56,571 research outputs found
Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour
Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it
easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated
data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues
arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous
studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where
data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to
encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations
on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial
Designing Auditory Feedback from Wearable Weightlifting Devices
While wearable devices for fitness have gained broad popularity, most are focused on tracking general activity types rather than correcting exercise forms, which is extremely important for weightlifters. We interviewed 7 frequent gym-goers about their opinions and expectations for feedback from wearable devices for weightlifting. We describe their desired feedback, and how their expectations and concerns could be balanced in future wearable fitness technologies
How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRRās Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers
Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a ātotal approach to rehabilitationā, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970ās, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program
Wearable Communications in 5G: Challenges and Enabling Technologies
As wearable devices become more ingrained in our daily lives, traditional
communication networks primarily designed for human being-oriented applications
are facing tremendous challenges. The upcoming 5G wireless system aims to
support unprecedented high capacity, low latency, and massive connectivity. In
this article, we evaluate key challenges in wearable communications. A
cloud/edge communication architecture that integrates the cloud radio access
network, software defined network, device to device communications, and
cloud/edge technologies is presented. Computation offloading enabled by this
multi-layer communications architecture can offload computation-excessive and
latency-stringent applications to nearby devices through device to device
communications or to nearby edge nodes through cellular or other wireless
technologies. Critical issues faced by wearable communications such as short
battery life, limited computing capability, and stringent latency can be
greatly alleviated by this cloud/edge architecture. Together with the presented
architecture, current transmission and networking technologies, including
non-orthogonal multiple access, mobile edge computing, and energy harvesting,
can greatly enhance the performance of wearable communication in terms of
spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin
A mobile fitness companion
The paper introduces a Mobile Companion prototype, which helps users to plan and keep track of their exercise activities via an interface based mainly on speech input and output. The Mobile Companion runs on a PDA and is based on a stand-alone, speaker-independent solution, making it fairly unique among mobile spoken dialogue systems, where the common solution is to run the ASR on a separate server or to restrict the speech input to some specific set of users. The prototype uses a GPS receiver to collect position, distance and speed data while the user is exercising, and allows the data to be compared to previous exercises. It communicates over the mobile network with a stationary system, placed in the userās home. This allows plans for exercise activities to be downloaded from the stationary to the mobile system, and exercise result data to be uploaded once an exercise has been completed
Online Group-exercises for Older Adults of Different Physical Abilities
In this paper we describe the design and validation of a virtual fitness
environment aiming at keeping older adults physically and socially active. We
target particularly older adults who are socially more isolated, physically
less active, and with less chances of training in a gym. The virtual fitness
environment, namely Gymcentral, was designed to enable and motivate older
adults to follow personalised exercises from home, with a (heterogeneous) group
of remote friends and under the remote supervision of a Coach. We take the
training activity as an opportunity to create social interactions, by
complementing training features with social instruments. Finally, we report on
the feasibility and effectiveness of the virtual environment, as well as its
effects on the usage and social interactions, from an intervention study in
Trento, Ital
Towards Inferring Mechanical Lock Combinations using Wrist-Wearables as a Side-Channel
Wrist-wearables such as smartwatches and fitness bands are equipped with a
variety of high-precision sensors that support novel contextual and
activity-based applications. The presence of a diverse set of on-board sensors,
however, also expose an additional attack surface which, if not adequately
protected, could be potentially exploited to leak private user information. In
this paper, we investigate the feasibility of a new attack that takes advantage
of a wrist-wearable's motion sensors to infer input on mechanical devices
typically used to secure physical access, for example, combination locks. We
outline an inference framework that attempts to infer a lock's unlock
combination from the wrist motion captured by a smartwatch's gyroscope sensor,
and uses a probabilistic model to produce a ranked list of likely unlock
combinations. We conduct a thorough empirical evaluation of the proposed
framework by employing unlocking-related motion data collected from human
subject participants in a variety of controlled and realistic settings.
Evaluation results from these experiments demonstrate that motion data from
wrist-wearables can be effectively employed as a side-channel to significantly
reduce the unlock combination search-space of commonly found combination locks,
thus compromising the physical security provided by these locks
Children's Health: Evaluating the Impact of Digital Technology. Final Report for Sunderland City Council.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Childrenās Health project sponsored by the City of Sunderland Digital Challenge project examined the impact of providing health-focused digital technologies to children aged 11-15 years, in terms of their usage and requirements of such technologies, and their subsequent behavioural changes.
The empirical study ran with three groups of six children over a period of seven weeks for each group. A console-based exercise game and an exercise-focused social website were used in the study and the focus was on opportunistic (unstructured/unplanned) exercise.
The emergent findings are:
ā¢ Data collected about physical activity must be more extensive than simple step counts.
ā¢ Data collection technologies for activities must be ubiquitous but invisible.
ā¢ Social interaction via technology is expected; positive messages reinforcing attainments of goals are valued; negative feedback is seen as demotivating.
ā¢ participants were very open to sharing information (privacy was not a concern).
ā¢ Authority figures have a significant impact on restricting adolescentsā use of technologies.
This document reports the how the study was conducted, analyses the findings and draws conclusions from these regarding how to use digital technologies to improve and/or maintain the physical activity levels of children throughout their adolescence and on into adulthood.
The appendices provide the detailed (anonymised) data collected during the study and the background literature review
- ā¦