Wize Mirror - a smart, multisensory cardio-metabolic risk monitoring system

In the recent years personal health monitoring systems have been gaining popularity, both as a result of the pull from the general population, keen to improve well-being and early detection of possibly serious health conditions and the push from the industry eager to translate the current significant progress in computer vision and machine learning into commercial products. One of such systems is the Wize Mirror, built as a result of the FP7 funded SEMEOTICONS (SEMEiotic Oriented Technology for Individuals CardiOmetabolic risk self-assessmeNt and Self-monitoring) project. The project aims to translate the semeiotic code of the human face into computational descriptors and measures, automatically extracted from videos, multispectral images, and 3D scans of the face. The multisensory platform, being developed as the result of that project, in the form of a smart mirror, looks for signs related to cardio-metabolic risks. The goal is to enable users to self-monitor their well-being status over time and improve their life-style via tailored user guidance. This paper is focused on the description of the part of that system, utilising computer vision and machine learning techniques to perform 3D morphological analysis of the face and recognition of psycho-somatic status both linked with cardio-metabolic risks. The paper describes the concepts, methods and the developed implementations as well as reports on the results obtained on both real and synthetic datasets

Head pose estimation on depth data based on Particle Swarm Optimization

We propose a method for human head pose estimation based on images acquired by a depth camera. During an initialization phase, a reference depth image of a human subject is obtained. At run time, the method searches the 6-dimensional pose space to find a pose from which the head appears identical to the reference view. This search is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective function quantifies the discrepancy of the depth measurements between the hypothesized views to the reference view. The method is demonstrated in several data sets including ones with known ground truth and comparatively evaluated with respect to state of the art methods. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in accuracy and tolerance to occlusions. Additionally, compared to the state of the art, it handles head pose estimation in a wider range of head poses. 1

Navigation assistance and guidance of older adults across complex public spaces: the DALi approach

The Devices for Assisted Living(DALi ) project is a research initiative sponsored by the European Commission under the FP7 programme aiming for the development of a robotic device to assist people with cognitive impairments in navigating complex environments. The project revisits the popular paradigm of the walker enriching it with sensing abilities (to perceive the environment), with cognitive abilities (to decide the best path across the space) and with mechanical, visual, acoustic and haptic guidance devices (to guide the person along the path). In this paper, we offer an overview of the developed system and describe in detail some of its most important technological aspects