Distributed Computing and Monitoring Technologies for Older Patients

This book summarizes various approaches for the automatic detection of health threats to older patients at home living alone. The text begins by briefly describing those who would most benefit from healthcare supervision. The book then summarizes possible scenarios for monitoring an older patient at home, deriving the common functional requirements for monitoring technology. Next, the work identifies the state of the art of technological monitoring approaches that are practically applicable to geriatric patients. A survey is presented on a range of such interdisciplinary fields as smart homes, telemonitoring, ambient intelligence, ambient assisted living, gerontechnology, and aging-in-place technology. The book discusses relevant experimental studies, highlighting the application of sensor fusion, signal processing and machine learning techniques. Finally, the text discusses future challenges, offering a number of suggestions for further research directions

THE SPORT DANCE ATHLETE: AEROBIC-ANAEROBIC CAPACITIES AND KINEMATICS TO IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE

Introduction. Little is known about the relationship between physiological and biomechanical parameters of sport dancers. Partners\u2019 body contact and posture are important to achieve top results. Knowledge of the links between these aspects could be of help for couples\u2019 matching and for improving the dance technique through the assessment of relevant parameters. Aim of the study. In our study compared with the few previous studies, we found that age and VO2max of the dancers increased from earlier studies, while body height and weight remains similar over the years. Material and methods. Data on hip alignment, knee kinematics, VO2max, Anaerobic Threshold and Lactate on top level couples were compared with amateur athletes showing that the discriminator factor is the hip kinematics and that no differences exists in physiological parameters. Results and conclusions. While we found a difference in VO2max between males and females, we didn\u2019t find any statistically significant correlation between the athlete position in the world ranking and VO2max, anaerobic threshold and lactate production. VO2max and lactate of nowadays top level dancers are higher than in the past, due to increases in athletic training. Knee kinematics are described for Quickstep, Slow Waltz, Tango, Slow Foxtrot and Viennese Waltz showing great differences in lower limbs action and thus in energy requirements. In conclusion, technical skills are confirmed to be the main influencer of the performance albeit a certain degree of fitness is necessary to sustain long training and competition sessions

Communicating unknown objects to robots through pointing gestures

Delegating tasks from a human to a robot needs an efficient and easy-to-use communication pipeline between them - especially when inexperienced users are involved. This work presents a robotic system that is able to bridge this communication gap by exploiting 3D sensing for gesture recognition and real-time object segmentation. We visually extract an unknown object indicated by a human through a pointing gesture and thereby communicating the object of interest to the robot which can be used to perform a certain task. The robot uses RGB-D sensors to observe the human and find the 3D point indicated by the pointing gesture. This point is used to initialize a fixation-based, fast object segmentation algorithm, inferring thus the outline of the whole object. A series of experiments with different objects and pointing gestures show that both the recognition of the gesture, the extraction of the pointing direction in 3D, and the object segmentation perform robustly. The discussed system can provide the first step towards more complex tasks, such as object recognition, grasping or learning by demonstration with obvious value in both industrial and domestic settings

Monitoring technology

This chapter aims at giving an insight into a variety of available monitoring technologies and techniques, which aim to provide solutions to the issues listed in Chap. 3. First, we start with discussing possible data collection approaches, by revealing choices of available sensors and underlying constrains. Second, we provide a summary of sensors used for data acquisition in regard to needed medical applications, revealing what relevant parameters can be derived from those sensor measurements. We then summarize what common data processing and analysis techniques are used for interpreting this data, with a special focus on machine learning approaches. Third, we derive important requirements and underlying challenges for the involved machine learning strategies and discuss possible implications for applying the different monitoring approaches. Finally, we refer to a number of established standards, which are needed to be complied with, when developing and implementing home monitoring systems for older adults