identification and evaluation

: Wearable electronics make it possible to monitor human activity and behavior. Most of these devices have not taken into account human factors and they have instead focused on technological issues. This fact could not only affect human–computer interaction and user experience but also the devices’ use cycle. Firstly, this paper presents a classification of wearable design requirements that have been carried out by combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology. Secondly, we present some evaluation procedures based on design methodologies and human–computer interaction measurement tools. Thus, this contribution aims to provide a roadmap for wearable designers and researchers in order to help them to find more efficient processes by providing a classification of the design requirements and evaluation tools. These resources represent time and resource-saving contributions. Therefore designers and researchers do not have to review the literature. It will no be necessary to carry out exploratory studies for the purposes of identifying requirements or evaluation tools either