Camera-based software in rehabilitation/therapy intervention

Use of an affordable, easily adaptable, ‘non-specific camera-based software’ that is rarely used in the field of rehabilitation is reported in a study with 91 participants over the duration of six workshop sessions. ‘Non-specific camera-based software’ refers to software that is not dependent on specific hardware. Adaptable means that human tracking and created artefact interaction in the camera field of view is relatively easily changed as one desires via a user-friendly GUI. The significance of having both available for contemporary intervention is argued. Conclusions are that the mature, robust, and accessible software EyeCon is a potent and significant user-friendly tool in the field of rehabilitation/therapy and warrants wider exploration.Peer Reviewe

A Low-Cost Tele-Presence Wheelchair System

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a tele-presence wheelchair system based on tele-presence robot, intelligent wheelchair, and touch screen technologies. The tele-presence wheelchair system consists of a commercial electric wheelchair, an add-on tele-presence interaction module, and a touchable live video image based user interface (called TIUI). The tele-presence interaction module is used to provide video-chatting for an elderly or disabled person with the family members or caregivers, and also captures the live video of an environment for tele-operation and semi-autonomous navigation. The user interface developed in our lab allows an operator to access the system anywhere and directly touch the live video image of the wheelchair to push it as if he/she did it in the presence. This paper also discusses the evaluation of the user experience

Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

TIMS: A Tactile Internet-Based Micromanipulation System with Haptic Guidance for Surgical Training

Microsurgery involves the dexterous manipulation of delicate tissue or fragile structures such as small blood vessels, nerves, etc., under a microscope. To address the limitation of imprecise manipulation of human hands, robotic systems have been developed to assist surgeons in performing complex microsurgical tasks with greater precision and safety. However, the steep learning curve for robot-assisted microsurgery (RAMS) and the shortage of well-trained surgeons pose significant challenges to the widespread adoption of RAMS. Therefore, the development of a versatile training system for RAMS is necessary, which can bring tangible benefits to both surgeons and patients. In this paper, we present a Tactile Internet-Based Micromanipulation System (TIMS) based on a ROS-Django web-based architecture for microsurgical training. This system can provide tactile feedback to operators via a wearable tactile display (WTD), while real-time data is transmitted through the internet via a ROS-Django framework. In addition, TIMS integrates haptic guidance to `guide' the trainees to follow a desired trajectory provided by expert surgeons. Learning from demonstration based on Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) was used to generate the desired trajectory. User studies were also conducted to verify the effectiveness of our proposed TIMS, comparing users' performance with and without tactile feedback and/or haptic guidance.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. For more details of this project, please view our website: https://sites.google.com/view/viewtims/hom

Comparison of Human Pilot (Remote) Control Systems in Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation

This paper concerns about the human pilot or remote control system in UAV navigation. Demands for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) are increasing tremendously in aviation industry and research area. UAV is a flying machine that can fly with no pilot onboard and can be controlled by ground-based operators. In this paper, a comparison was made between different proposed remote control systems and devices to navigate multirotor UAV, like hand-controllers, gestures and body postures techniques, and vision-based techniques. The overall reviews discussed in this paper have been studied in various research sources related to UAV and its navigation system. Every method has its pros and cons depends on the situation. At the end of the study, those methods will be analyzed and the best method will be chosen in term of accuracy and efficiency

Hand in Motion Reveals Mind in Motion

Recently, researchers have measured hand movements en route to choices on a screen to understand the dynamics of a broad range of psychological processes. We review this growing body of research and explain how manual action exposes the real-time unfolding of underlying cognitive processing. We describe how simple hand motions may be used to continuously index participants’ tentative commitments to different choice alternatives during the evolution of a behavioral response. As such, hand-tracking can provide unusually high-fidelity, real-time motor traces of the mind. These motor traces cast novel theoretical and empirical light onto a wide range of phenomena and serve as a potential bridge between far-reaching areas of psychological science – from language, to high-level cognition and learning, to social cognitive processes

Assistive Courseware for Dyslexic Children To Increase Learning Abilities Based on Kinect Technology (ABCDyslexic)

It is well known that every child whether it be in pre-school or primary school have the difficulties to start to learn about language. They do not recognize the alphabet thus making them to read or write even a word is hard enough. Teachers will teach them and assist them in this situation and usually those children will passed from this stage after some time. But there’s a medical conditions where some children have the difficulties to even recognize the shape of the alphabet and effecting in further progress of the studies about language. Those children faced a language-based learning disorder that interferes with the acquisition of print literacy which refers to reading, writing, and spelling. This learning disorder called as Dyslexia which refers to difficulties in reading, writing, and spelling. There is a lot of technique that created special to assists dyslexic children that mainly based on multisensory approach. It optimizes the usage of all sensory organ of a student in learning process. Previous method may not be fully utilized because of the limitation of the apparatus that needed in optimizing the use of sensory organ. So the proposed system is a courseware based on Kinect to help dyslexic to improve learning abilities was presented. The propose system will help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities by using Kinect that will maximize the use of all sensory organ and based on the English syllabus for primary school in Standard 1 and Standard 2, that officially prepared by the Ministry of Education. The objective of this study is to identify and limitations of the current ways of teaching English to dyslexic pre-school children. Extend its purpose to the investigation of the use of gesture-based learning approach for teaching & learning to dyslexic pre-school children. Then, it purpose also to develop a courseware that based on Kinect and also to conduct user’s perception study towards the develop course. It focuses on dyslexic children at the age of 5-10 years old. During the development process, the incremental and Iterative methodology is chosen. All the analysis, design, and implementation phases performed at the same time thus producing a prototype on each phase. The cycle repeated continually until the final prototype successfully meets the requirements. At first the system should be develop using Microsoft Visual Studio C# and Kinect SDK, but after a few prototyping process, the system has been changed and develop using Adobe Flash. The Kinect application also unattached between the applications as it will allow user that don’t have Kinect to run the application. User may use Kinect or Mouse as a controller for the application.Mainly the system consists of 4 main modules. Each modules dedicated to train in certain area start from Module 1 continue till Module 4. Module 1 focus on getting to know the letters and numbers. Module 2 design to train children with proper spelling. The third module focuses on the self-introduction. Then the last module is for shapes recognition which will train children to differentiate between letters and numbers. After the final prototype has been produced, the user perception study was conducted. The study results helps to support the develop application for further improvement and alteration to the application. The study was conducted on 5 primary school situated around Kluang, Johor. The final result shows good feedback on the application towards them. The application ‘ABCDyslexic’ has the abilities to help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities thus improving their learning in other aspect. The development of this application will surely contribute to them and also at the same time provide guidance for teacher in assisting Dyslexic children in today learning environment. But further development on this application should be done to improve it even further such as making it compatible in other platform and improving the current modules to really cater and help dyslexic children to improve their learning abilities