Cognitive assistance in intelligent environments

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia BiomédicaCurrently society responds badly to some social issues. One of the problems lies on the society concept itself. The common pyramid describing the social strata does not reflect the new social reality, given that the elderly strata largely exceed the teenage strata. This fact also implies a change in terms of social and medical needs. Thus, a great number of medical services should be adapted to respond to the needs of the elderly people. In fact, any common family cannot take care of an elderly person and, in many cases they cannot also afford the required medical care. Having less time, and often, less money, a family cannot have their older relatives in their homes. In addition, the necessary support required to overcome the elderly limitations, makes it even more difficult. One solution could be that elderly people go to nursing homes or care centers. However, due to the overgrowth of the elderly community, geriatric units are not enough to take care of all those people. As a solution, technology can provide wellbeing and assistance in the elderly everyday life through personalized services at low cost. This thesis presents a cognitive assistant platform, named iGenda. A cognitive assistant provides numerous user oriented services, and it ubiquitously and transparently interacts directly with the user. Therefore, this research work has as motto: impacting the user’s life without causing an impact. It means that the platform aim is to influence the user’s life, by providing a greater quality of life, without being too complex to use. The answers to our society’s social and technological challenges are provided by the development of a platform that is intuitive to the user, cheap and able to be integrated in an Ambient Assisted Living ecosystem. Thus, this thesis presents a multi-agent, platform-independent architecture capable of intelligent scheduling. Being the cognitive assistant implemented in four case studies, namely: a sensor platform, a digital clinical guideline system, an orientation system based on augmented reality, and a fall detection application. These case studies validate the social and technological challenges, therefore the iGenda too. This is due to the complete integration with other systems, without major changes of the architecture and archetype.Atualmente, a sociedade debate-se com um problema para o qual não há uma solução simples. O problema reside na própria sociedade, mais especificamente no seu conceito. A pirâmide populacional clássica não retrata a sociedade como é atualmente, sendo que o número de idosos ultrapassa o número de jovens. Ora, este facto acarreta uma mudança nas necessidades sociais e cuidados médicos. Deste modo, um grande número de serviços médicos têm que ser reajustados para as necessidades das pessoas mais idosas. Com menos tempo e frequentemente sem dinheiro, a família não é capaz de ter um idoso na sua casa. Tendo em conta as limitações das pessoas idosas em termos de saúde, a incapacidade de assistir uma pessoa idosa é ainda maior. Uma possível solução é colocar os idosos em casas de repouso ou centros geriátricos. Contudo, devido ao crescimento da comunidade idosa, não existem unidades geriátricas suficientes para todas as pessoas. A tecnologia pode providenciar assistência e bem-estar na vida cotidiana de uma pessoa idosa, através de serviços personalizados de baixo custo, servindo como uma possível resposta aos problemas apresentados. Nesta tese apresenta-se o iGenda, como uma plataforma de desenvolvimento de assistentes cognitivos. Um assistente cognitivo que assegura vários serviços orientados ao utilizador, interagindo com o utilizador de forma ubíqua e transparente. Este trabalho de investigação tem como lema: mudar a vida do utilizador sem o mudar. Isto significa que a plataforma tem como objetivo mudar a vida do utilizador, ao proporcionar uma maior qualidade de vida, sem que o utilizador tenha dificuldade a adaptar-se ou a utilizar a plataforma. As respostas para os desafios sociais e tecnológicos apresentados pela nossa sociedade são fornecidas pelo desenvolvimento de uma plataforma intuitiva, barata e capaz de ser integrada num ecossistema de Ambient Assisted Living. Deste modo, o processo de agendamento inteligente é assegurado por uma arquitetura multiagente e independente de plataformas, apresentada nesta tese. Sendo que o assistente cognitivo é implementado em quatro casos de estudo: uma plataforma de sensores, um sistema digital de guias clínicos, um sistema de orientação baseado em realidade aumentada e um sistema de deteção de quedas. Estes casos de estudo validam os desafios sociais e tecnológicos, portanto validando também o iGenda. Isto verifica-se com a integração completa com outros sistemas, sem muitas alterações à arquitetura ou ao arquétip

Cognitive assistants

[Excerpt] 1. Introduction: Society is ageing fast. A number of studies [1, 2, 3, 4] confirm this trend and highlight a negative consequence of this trend: the increased lack of care and assistance for the elderly. Elderly care (paid and unpaid) requires a high cost for the families [3], monetarily, physically, and psychologically. This cost is hard to translate to a single value, and even harder to attain help from governmental sources or external help. Furthermore, family members who provide care to their elderly relatives often report high tension levels in their relationships, degrading the quality of life for all parties [...]This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (Angelo Costa) This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN 2015-65515-C4-1-R

A persuasive cognitive assistant system

In this paper, we present a persuasive recommendation module to be included into the iGenda framework. iGenda is a cognitive assistant that helps care-receivers and caregivers in the management of their agendas. The proposed new module will allow the system to select and recommend to the users the action that potentially best suits to his/her interests. The multi-agent approach followed by the iGenda framework facilitates an easy integration of these new features.This work has been partially supported by the projects TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and TIN2014-55206-R of the Spanish government, by the grant program for the recruitment of doctors for the Spanish system of science and technology (PAID-10-14) of the Universitat Politècnica de València, and by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Costa)

Aplicação de sistema baseado em bainhas de pré-esforço ventiladas para redução do risco de fissuração de origem térmica do betão nas primeiras idades

A gestão do risco de fissuração de origem térmica durante as primeiras idades do betão é frequentemente a razão para que sejam adotados critérios conservativos no que diz respeito às alturas de betonagem a adotar em estruturas de grande volume. Por outro lado, a adoção de sistemas de pré ou pós-arrefecimento do betão para diminuir os efeitos do calor de hidratação acarreta normalmente consequências práticas e económicas que dificultam a sua aplicabilidade na generalidade das estruturas que poderiam beneficiar dessas técnicas. No presente artigo são estudados os efeitos da aplicação de um sistema de pós-arrefecimento do betão, com implementação acessível, baseado em bainhas de pré-esforço ventiladas, para redução do risco de fissuração na parede central de um descarregador de cheias. Em paralelo com a aplicação do sistema de arrefecimento foi efetuada uma caracterização térmica e mecânica do betão utilizado, bem como monitorização in-situ das temperaturas e extensões ocorridas. Adicionalmente foi efetuada uma simulação termo-mecânica para apoiar a compreensão dos efeitos do sistema de arrefecimento. Finalmente, com base nos trabalhos efetuados, são discutidas as limitações e possibilidades de aplicação prática desta técnica de arrefecimento

Detecting social emotions with a NAO robot

This article aims to give an approach of a dynamic and emotional propagation, which allows to calculate the propagation of the emotion of a group of humans and/or intelligent entities. The dynamic model is based on the Newton laws in order to calculate the emotional attraction among them. To obtain the emotions we use a NAO robot as a tool to move around of a real environment for interacting with the humans. The robot obtains the emotions through image processing. Moreover, the robot can start a dialogue game with humans in order to estimate the personality of a new individual.This work is partially supported by the MINECO project TIN2015-65515-C4-1- R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon

Using non-invasive wearables for detecting emotions with intelligent agents

This paper proposes the use of intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states in order to develop an application which allows to extract, analyze, represent and manage the social emotion of a group of entities. Nowadays, the detection of the joined emotion of an heterogeneous group of people is still an open issue. Most of the existing approaches are centered in the emotion detection and management of a single entity. Concretely, the application tries to detect how music can influence in a positive or negative way over individuals’ emotional states. The main goal of the proposed system is to play music that encourages the increase of happiness of the overall patrons.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Cost

Using emotions in intelligent virtual environments: the EJaCalIVE framework

Nowadays, there is a need to provide new applications which allow the definition and implementation of safe environments that attends to the user needs and increases their wellbeing. In this sense, this paper introduces the EJaCalIVE framework which allows the creation of emotional virtual environments that incorporate agents, eHealth related devices, human actors, and emotions projecting them virtually and managing the interaction between all the elements. In this way, the proposed framework allows the design and programming of intelligent virtual environments, as well as the simulation and detection of human emotions which can be used for the improvement of the decision-making processes of the developed entities. The paper also shows a case study that enforces the need of this framework in common environments like nursing homes or assisted living facilities. Concretely, the case study proposes the simulation of a residence for the elderly. The main goal is to have an emotion-based simulation to train an assistance robot avoiding the complexity involved in working with the real elders. The main advantage of the proposed framework is to provide a safe environment, that is, an environment where users are able to interact safely with the system.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI Grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is also supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Costa).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A dynamic emotional model for agent societies

This paper presents a first approximation of a dynamic emotional model to be employed in agent societies. The proposed model is based on the PAD emotional model and allows the representation of the emotional contagion phenomena of a heterogeneous group of agents which are capable of express emotions. Moreover, the proposal allows the definition of the social emotion of this group of agents. The model is mainly based on three elements: personality, empathy and affinity. These elements allow the characterization of each individual, causing them susceptible to vary in some degre the emotions of other individuals

A new emotional robot assistant that facilitates human interaction and persuasion

The development of robots that are truly sociable requires understanding how human interactions can be applied to the interaction between humans and robots. A sociable robot must be able to interact with people taking into account aspects like verbal and non-verbal communications (emotions, postures, gestures). This work presents a social robot which main goal is to provide assistance to older people in carrying out their daily activities (through suggestions or reminders). In addition, the robot presents non-verbal communications like perceiving emotions and displaying human identifiable emotions in order to express empathy. A prototype of the robot is being tested in a daycare center in the northern area of Portugal.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI Grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (Angelo Costa)

Emotions detection on an ambient intelligent system using wearable devices

This paper presents the Emotional Smart Wristband and its integration with the iGenda. The aim is to detect emotional states of a group of entities through the wristband and send the social emotion value to the iGenda so it may change the home environment and notify the caregivers. This project is advantageous to communities of elderly people, like retirement homes, where a harmonious environment is imperative and where the number of inhabitants keeps increasing. The iGenda provides the visual interface and the information center, receiving the information from the Emotional Smart Wristband and tries achieve a specific emotion (such as calm or excitement). Thus, the goal is to provide an affective system that directly interacts with humans by discreetly improving their lifestyle. In this paper, it is described the wristband in depth and the data models, and is provided an evaluation of them performed by real individuals and the validation of this evaluation.- This work is supported by COMPETE, Portugal: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologi, Portugal a within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (Angelo Costa) This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER, Spain TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon