The Case for Public Interventions during a Pandemic

Funding Information: This work has been supported by Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions ITN AffecTech (ERC H2020 Project 1059 ID: 722022). Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.Within the field of movement sensing and sound interaction research, multi-user systems have gradually gained interest as a means to facilitate an expressive non-verbal dialogue. When tied with studies grounded in psychology and choreographic theory, we consider the qualities of interaction that foster an elevated sense of social connectedness, non-contingent to occupying one’s personal space. Upon reflection of the newly adopted social distancing concept, we orchestrate a technological intervention, starting with interpersonal distance and sound at the core of interaction. Materialised as a set of sensory face-masks, a novel wearable system was developed and tested in the context of a live public performance from which we obtain the user’s individual perspectives and correlate this with patterns identified in the recorded data. We identify and discuss traits of the user’s behaviour that were accredited to the system’s influence and construct four fundamental design considerations for physically distanced sound interaction. The study concludes with essential technical reflections, accompanied by an adaptation for a pervasive sensory intervention that is finally deployed in an open public space.publishersversionpublishe

Applications and Issues for Physiological Computing Systems: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The prospect of connecting the brain and body to a technological device can elicit a broad range of responses from potential users. Early adopters are thrilled by the possibility of a device that can interface directly to the human nervous system. For the vast majority, interest is tempered by caution, as nascent varieties of physiological computing systems raise as many questions as answers about how we will interact with computers in the future

Bridging the Clinic-Home Divide in Muscular Rehabilitation

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are a major worldwide problem that regularly affects up to a third of the general population. In the US alone, the market for physical therapy was valued at ~32 B USD in 2015, recently growing at ~6% YoY. Besides the direct impact in the quality of life and cost of treatment, MSDs accounted for one-third of days lost due to work-related ill health and injury in countries such as the US, UK and Finland, with ~20% of leaves of absence due to MSD injuries being above a 1-month period. To help mitigate these issues, in this chapter, we describe a novel biofeedback system designed to support part of the rehabilitation processes at home, further extending the state of the art with an app-driven and cloud-based approach. This approach enables the therapists to remotely monitor the progress of the patients and near instant adjustment of the training program from the clinic. The system consists of low-cost wearable devices for electromyography (EMG), a set of user-friendly smartphone apps, and a cloud-based service that allows the patient to have a remote evaluation of his/her performance, handled by the clinical therapist that prescribed the treatment

e-CoVig: a novel mHealth system for remote monitoring of symptoms in COVID-19

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).In 2019, a new virus, SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 disease, was discovered. Asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients were forced to quarantine and closely monitor their symptoms and vital signs, most of the time at home. This paper describes e-CoVig, a novel mHealth application, developed as an alternative to the current monitoring paradigm, where the patients are followed up by direct phone contact. The e-CoVig provides a set of functionalities for remote reporting of symptoms, vital signs, and other clinical information to the health services taking care of these patients. The application is designed to register and transmit the heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), body temperature, respiration, and cough. The system features a mobile application, a web/cloud platform, and a low-cost specific device to acquire the temperature and SpO2. The architecture of the system is flexible and can be configured for different operation conditions. Current commercial devices, such as oximeters and thermometers, can also be used and read using the optical character recognition (OCR) functionality of the system. The data acquired at the mobile application are sent automatically to the web/cloud application and made available in real-time to the medical staff, enabling the follow-up of several users simultaneously without the need for time consuming phone call interactions. The system was already tested for its feasibility and a preliminary deployment was performed on a nursing home showing promising results.This work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under the grants e-CoVig—Project 255_596880547, and LARSyS—Project UIDB/50009/2020, by FCT/MCTES through national funds and, when applicable, co-funded EU funds under the grant NICE-HOME—Project UIDB/50008/2020, and by the IT—Instituto de Telecomunicações under grant BI/No. 13—19 May 2020 “AIMHealth”, which is gratefully acknowledged.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Avaliação de um sistema de monitorização portátil do retorno anestésico baseado em análise de movimento em caninos e felinos / Evaluation of a portable anesthetic return monitoring system based on canine and feline movement analysis

O monitoramento do retorno anestésico em pequenos animais pode ser desafiador. Este trabalho visou validar a monitorização portátil do retorno anestésico por meio de um sistema BITalino R-IoT conectado a um computador via Wi-Fi, baseado na análise de movimento e aquisição digital de sinais vitais em pequenos animais. O movimento foi medido com base na variação da aceleração em intervalos de cinco milisegundos em cada eixo, sendo então somados os três eixos. Foram avaliadas 12 fêmeas, caninas e felinas, sem raças definidas, com idade estimada entre 6 meses a 3 anos e consideradas ASA I. Os animais foram alocados em 2 grupos,sendo todos submetidos a cirurgia de ovário histerectomia sob o mesmo protocolo anestésico. Os indivíduos foram monitorados durante 1 minuto, por meio do acoplamento do aparelho ao pescoço, em 5 momentos diferentes: com o animal livre de fármacos (M1), 15 minutos após a medicação pré anestésica (M2), na extubação (M3), 30 minutos pós extubação (M4) e, por fim, 120 minutos pós extubação (M5). Após o procedimento foram calculadas as médias dos valores coletados. Observou-se que todos animais iniciaram M1 com 662 pontos e retornaram totalmente à normalidade em M5, com diferença entre os grupos de M2 a M4. Os felinos apresentaram maior depressão e excitação do que os caninos. O valores mais baixos observam-se em M3, aumentado a excitação até M4, com retorno aos valores iniciais em M5. Os estudo deste parâmetros sugere a futura capacidade de utilizar desta tecnologia para identificar ataques convulsivos. Os dados obtidos demonstraram a capacidade do aparelho BITalino em detectar as variações, mesmo que pequenas, na movimentação e sinais vitais dos animais em questão; além de ser de fácil montagem e aplicação na rotina cirúrgica. A ferramenta aqui apresentada permite o acompanhamento seguro dos animais no contexto perioperatório e de internamento, aumentando a eficiência e produtividade dos centros de atendimento veterinários, além de auxiliar na diminuição dos custos envolvidos em certos procedimentos

Developments in Transduction, Connectivity and AI/Machine Learning for Point-of-Care Testing

We review some emerging trends in transduction, connectivity and data analytics for Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) of infectious and non-communicable diseases. The patient need for POCT is described along with developments in portable diagnostics, specifically in respect of Lab-on-chip and microfluidic systems. We describe some novel electrochemical and photonic systems and the use of mobile phones in terms of hardware components and device connectivity for POCT. Developments in data analytics that are applicable for POCT are described with an overview of data structures and recent AI/Machine learning trends. The most important methodologies of machine learning, including deep learning methods, are summarised. The potential value of trends within POCT systems for clinical diagnostics within Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs) and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are highlighted

Characterization and Validation of Flexible Dry Electrodes for Wearable Integration

When long-term biosignal monitoring is required via surface electrodes, the use of conventional silver/silver chloride (Ag/AgCl) gelled electrodes may not be the best solution, as the gel in the electrodes tends to dry out over time. In this work, the electrical behaviour and performance of dry electrodes for biopotential monitoring was assessed. Three materials were investigated and compared against the gold-standard Ag/AgCl gelled electrodes. To characterize their electrical behaviour, the impedance response over the frequency was evaluated, as well as its signal to noise ratio. The electrodes’ performance was evaluated by integrating them in a proven electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition setup where an ECG signal was acquired simultaneously with a set of dry electrodes and a set of standard Ag/AgCl gelled electrodes as reference. The obtained results were morphologically compared using the Normalised Root Mean Squared Error (nRMSE) and the Cosine Similarity (CS). The findings of this work suggest that the use of dry electrodes for biopotential monitoring is a suitable replacement for the conventional Ag/AgCl gelled electrodes. The signal obtained with dry electrodes is comparable to the one obtained with the gold standard, with the advantage that these do not require the use of gel and can be easily integrated into fabric to facilitate their use in long-term monitoring scenarios

A Novel Smart Chair System for Posture Classification and Invisible ECG Monitoring

In recent years, employment in sedentary occupations has continuously risen. Office workers are more prone to prolonged static sitting, spending 65–80% of work hours sitting, increasing risks for multiple health problems, including cardiovascular diseases and musculoskeletal disorders. These adverse health effects lead to decreased productivity, increased absenteeism and health care costs. However, lack of regulation targeting these issues has oftentimes left them unattended. This article proposes a smart chair system, with posture and electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring modules, using an “invisible” sensing approach, to optimize working conditions, without hindering everyday tasks. For posture classification, machine learning models were trained and tested with datasets composed by center of mass coordinates in the seat plane, computed from the weight measured by load cells fixed under the seat. Models were trained and evaluated in the classification of five and seven sitting positions, achieving high accuracy results for all five-class models (>97.4%), and good results for some seven-class models, particularly the best performing k-NN model (87.5%). For ECG monitoring, signals were acquired at the armrests covered with conductive nappa, connected to a single-lead sensor. Following signal filtering and segmentation, several outlier detection methods were applied to remove extremely noisy segments with mislabeled R-peaks, but only DBSCAN showed satisfactory results for the ECG segmentation performance (88.21%) and accuracy (90.50%)

Validation of a Low-Cost Electrocardiography (ECG) System for Psychophysiological Research

Background and Objective: The reliability of low-cost mobile systems for recording Electrocardiographic (ECG) data is mostly unknown, posing questions regarding the quality of the recorded data and the validity of the extracted physiological parameters. The present study compared the BITalino toolkit with an established medical-grade ECG system (BrainAmp-ExG). Methods: Participants underwent simultaneous ECG recordings with the two instruments while watching pleasant and unpleasant pictures of the “International Affective Picture System” (IAPS). Common ECG parameters were extracted and compared between the two systems. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICCs) and the Bland–Altman Limits of Agreement (LoA) method served as criteria for measurement agreement. Results: All but one parameter showed an excellent agreement (>80%) between both devices in the ICC analysis. No criteria for Bland–Altman LoA and bias were found in the literature regarding ECG parameters. Conclusion: The results of the ICC and Bland–Altman methods demonstrate that the BITalino system can be considered as an equivalent recording device for stationary ECG recordings in psychophysiological experiments

A simple pendulum studied with a low-cost wireless acquisition board

In the field of physics teaching, the simple pendulum provides a very simple way to study the harmonic oscillator, the source of some fundamental concepts such as periodicity, relaxation time and anharmonicity. As such, its experimental study is frequently integrated into high school or first year university programs. With this in mind, in this article, we propose a simple setup allowing the study of some of its properties. By coupling a small wireless acquisition board to an oscillating mass, the centripetal acceleration is recorded and analyzed. We show using basic calculations how this acceleration allows us to extract the variation with time of its period and of the amplitude. The experimental results show that the damping of the amplitude is very well described by an exponential law. The accuracy we obtain on the period allows us to show that, not only does it decrease with amplitude, but that this decrease is relatively well described by standard calculation. Using wireless multipurpose acquisition board and usual spreadsheet for experimental modelling, the completion of this work, about 4 h, offers to the student an original way to go a little beyond the classical study of the spectacular object that is the pendulum.authorsversionpublishe