Energy expenditure estimation using visual and inertial sensors

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017. Deriving a person's energy expenditure accurately forms the foundation for tracking physical activity levels across many health and lifestyle monitoring tasks. In this study, the authors present a method for estimating calorific expenditure from combined visual and accelerometer sensors by way of an RGB-Depth camera and a wearable inertial sensor. The proposed individual-independent framework fuses information from both modalities which leads to improved estimates beyond the accuracy of single modality and manual metabolic equivalents of task (MET) lookup table based methods. For evaluation, the authors introduce a new dataset called SPHERE_RGBD + Inertial_calorie, for which visual and inertial data are simultaneously obtained with indirect calorimetry ground truth measurements based on gas exchange. Experiments show that the fusion of visual and inertial data reduces the estimation error by 8 and 18% compared with the use of visual only and inertial sensor only, respectively, and by 33% compared with a MET-based approach. The authors conclude from their results that the proposed approach is suitable for home monitoring in a controlled environment

Coalescence of Microsomal Vesicles From Rat-liver - a Phenomenon Occurring in Parallel With Enhancement of the Glycosylation Activity During Incubation of Stripped Rough Microsomes With Gtp

ABSTRACT Rough microsomes from rat liver have been subjected to various treatments and incubated afterwards with UDP-N-acetyl-[ ' °C]glucosamine and GDP-mannose in the presence of GTP (0.5 mM), or of other nucleotides. In agreement with earlier results from this laboratory, the preparations previously treated to strip off the ribosomes and incubated in the presence of GTP assembled dolichol-linked oligosaccharides and transferred these oligosaccharides to endogenous protein acceptors much more actively than untreated preparations, or stripped preparations incubated in the absence of GTP. Thin-section and freeze-fracture electron microscopy have revealed that pyrophosphate-treated preparations incubated with GTP are aggregated and contain numerous vesicles as large as 1-4,um, or more. Such large vesicles were not present before incubation and thus were considered to have been formed through coalescence of regular-sized ones. Like glycosylation, the coalescence phenomenon depends upon the removal of ribosomes, because it occurred whether ribosomes had been stripped, at least partly, with pyrophosphate, KCI, or puromycin, but not when rough microsomes had been washed with 0.25 M sucrose or with KCI and MgCl 2. Like glycosylation, it also depends on the addition of GTP and was not induced by ATP, UTP, CTP, and nonhydrolysable analogue