Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction with Young Users

Artificial companion agents have the potential to combine novel means for effective health communication with young patients support and entertainment. However, the theory and practice of longterm child-robot interaction is currently an under-developed area of research. This paper introduces an approach that integrates multiple functional aspects necessary to implement temporally extended human-robot interaction in the setting of a paediatric ward. We present our methodology for the implementation of a companion robot which will be used to support young patients in hospital as they learn to manage a lifelong metabolic disorder (diabetes). The robot will interact with patients over an extended period of time. The necessary functional aspects are identified and introduced, and a review of the technical challenges involved is presented

Jurnalul de bord, ca instrument în managementul calităţii asistenţei medicale primare

Management express the activity to rule an organization, all the actions by which it follows an efficiency realization of a purpose with or by other people. Management functions are represented by planification, organization, control, communication, training, leadership, commanding, monitoring and evaluation.Health management are evaluating health primordial, primary (family doctor), secondary (hospital) and tertiary services costs, using the process who establish the organization objectives and the necessary activities for getting those basing on disposable sources.Quality is a characteristics set of goods, offered by the organization to the clients in purpose to satisfy their needs in a proper time with an accesible cost.Donabedian defines the quality of health services as a balance level between the benefits and losts brought to the health.The purpose of the study is the evaluation of the health quality  primary services from an individual medical office, usind own board – table and indicators of health quality als HEDIS and OECD’s systems.On display in a board - table the descriptive analysis of the propre inputs, process, outputs, outcomes and own indicators of health quality’s results.In future we will use the review to transform our resources into a real activities value.Keywords: health management, quality of medical activity, board-table,  indicators of health quality, primary health servicesContent available only in Romanian

A combined GPGPU-FPGA high-performance desktop

Computation of intensive interactive software applications on R&D desktops require a versatile hardware and software high-performance environment. Present-day solutions focus on one technology, e.g. GPUs, grids, multi-cores, clusters, … To leverage the power of different technologies, a hybrid solution is presented, combining the power of General-Purpose Graphical Processing units (GPGPUs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI

Research and Science Today Supplement No.1(3)/2012

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and / or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or / and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above. The Journal is a training means of the factors involved in the conceptualization, development, implementation and evaluation , aiming the formation of creative personalities who could be able to adapt through the changing conditions of life. Journal wants to be a forum for debates disciplinaries and interdisciplinaries theoretical topics, to become a research support, to leverage this work at regional, national and international levels. We believe that this gathering will enjoy the support from both parts of the researchers and of the practitioners, and will provide appropriate training sources held professional through the current problems

Research and Science Today Supplement No.1(3)/2012

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and / or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or / and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above. The Journal is a training means of the factors involved in the conceptualization, development, implementation and evaluation , aiming the formation of creative personalities who could be able to adapt through the changing conditions of life. Journal wants to be a forum for debates disciplinaries and interdisciplinaries theoretical topics, to become a research support, to leverage this work at regional, national and international levels. We believe that this gathering will enjoy the support from both parts of the researchers and of the practitioners, and will provide appropriate training sources held professional through the current problems

A framework for integrating MPEG-7 knowledge templates into video surveillance applications

Abstract — In this paper we propose a method of representing knowledge structures for visual content categorization and annotation in video surveillance applications. In order to achieve this purpose, we designed and implemented an ontology database for storing templates of domain-dependent moving objects and scene regions descriptions. The novelty of the system consists in the employment of a double layer, visual and semantic knowledge representation at the beginning of the video processing chain. As in similar approaches, bottom-up low-level feature extraction mechanisms are used, followed by top-down object classification using hypothesis proposal extracted from the ontology database. Instead of using top-down inference after the low-level processing steps, the two processes are entangled, such that the feature extraction algorithms are driven by logical and scenario-bound object and scene regions relations. The resulting content description is converted into MPEG-7 compliant representation and archived for later retrieval purposes. I

Shipping containers traffic information for EU customs

Data on the international movement of goods in maritime shipping containers as well on the movement of the involved vessels plus the analysis results of relevant import declarations or entry summary declarations as well as feedback from customs on the analysis results.JRC.E.5-Transport and Border Securit

GUDI: A combined GPU/FPGA Desktop System for Accelerating Image Processing Applications

The performance of today's PCs exceeds many times the power of the supercomputers in the 90s, but it is not enough for many computationally hungry applications. Present-day solutions focus on one technology, e.g. multi-cores, grids, clusters, ... To leverage the power of different technologies, a hybrid solution is presented, combining the power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs