ENLACE: A Combination of Layer-Based Architecture and Wireless Communication for Emotion Monitoring in Healthcare

Owing to the increase in the number of people with disabilities, as a result of either accidents or old age, there has been an increase in research studies in the area of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. They are aimed at monitoring health, in an efficient and easily accessible way, as a means of managing and improving the quality of life of this section of the public. It also involves adopting a Health Homes policy based on the Internet of Things and applied in smart home environments. This is aimed at providing connectivity between the patients and their surroundings and includes mechanisms for helping the diagnosis and prevention of accidents and/or diseases. Monitoring gives rise to an opportunity to exploit the way computational systems can help to determine the real-time emotional state of patients. This is necessary because there are some limitations to traditional methods of health monitoring, for example, establishing the behavior of the user’s routine and issuing alerts and warnings to family members and/or medical staff about any abnormal event or signs of the onset of depression. This article discusses how a layer-based architecture can be used to detect emotional factors to assist in healthcare and the prevention of accidents within the context of Smart Home Health. The results show that this process-based architecture allows a load distribution with a better service that takes into account the complexity of each algorithm and the processing power of each layer of the architecture to provide a prompt response when there is a need for some intervention in the emotional state of the user

Exploiting Offloading in IoT-Based Microfog: Experiments with Face Recognition and Fall Detection

The growth in many countries of the population in need of healthcare and with reduced mobility in many countries shows the demand for the development of assistive technologies to cater for this public, especially when they require home treatment after being discharged from the hospital. To this end, interactive applications on mobile devices are often integrated into intelligent environments. Such environments usually have limited resources, which are not capable of processing great volumes of data and can expend much energy due to devices being in communication to a cloud. Some approaches have tried to minimize these problems by using fog microdatacenter networks to provide high computational capabilities. However, full outsourcing of the data analysis to a microfog can generate a reduced level of accuracy and adaptability. In this work, we propose a healthcare system that uses data offloading to increase performance in an IoT-based microfog, providing resources and improving health monitoring. The main challenge of the proposed system is to provide high data processing with low latency in an environment with limited resources. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is to design an offloading algorithm to ensure resource provision in a microfog and synchronize the complexity of data processing through a healthcare environment architecture. We validated and evaluated the system using two interactive applications of individualized monitoring: (1) recognition of people using images and (2) fall detection using the combination of sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) on a smartwatch and smartphone. Our system improves by 54% and 15% on the processing time of the user recognition and Fall Decision applications, respectively. In addition, it showed promising results, notably (a) high accuracy in identifying individuals, as well as detecting their mobility; and (b) efficiency when implemented in devices with scarce resources

IoT-Based System Monitoring of the Sleep Environment - A Study Aimed at the Elderly

The aging process in our population can cause changes in people’s sleeping patterns, more specifically in the elderly, by impairing their cognitive abilities, quality of life, and autonomy. Advances in Ubiquitous Computing and Internet of Things have contributed to the monitoring of such situations. In particular, the use of sensors to evaluate the environment and aspects related to the health and well-being of individuals, as well as providing event alerts. The main objective of this experiment is to propose a monitoring system based on both the responses of multiple sensors (brightness, microphone, accelerometer, and gyroscope) at runtime to classify the environment for elderly people’s sleep quality. The results show that using embedded devices, and capturing environmental aspects through sensors, can develop solutions that offer more safety and comfort to the individuals’ sleep quality environment

An intelligent and generic approach for detecting human emotions: A case study with facial expressions

Several studies in the field of human-computer interaction have focused on the importance of emotional factors related to the interaction of humans with computer systems. According to the knowledge of the users' emotions, intelligent software can be developed for interacting and even influencing users. However, such a scenario is still a challenge in the field of human-computer interaction. This article endeavors to enhance intelligence in such types of systems by adopting an ensemble-based model that is able to identify and classify emotions. We developed a system (music player) that can be used as a mechanism to interact and/or persuade someone to "change" his/her current emotional state. In order to do this, we also designed a generic model that accepts any kind of interaction or persuasion mechanism (e.g., preferred YouTube channel videos, games, etc.) to be deployed at runtime based on the needs of each user. We showed that the approach based on a genetic algorithm for the weight assignment of the ensemble achieved an accuracy average of 80%. Moreover, the results showed a 60% increase in the level of user's satisfaction regarding the interaction with users' emotions

Federated System for Transport Mode Detection

Data on transport usage is important in a wide range of areas. These data are often obtained manually through costly and inaccurate interviews. In the last decade, several researchers explored the use of smartphone sensors for the automatic detection of transport modes. However, such works have focused on developing centralized machine learning mechanisms. This centralized approach requires user data to be transferred to a central server and, therefore, does not satisfy a transport mode detection mechanism’s practical response time and privacy needs. This research presents the Federated System for Transport Mode Detection (FedTM). The main contribution of FedTM is exploring Federated Learning on transport mode detection using smartphone sensors. In FedTM, both the training and inference process is moved to the client side (smartphones), reducing response time and increasing privacy. The FedTM was designed using a Neural Network for the classification task and obtained an average accuracy of 80.6% in three transport classes (cars, buses and motorcycles). Other contributions of this work are: (i) The use of data collected only on the curves of the route. Such reduction in data collection is important, given that the system is decentralized and the training and inference phases take place on smartphones with less computational capacity. (ii) FedTM and centralized classifiers are compared with regard to execution time and detection performance. Such a comparison is important for measuring the pros and cons of using Federated Learning in the transport mode detection task

Machine Learning Applied to COVID-19: A Review of the Initial Pandemic Period

Abstract Diagnostic and decision-making processes in the 2019 Coronavirus treatment have combined new standards using patient chest images, clinical and laboratory data. This work presents a systematic review aimed at studying the Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to the patients’ diagnosis or evolution with Coronavirus 2019. Five electronic databases were searched, from December 2019 to October 2020, considering the beginning of the pandemic when there was no vaccine influencing the exploration of Artificial Intelligence-based techniques. The first search collected 839 papers. Next, the abstracts were reviewed, and 138 remained after the inclusion/exclusion criteria was performed. After thorough reading and review by a second group of reviewers, 64 met the study objectives. These papers were carefully analyzed to identify the AI techniques used to interpret the images, clinical and laboratory data, considering a distribution regarding two variables: (i) diagnosis or outcome and (ii) the type of data: clinical, laboratory, or imaging (chest computed tomography, chest X-ray, or ultrasound). The data type most used was chest CT scans, followed by chest X-ray. The chest CT scan was the only data type that was used for diagnosis, outcome, or both. A few works combine Clinical and Laboratory data, and the most used laboratory tests were C-reactive protein. AI techniques have been increasingly explored in medical image annotation to overcome the need for specialized manual work. In this context, 25 machine learning (ML) techniques with a highest frequency of usage were identified, ranging from the most classic ones, such as Logistic Regression, to the most current ones, such as those that explore Deep Learning. Most imaging works explored convolutional neural networks (CNN), such as VGG and Resnet. Then transfer learning which stands out among the techniques related to deep learning has the second highest frequency of use. In general, classification tasks adopted two or three datasets. COVID-19 related data is present in all papers, while pneumonia is the most common non-COVID-19 class among them

Alirocumab and cardiovascular outcomes after acute coronary syndrome

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