Automatic detection of falls and fainting

Healthcare environments have always been considered an important scenario in which to apply new technologies to improve residents and employees conditions, solve problems and facilitate the performance of tasks. In this way, the use of sensors based on user movement interaction allows solving complicated situations that should be immediately addressed, such as controlling falls and fainting spells in residential care homes. However, ensuring that all the residents are always visually controlled by at least one employee is quite complicated. In this paper, we present a ubiquitous and context-aware system focused on geriatrics and residential care homes, but it could be applied to any other healthcare centre. This system has been designed to automatically detect falls and fainting spells, alerting the most appropriate employees to address the emergency. To that end, the system is based on movement interaction through a set of Kinect devices that allows the identification of the position of a person. These devices imply some development problems that authors have had to deal with, including camera location, the detection of head movements and people in horizontal position. The proposed system allows controlling each resident posture through a notification and warning procedure. When an anomalous situation is detected, the system analyses the resident posture and, if necessary, the most adequate employee will be warned to react urgently. Ubiquity and context-awareness are essential features since the proposed system has to be able to know where any employee is and what they are doing at any time. Finally, we present the outcomes of an evaluation based on the ISO 9126-4 about the usability of the system.We would like to acknowledge the project CICYT TIN2011-27767-C02-01 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the Regional Goverment: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha PPII10-0300-4174 and PII2C09-0185-1030 projects for partially funding this work

Getting-up rehabilitation therapy supported by movement based interaction techniques

Every day the number of diseases related to brain problems increases dramatically. Medical facilities are full of people who need complex rehabilitation processes as a result of suffering from Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer’s disease, brain stroke, or multiple sclerosis, as well as other conditions. Patients often spend a long time travelling every day to get to the corresponding rehabilitation clinics. Physiotherapists carefully attend patients over a period of time, and the exercises are often extremely repetitive. The type of patient suffering from these type of illnesses is unable to perform many common every day actions such as getting-up from a chair, walking in a straight line, picking up objects, etc. The system we propose in this paper provides a way for patients to perform the common rehabilitation process of gettingup from a chair. It monitors and guides the patient when the specialist considers they are prepared to do so. The specialists can focus on the results and the way to improve each rehabilitation process and not just on iterations

Processes : working group report

It has often been suggested that model-driven development of user interfaces amounted to producing models of user interfaces then using automatic code generation to obtain the final result. However, this may be seen as an extreme interpretation of the model-driven approach. There are examples where that approach is successful, including mobile computing and database management systems. But in many cases automatic generation may be either impossible or may limit the quality of the final interface

Describing Group Tasks in Multi-User Systems

Task Modelling is especially important when dealing with collaborative systems in which the number of users and tasks increases and the last ones became much more complex due to their collaborative nature. In this paper we propose a metamodel to describe tasks and group task for multi-user systems in order to make a precise characterization of the different kind of tasks involved in these environments. 1