25,021 research outputs found
Bioengineered Textiles and Nonwovens – the convergence of bio-miniaturisation and electroactive conductive polymers for assistive healthcare, portable power and design-led wearable technology
Today, there is an opportunity to bring together creative design activities to exploit the responsive and adaptive ‘smart’ materials that are a result of rapid development in electro, photo active polymers or OFEDs (organic thin film electronic devices), bio-responsive hydrogels, integrated into MEMS/NEMS devices and systems respectively. Some of these integrated systems are summarised in this paper, highlighting their use to create enhanced functionality in textiles, fabrics and non-woven large area thin films. By understanding the characteristics and properties of OFEDs and bio polymers and how they can be transformed into implementable physical forms, innovative products and services can be developed, with wide implications. The paper outlines some of these opportunities and applications, in particular, an ambient living platform, dealing with human centred needs, of people at work, people at home and people at play. The innovative design affords the accelerated development of intelligent materials (interactive, responsive and adaptive) for a new product & service design landscape, encompassing assistive healthcare (smart bandages and digital theranostics), ambient living, renewable energy (organic PV and solar textiles), interactive consumer products, interactive personal & beauty care (e-Scent) and a more intelligent built environment
A Model for Using Physiological Conditions for Proactive Tourist Recommendations
Mobile proactive tourist recommender systems can support tourists by
recommending the best choice depending on different contexts related to herself
and the environment. In this paper, we propose to utilize wearable sensors to
gather health information about a tourist and use them for recommending tourist
activities. We discuss a range of wearable devices, sensors to infer
physiological conditions of the users, and exemplify the feasibility using a
popular self-quantification mobile app. Our main contribution then comprises a
data model to derive relations between the parameters measured by the wearable
sensors, such as heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, and use them to
infer the physiological condition of a user. This model can then be used to
derive classes of tourist activities that determine which items should be
recommended
An intelligent information forwarder for healthcare big data systems with distributed wearable sensors
© 2016 IEEE. An increasing number of the elderly population wish to live an independent lifestyle, rather than rely on intrusive care programmes. A big data solution is presented using wearable sensors capable of carrying out continuous monitoring of the elderly, alerting the relevant caregivers when necessary and forwarding pertinent information to a big data system for analysis. A challenge for such a solution is the development of context-awareness through the multidimensional, dynamic and nonlinear sensor readings that have a weak correlation with observable human behaviours and health conditions. To address this challenge, a wearable sensor system with an intelligent data forwarder is discussed in this paper. The forwarder adopts a Hidden Markov Model for human behaviour recognition. Locality sensitive hashing is proposed as an efficient mechanism to learn sensor patterns. A prototype solution is implemented to monitor health conditions of dispersed users. It is shown that the intelligent forwarders can provide the remote sensors with context-awareness. They transmit only important information to the big data server for analytics when certain behaviours happen and avoid overwhelming communication and data storage. The system functions unobtrusively, whilst giving the users peace of mind in the knowledge that their safety is being monitored and analysed
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
Building an Understanding of Human Activities in First Person Video using Fuzzy Inference
Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) are the activities that people perform every day in their home as part of their typical routine. The in-home, automated monitoring of ADL’s has broad utility for intelligent systems that enable independent living for the elderly and mentally or physically disabled individuals. With rising interest in electronic health (e-Health) and mobile health (m-Health) technology, opportunities abound for the integration of activity monitoring systems into these newer forms of healthcare. In this dissertation we propose a novel system for describing ’s based on video collected from a wearable camera. Most in-home activities are naturally defined by interaction with objects. We leverage these object-centric activity definitions to develop a set of rules for a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) that uses video features and the identification of objects to identify and classify activities. Further, we demonstrate that the use of FIS enhances the reliability of the system and provides enhanced explainability and interpretability of results over popular machine-learning classifiers due to the linguistic nature of fuzzy systems
Development of Wearable Systems for Ubiquitous Healthcare Service Provisioning
This paper reports on the development of a wearable system using wireless
biomedical sensors for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. The
prototype system is developed to address current healthcare challenges such as
increasing cost of services, inability to access diverse services, low quality
services and increasing population of elderly as experienced globally. The
biomedical sensors proactively collect physiological data of remote patients to
recommend diagnostic services. The prototype system is designed to monitor
oxygen saturation level (SpO2), Heart Rate (HR), activity and location of the
elderly. Physiological data collected are uploaded to a Health Server (HS) via
GPRS/Internet for analysis.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, APCBEE Procedia 7, 2013. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1309.154
Software for Wearable Devices: Challenges and Opportunities
Wearable devices are a new form of mobile computer system that provides
exclusive and user-personalized services. Wearable devices bring new issues and
challenges to computer science and technology. This paper summarizes the
development process and the categories of wearable devices. In addition, we
present new key issues arising in aspects of wearable devices, including
operating systems, database management system, network communication protocol,
application development platform, privacy and security, energy consumption,
human-computer interaction, software engineering, and big data.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, for Compsac 201
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