INLIFE - independent living support functions for the elderly : technology and pilot overview

In this paper, we present the European H2020 project INLIFE (INdependent LIving support Functions for the Elderly). The project brought together 20 partners from nine countries with the goal of integrating into a common ICT platform a range of technologies intended to assist community-dwelling older people with cognitive impairment. The majority of technologies existed prior to INLIFE and a key goal was to bring them together in one place along with a number of new applications to provide a comprehensive set of services. The range of INLIFE services fell into four broad areas: Independent Living Support, Travel Support, Socialization and Communication Support and Caregiver Support. These included security applications, services to facilitate interactions with formal and informal caregivers, multilingual conversation support, web-based physical exercises, teleconsultations, and support for transport navigation. In total, over 2900 people participated in the project; they included elderly adults with cognitive impairment, informal caregivers, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders. The aim of the study was to assess whether there was improvement/stabilization of cognitive/emotional/physical functioning, as well as overall well-being and quality of life of those using the INLIFE services, and to assess user acceptance of the platform and individual services. The results confirm there is a huge interest and appetite for technological services to support older adults living with cognitive impairment in the community. Different services attracted different amounts of use and evaluation with some proving extremely popular while others less so. The findings provide useful information on the ways in which older adults and their families, health and social care services and other stakeholders wish to access technological services, what sort of services they are seeking, what sort of support they need to access services, and how these services might be funded

Object search using mobile platform and RGBD camera

Intelligent robots are nowadays making their way from laboratories to domestic homes. In this thesis, a vacuum cleaner robot iRobot Roomba is upgraded so it can search for objects in a room. Robot sensors alone are not good enough that is why a RGBD camera Kinect is added on top of the robot. For software part the robot meta operating system ROS is used. ROS connects the robot’s hardware and software together and is easily upgradable with custom packages for different tasks. This thesis is divided in two parts: object recognition and systematical search of space. For object recognition, a solution made by RoboEarth is used. The focus of this thesis is on navigating the robot and bringing the whole system together. For better representation of the robot’s actions, visualization and verbalization of these actions are added. Before the evaluation of the program on a real robot, exact parameters of the visual recognition system are measured and then used to create a test environment

Bumble bee nest thermoregulation

Careful control of brood temperature is important for successful colony development in social insects. Six bumble bee colonies of six common Central European species (B. hypnorum, B. hortorum, B. argillaceus, B. pascuorum, B. humilis, B. sylvarum) were continuously monitored for several weeks. We recorded the brood temperature as well as the air temperature in the nest and outside once per minute using a homemade electronic setup. Two colonies succeeded in producing new queens and males during the measurement period while the other four colonies were attacked by parasites at some point during the equilibrium stage. We discuss the nest thermoregulation in view of species and the number of workers in the colony. The results show that the strongest colonies were able to maintain very stable brood temperature over longer periods (standard deviations below 0.5 °C), which is in agreement with previous studies. Colonies with 25 or more workers typically kept the standard deviation below 1 °C. There are two main contributions to the paper. First, we discuss the applicability of a multi-sensor monitoring setup for an outdoor study. Second, due to fast temperature sampling, we were able to observe different thermoregulation strategies that colonies may apply, including keeping the temperature above 31 °C at night and letting it rise during the day in B. argillaceus and short heating cycles in B. sylvarum

ASR database ARTUR 1.0 (audio)

Artur 1.0 is a speech database designed for the needs of automatic speech recognition for the Slovenian language. The database includes 1,067 hours of speech. 884 hours are transcribed, while the remaining 183 hours are recordings only. This repository entry includes audio files only, the transcriptions are available on http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1772. The data are structured as follows: (1) Artur-B, read speech, 573 hours in total. It includes: (1a) Artur-B-Brani, 485 hours: Readings of sentences which were pre-selected from a 10% increment in the Gigafida 2.0 corpus. The sentences were chosen in such a way that they reflect the natural or the actual distribution of triphones in the words. They were distributed between 1,000 speakers, so that we recorded approx. 30 min in read form from each speaker. The speakers were balanced according to gender, age, region, and a small proportion of speakers were non-native speakers of Slovene. Each sentence is its own audio file and has a corresponding transcription file. (1b) Artur-B-Crkovani, 10 hours: Spellings. Speakers were asked to spell abbreviations and personal names and surnames, all chosen so that all Slovene letters were covered, plus the most common foreign letters. (1c) Artur-B-Studio, 51 hours: Designed for the development of speech synthesis. The sentences were read in a studio by a single speaker. Each sentence is its own audio file and has a corresponding transcription file. (1d) Artur-B-Izloceno, 27 hours: The recordings include different types of errors, typically, incorrect reading of sentences or a noisy environment. (2) Artur-J, public speech, 62 hours in total. It includes: (2a) Artur-J-Splosni, 62 hours: media recordings, online recordings of conferences, workshops, education videos, etc. (3) Artur-N, private speech, 74 hours in total. It includes: (3a) Artur-N-Obrazi, 6 hours: Speakers were asked to describe faces on pictures. Designed for a face-description domain-specific speech recognition. (3b) Artur-N-PDom, 7 hours: Speakers were asked to read pre-written sentences, as well as to express instructions for a potential smart-home system freely. Designed for a smart-home domain-specific speech recognition. (3c) Artur-N-Prosti, 61 hours: Monologues and dialogues between two persons, recorded for the purposes of the Artur database creation. Speakers were asked to conversate or explain freely on casual topics. (4) Artur-P, parliamentary speech, 201 hours in total. It includes: (4a) Artur-P-SejeDZ, 201 hours: Speech from the Slovene National Assembly. Further information on the database are available in the Artur-DOC file, which is part of this repository entry