25,190 research outputs found
Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective
Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings,
which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and
identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable
cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the
always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for
parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives,
those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera
visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual
information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and
an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40)
participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian
detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of
the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned
above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(CHI 2020
Canine-centered interface design: supporting the work of diabetes alert dogs
Many people with Diabetes live with the continuous threat of hypoglycaemic attacks and the danger of going into coma. Diabetic Alert Dogs are trained to detect the onset of an attack before the human handler they are paired with deteriorates, giving them time to take action. We investigated requirements for designing an alert system allowing dogs to remotely call for help when their human falls unconscious before being able to react to an alert. Through a multispecies ethnographic approach we focus on teasing out the requirements for a physical canine user interface, involving both dogs, their handlers and trainers in the design. We discuss tensions between the requirements for the canine and the human users, argue the need for increased sensitivity towards the needs of individual dogs that goes beyond breed specific physical characteristics and reflect on how we can move from designing for dogs to designing with dogs
Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review
Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today.
Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work
closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue
situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain,
and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely
raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint.
Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and
shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically
survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for
domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal
welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether
animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated
in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is
used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not
isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote
data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart
technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well
as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to
motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication
management as well as policy for animal welfare
SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments
The emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur
Immersive Technologies in Virtual Companions: A Systematic Literature Review
The emergence of virtual companions is transforming the evolution of
intelligent systems that effortlessly cater to the unique requirements of
users. These advanced systems not only take into account the user present
capabilities, preferences, and needs but also possess the capability to adapt
dynamically to changes in the environment, as well as fluctuations in the users
emotional state or behavior. A virtual companion is an intelligent software or
application that offers support, assistance, and companionship across various
aspects of users lives. Various enabling technologies are involved in building
virtual companion, among these, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality
(VR) are emerging as transformative tools. While their potential for use in
virtual companions or digital assistants is promising, their applications in
these domains remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, a systematic
review was conducted to investigate the applications of VR, AR, and MR
immersive technologies in the development of virtual companions. A
comprehensive search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar yielded 28
relevant articles out of a pool of 644. The review revealed that immersive
technologies, particularly VR and AR, play a significant role in creating
digital assistants, offering a wide range of applications that brings various
facilities in the individuals life in areas such as addressing social
isolation, enhancing cognitive abilities and dementia care, facilitating
education, and more. Additionally, AR and MR hold potential for enhancing
Quality of life (QoL) within the context of virtual companion technology. The
findings of this review provide a valuable foundation for further research in
this evolving field
3D/2D Registration of Mapping Catheter Images for Arrhythmia Interventional Assistance
Radiofrequency (RF) catheter ablation has transformed treatment for
tachyarrhythmias and has become first-line therapy for some tachycardias. The
precise localization of the arrhythmogenic site and the positioning of the RF
catheter over that site are problematic: they can impair the efficiency of the
procedure and are time consuming (several hours). Electroanatomic mapping
technologies are available that enable the display of the cardiac chambers and
the relative position of ablation lesions. However, these are expensive and use
custom-made catheters. The proposed methodology makes use of standard catheters
and inexpensive technology in order to create a 3D volume of the heart chamber
affected by the arrhythmia. Further, we propose a novel method that uses a
priori 3D information of the mapping catheter in order to estimate the 3D
locations of multiple electrodes across single view C-arm images. The monoplane
algorithm is tested for feasibility on computer simulations and initial canine
data.Comment: International Journal of Computer Science Issues, IJCSI, Volume 4,
Issue 2, pp10-19, September 200
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