IT-Supported Management of Mass Casualty Incidents: The e-Triage Project

Voice, analogue mobile radio, and paper have been successfully used for decades for coordination of emergencies and disasters, but although being simple and robust this approach cannot keep pace with today’s requirements any more. Emerging and established digital communication standards open the door to new applications and services, but the expected benefit needs to be carefully evaluated against robustness, interoperability, and user-friendliness. This paper describes a framework for IT-supported management of mass casualty incidents, which is currently under implementation and study. The four pillars of the concept are handheld devices for use both in daily rescue operations and in disasters, autonomous satellite-based communication infrastructure, a distributed database concept for maximal availability, and psychological acceptance research

Towards a Formal Framework for Mobile, Service-Oriented Sensor-Actuator Networks

Service-oriented sensor-actuator networks (SOSANETs) are deployed in health-critical applications like patient monitoring and have to fulfill strong safety requirements. However, a framework for the rigorous formal modeling and analysis of SOSANETs does not exist. In particular, there is currently no support for the verification of correct network behavior after node failure or loss/addition of communication links. To overcome this problem, we propose a formal framework for SOSANETs. The main idea is to base our framework on the \pi-calculus, a formally defined, compositional and well-established formalism. We choose KLAIM, an existing formal language based on the \pi-calculus as the foundation for our framework. With that, we are able to formally model SOSANETs with possible topology changes and network failures. This provides the basis for our future work on prediction, analysis and verification of the network behavior of these systems. Furthermore, we illustrate the real-life applicability of this approach by modeling and extending a use case scenario from the medical domain.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2013, arXiv:1302.478

Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns

We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Human-Machine Interface for Remote Training of Robot Tasks

Regardless of their industrial or research application, the streamlining of robot operations is limited by the proximity of experienced users to the actual hardware. Be it massive open online robotics courses, crowd-sourcing of robot task training, or remote research on massive robot farms for machine learning, the need to create an apt remote Human-Machine Interface is quite prevalent. The paper at hand proposes a novel solution to the programming/training of remote robots employing an intuitive and accurate user-interface which offers all the benefits of working with real robots without imposing delays and inefficiency. The system includes: a vision-based 3D hand detection and gesture recognition subsystem, a simulated digital twin of a robot as visual feedback, and the "remote" robot learning/executing trajectories using dynamic motion primitives. Our results indicate that the system is a promising solution to the problem of remote training of robot tasks.Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on Imaging Systems and Techniques - IST201

Assessing the effectiveness of multi-touch interfaces for DP operation

Navigating a vessel using dynamic positioning (DP) systems close to offshore installations is a challenge. The operator's only possibility of manipulating the system is through its interface, which can be categorized as the physical appearance of the equipment and the visualization of the system. Are there possibilities of interaction between the operator and the system that can reduce strain and cognitive load during DP operations? Can parts of the system (e.g. displays) be physically brought closer to the user to enhance the feeling of control when operating the system? Can these changes make DP operations more efficient and safe? These questions inspired this research project, which investigates the use of multi-touch and hand gestures known from consumer products to directly manipulate the visualization of a vessel in the 3D scene of a DP system. Usability methodologies and evaluation techniques that are widely used in consumer market research were used to investigate how these interaction techniques, which are new to the maritime domain, could make interaction with the DP system more efficient and transparent both during standard and safety-critical operations. After investigating which gestures felt natural to use by running user tests with a paper prototype, the gestures were implemented into a Rolls-Royce DP system and tested in a static environment. The results showed that the test participants performed significantly faster using direct gesture manipulation compared to using traditional button/menu interaction. To support the results from these tests, further tests were carried out. The purpose is to investigate how gestures are performed in a moving environment, using a motion platform to simulate rough sea conditions. The key results and lessons learned from a collection of four user experiments, together with a discussion of the choice of evaluation techniques will be discussed in this paper

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Fully Integrated Biochip Platforms for Advanced Healthcare

Recent advances in microelectronics and biosensors are enabling developments of innovative biochips for advanced healthcare by providing fully integrated platforms for continuous monitoring of a large set of human disease biomarkers. Continuous monitoring of several human metabolites can be addressed by using fully integrated and minimally invasive devices located in the sub-cutis, typically in the peritoneal region. This extends the techniques of continuous monitoring of glucose currently being pursued with diabetic patients. However, several issues have to be considered in order to succeed in developing fully integrated and minimally invasive implantable devices. These innovative devices require a high-degree of integration, minimal invasive surgery, long-term biocompatibility, security and privacy in data transmission, high reliability, high reproducibility, high specificity, low detection limit and high sensitivity. Recent advances in the field have already proposed possible solutions for several of these issues. The aim of the present paper is to present a broad spectrum of recent results and to propose future directions of development in order to obtain fully implantable systems for the continuous monitoring of the human metabolism in advanced healthcare applications

Virtually connected, practically mobile

This is the post-print version of the Chapter. The official published version can be accessed from the links below - Copyright @ 2006 SpringerThis chapter addresses a central issue in studies of mobile work and mobile technology – what is the work of mobile workers, and how do they use the resources that they have to undertake this work (i.e. the work they have to do in order to do their work)? In contrast to many of the other papers in this collection, the objective of this chapter is to examine individual mobile work, and not teamwork and co-operation other than where it impacts on the work of individuals. We present data from a study of mobile workers, examining a range of mobile workers to produce a rich picture of their work. Our analysis reveals insights into how mobile workers mix their mobility with their work, home and social lives, their use of mobile technology, the problems – technological and otherwise – inherent in being mobile, and the strategies that they use to manage their work, time, other resources and availability. Our findings demonstrate important issues in understanding mobile work, including the maintenance of communities of practice, the role and management of interpersonal awareness and co-ordination, how environmental resources affect activity, the impact of mobility on family/social relationships and the crossover between the mobile workers’ private and working lives, how preplanning is employed prior to travel, and how mobile workers perform activity multitasking, for example through making use of ‘dead time’. Finally, we turn to the implications of this data for the design and deployment of mobile virtual work (MVW) technologies for individuals and a broader organisational context