Experimental study and modelling of Networked Virtual Environment server traffic

The paradigm of virtual world environment arises as an useful tool in diverse fields such as e-Health or education, where they provide a new way of communication and interaction with end users. Networking capabilities play an important role in these systems, which motivates the study and understanding of the gaming network traffic. The present work focuses on Open Wonderland, a system that provides the basis for the development of Networked Virtual Environments with educational or health purposes. The goal of this paper is defining a testing environment and modelling the behaviour of the outgoing network traffic at the server side.Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo AAL-010000-2012-10Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-10639-C04-0

Open Source Virtual Worlds and Low Cost Sensors for Physical Rehab of Patients with Chronic Diseases

For patients with chronic diseases, exercise is a key part of rehab to deal better with their illness. Some of them do rehabilitation at home with telemedicine systems. However, keeping to their exercising program is challenging and many abandon the rehabilitation. We postulate that information technologies for socializing and serious games can encourage patients to keep doing physical exercise and rehab. In this paper we present Virtual Valley, a low cost telemedicine system for home exercising, based on open source virtual worlds and utilizing popular low cost motion controllers (e.g. Wii Remote) and medical sensors. Virtual Valley allows patient to socialize, learn, and play group based serious games while exercising

Diavideos: a Diabetes Health Video Portal

Diavideos1 is a web platform that collects trustworthy diabetes health videos from YouTube and offers them in a easy way. YouTube is a big repository of health videos, but good content is sometimes mixed with misleading and harmful videos such as promoting anorexia [1].Diavideos is a web portal that provides easy access to a repository of trustworthy diabetes videos. This poster describes Diavideos and explains the crawling method used to retrieve these videos from trusted channels

Heuristic usability evaluation on games: a modular approach

Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to evaluate games usability is still Nielsen’s proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different games, using both the Nielsen’s heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.Unión Europea PI055-15/E0

The Usefulness of Activity Trackers in Elderly with Reduced Mobility: A Case Study

This study was conducted to determine the accuracy and usefulness of two current commercially available activity trackers in rollator dependent elderly with reduced mobility (RME), compared with elderly with normal mobility (NME) and healthy adults (HA). Methods: Accuracy of pedometers placed at hip (Fitbit Ultra and Samsung GT-I9300 mobile phone) and wrist (Fitbit Ultra) were evaluated against actual steps (video) in RME (n=5), NME (n=7) and HA (n=6). Walk speed, Tinetti gait score and device percent error was calculated and analyzed in SPSS using Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney U and correlation tests. Results: NME and HA walked significantly faster (p = 0.001) than RME, had significantly higher gait score (p < 0.05). Gait scores were correlated with walking speed and negatively with pedometer percent error (p < 0.01). Estimation error in RME were >60% at all device locations Conclusions: Slow walking speed and gait disorders hamper the utility of pedometers for physical activity measurement in rollator dependent elderly, with estimation errors >60%. The tested devices are better suited for use by ostensibly healthy elderly or adult populations.European Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Project AAL-2011-4- 09

AmbienNet: An Intelligent Environment to Support People with Disabilities and Elderly People

AmbienNet is an ongoing project aiming to demonstrate the viability of accessible intelligent environments to support people with disabilities and elderly people living autonomously. Based on the Ambient Intelligence paradigm, it tries to study in depth its advantages and disadvantages for people with sensory, physical or cognitive restrictions. To this end diverse supporting technologies and applications have been designed, in order to test their accessibility, usability and validity. After introducing the objectives and findings of the project, in this paper a number of preliminary results are presented and discussed

Technology-Based Feedback and Its Efficacy in Improving Gait Parameters in Patients with Abnormal Gait: A Systematic Review

This systematic review synthesized and analyzed clinical findings related to the effectiveness of innovative technological feedback for tackling functional gait recovery. An electronic search of PUBMED, PEDro, WOS, CINAHL, and DIALNET was conducted from January 2011 to December 2016. The main inclusion criteria were: patients with modified or abnormal gait; application of technology-based feedback to deal with functional recovery of gait; any comparison between different kinds of feedback applied by means of technology, or any comparison between technological and non-technological feedback; and randomized controlled trials. Twenty papers were included. The populations were neurological patients (75%), orthopedic and healthy subjects. All participants were adults, bar one. Four studies used exoskeletons, 6 load platforms and 5 pressure sensors. The breakdown of the type of feedback used was as follows: 60% visual, 40% acoustic and 15% haptic. 55% used terminal feedback versus 65% simultaneous feedback. Prescriptive feedback was used in 60% of cases, while 50% used descriptive feedback. 62.5% and 58.33% of the trials showed a significant effect in improving step length and speed, respectively. Efficacy in improving other gait parameters such as balance or range of movement is observed in more than 75% of the studies with significant outcomes. Conclusion: Treatments based on feedback using innovative technology in patients with abnormal gait are mostly effective in improving gait parameters and therefore useful for the functional recovery of patients. The most frequently highlighted types of feedback were immediate visual feedback followed by terminal and immediate acoustic feedback.Universidad de Sevilla, Telefonica Chair "Intelligence in Networks

Influence of Input/output Operations on Processor Performance

Nowadays, computers are frequently equipped with peripherals that transfer great amounts of data between them and the system memory using direct memory access techniques (i.e., digital cameras, high speed networks, . . . ). Those peripherals prevent the processor from accessing system memory for significant periods of time (i.e., while they are communicating with system memory in order to send or receive data blocks). In this paper we study the negative effects that I/O operations from computer peripherals have on processor performance. With the help of a set of routines (SMPL) used to make discrete event simulators, we have developed a configurable software that simulates a computer processor and main memory as well as the I/O scenarios where the periph-erals operate. This software has been used to analyze the performance of four different processors in four I/O scenarios: video capture, video capture and playback, high speed network, and serial transmission