Personalized Virtual Reality Environments for Intervention with People with Disability

[Abstract] Background: Virtual reality (VR) is a technological resource that allows the generation of an environment of great realism while achieving user immersion. The purpose of this project is to use VR as a complementary tool in the rehabilitation process of people with physical and cognitive disabilities. An approach based on performing activities of daily living is proposed. Methods: Through joint work between health and IT professionals, the VR scenarios and skills to be trained are defined. We organized discussion groups in which health professionals and users with spinal injury, stroke, or cognitive impairment participated. A testing phase was carried out, followed by a qualitative perspective. As materials, Unity was used as a development platform, HTC VIVE as a VR system, and Leap Motion as a hand tracking device and as a means of interacting with the scenarios. Results: A VR application was developed, consisting of four scenarios that allow for practicing different activities of daily living. Three scenarios are focused on hand mobility rehabilitation, while the remaining scenario is intended to work on a cognitive skill related to the identification of elements to perform a task. Conclusions: Performing activities of daily living using VR environments provides an enjoyable, motivating, and safe means of rehabilitation in the daily living process of people with disabilities and is a valuable source of information for healthcare professionals to assess a patient’s evolution.The APC was funded by the National Program of R + D+i oriented to the Challenges of Society 2019 (coordinated research) Grant number: PID2019-104323RB-C33. Ministry of science and innovation.The APC was funded by the National Program of R + D+i oriented to the Challenges of Society 2019 (coordinated research) Grant number: PID2019-104323RB-C33. Ministry of science and innovation. The research was done in the Center CITIC, which is a Research Center accredited by Galician University System (Xunta de Galicia). CITIC is partly supported by “Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidades from Xunta de Galicia”, which provided 80% of funds through ERDF Funds, ERDF Operational Programme Galicia 2014-2020, and the remaining 20% was provided by “Secretaría Xeral de Universidades [Grant ED431G 2019/01]Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/0

La serie histórica de la Universidad de Oviedo

Póster presentado en la exposición "La observación meteorológica en AEMET, pasado y presente", celebrada en Castropol (Asturias), del 17 al 30 de agosto de 2018

La fotografía aérea en España y su aplicabilidad al seguimiento y la estimación de la erosión por flujo concentrado

Son numerosos los trabajos que muestran la creciente preocupación por los procesos de erosión hídrica por flujo concentrado en los países mediterráneos en los últimos años. Los métodos y técnicas existentes para el seguimiento y cuantificación de la erosión hídrica por flujo concentrado son muy diversos, resultando de especial interés, relevancia y potencial aquellos relacionados con las modernas tecnologías geoespaciales (sistemas de posicionamiento global diferenciales, equipos laser terrestres o aerotransportados, fotogrametría digital aérea y terrestre, etc.). Sin embargo, la utilización de dichas técnicas en numerosas ocasiones se encuentra limitada por la fecha de aparición del instrumental, por tanto, algunas fuentes históricas son todavía necesarias para comprender la evolución a medio y largo plazo de las formas de erosión por flujo concentrado. Sin embargo, en ocasiones, la localización de las fotografías aéreas existentes para una determinada zona puede resultar laboriosa y tediosa lo que da lugar a grandes pérdidas de tiempo en los proyectos y equipos de investigación. Por todo ello, los principales objetivos del presente trabajo son i) presentar una guía respecto al material fotográfico aéreo disponible para España, ii) resumir sus características principales y iii) analizar su utilidad para el seguimiento y cuantificación de la erosión ocasionada por flujo concentrado.Erosion produced by concentrated water flow has been highlighted as an important soil degradation phenomenon in the Mediterranean catchment. Several kinds of methodologies and techniques have been used indeed in order to monitor and quantify erosion produced by concentrated flow, mainly those related with modern geospatial technologies (DGPS, LIDAR, LTS, aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry, etc.). However the time scale of the studies based exclusively on modern techniques is constrained by the date of appearance of those techniques. Therefore, some historical sources are still necessary in gully erosion studies (medium, short time scale). Sometimes, however, finding these documents is laborious and tedious, being the researchers forced to spend a lot of time in localizing and acquiring it. Therefore, the main objectives of this work are i) to provide a guidance regarding the available aerial photographs and orthophotographs for rill and gully erosion studies in Spain and covering the whole country, ii) to summarize the main characteristics of these materials and iii) to analyze the suitability of using these materials for soil loss monitoring and assessment produced by concentrated flow

Maritime studies and shipping bussines: a trend research on education programs

The Schools of Maritime Engineering & Business of the Spanish Universities forms the future professionals of the Spanish Merchant Marine who will sail the seven seas transporting goods in all its various forms. This remains a very important profession however, the importance of these activities it is not usually well known by the rest of the society not directly involved with the maritime world. The professions have been evolving, and the maritime job is not an exception. The marine professionals had opened new gates to develop new activities in other di erent positions which traditionally were busy by others carriers, for example, shipping companies. However, training in this sense is lacking, nautical students in most of the cases are not trained and specialized in this regard. The idea of this research paper is to quantify and identify the needs for the training and propose a training plan according to current needs in this area. The methodology of this work, has consisted of comparative analysis based on the results obtained from di erent surveys. The first survey has been conducted in several schools of nautical and maritime studies, considering the di erent levels existent at training programs, perception from students in relation to major weaknesses and missing elements. The second survey focused on experts in shipping & maritime logistics considering their experience from the trainee students with the objective to identify the core skills that will be required from a professional point of view. The results of both surveys have been combined, performing a comparative analysis in order to define a curriculum model that should cover the academic and business abilities gaps identified during the study

Los colaboradores meteorológicos asturianos

Póster presentado en la exposición "La observación meteorológica en AEMET, pasado y presente", celebrada en Castropol (Asturias), del 17 al 30 de agosto de 2018

Dual-Channel Speech Enhancement Based on Extended Kalman Filter Relative Transfer Function Estimation

This paper deals with speech enhancement in dual-microphone smartphones using beamforming along with postfiltering techniques. The performance of these algorithms relies on a good estimation of the acoustic channel and speech and noise statistics. In this work we present a speech enhancement system that combines the estimation of the relative transfer function (RTF) between microphones using an extended Kalman filter framework with a novel speech presence probability estimator intended to track the noise statistics’ variability. The available dual-channel information is exploited to obtain more reliable estimates of clean speech statistics. Noise reduction is further improved by means of postfiltering techniques that take advantage of the speech presence estimation. Our proposal is evaluated in different reverberant and noisy environments when the smartphone is used in both close-talk and far-talk positions. The experimental results show that our system achieves improvements in terms of noise reduction, low speech distortion and better speech intelligibility compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.Spanish MINECO/FEDER Project TEC2016-80141-PSpanish Ministry of Education through the National Program FPU under Grant FPU15/0416

Viscosity and density measurements of aqueous amines at high pressures: MDEA-water and MEA-water mixtures for CO2 capture

Producción CientíficaViscosity and density are thermophysical properties crucial to characterizing any kind of fluid such as aqueous amines. These blends are becoming more and more relevant for their CO2 capture potential, such that having accurate viscosity and density measurements would prove useful. Densities and viscosities of these mixtures at atmospheric pressure may be found in the literature although it is more difficult to find values at high pressures, these potentially proving interesting when seeking to provide a full description of these fluids. Viscosity and density measurements at high pressures (up to 120 MPa) and at temperatures between 293.15 and 353.15 K of MDEA + water and MEA + water mixtures (both from 10 % to 40 % amine mass fraction) are presented in this work. Density measurements were performed with an Anton Paar DMA HPM densimeter with an expanded uncertainty (k = 2) less than ± 0.7 kg·m-3. A falling body technique was used to measure viscosities at high pressures due to its sturdiness in terms of corrosion. Details of this latter equipment are presented, including calibration using n-dodecane and uncertainty calculations, which give a relative expanded uncertainty (k = 2) of less than ± 2.4 % for the highest viscosity and ± 2.9 % for the lowest.2018-03-15Education Ministry (Spanish Government) through a FPU scholarshipProject for European Latin American Cooperation and Exchange (PEACE)Regional Government of Castilla y León through the Project VA295U1