Estimating Carotid Pulse and Breathing Rate from Near-infrared Video of the Neck

Objective: Non-contact physiological measurement is a growing research area that allows capturing vital signs such as heart rate (HR) and breathing rate (BR) comfortably and unobtrusively with remote devices. However, most of the approaches work only in bright environments in which subtle photoplethysmographic and ballistocardiographic signals can be easily analyzed and/or require expensive and custom hardware to perform the measurements. Approach: This work introduces a low-cost method to measure subtle motions associated with the carotid pulse and breathing movement from the neck using near-infrared (NIR) video imaging. A skin reflection model of the neck was established to provide a theoretical foundation for the method. In particular, the method relies on template matching for neck detection, Principal Component Analysis for feature extraction, and Hidden Markov Models for data smoothing. Main Results: We compared the estimated HR and BR measures with ones provided by an FDA-cleared device in a 12-participant laboratory study: the estimates achieved a mean absolute error of 0.36 beats per minute and 0.24 breaths per minute under both bright and dark lighting. Significance: This work advances the possibilities of non-contact physiological measurement in real-life conditions in which environmental illumination is limited and in which the face of the person is not readily available or needs to be protected. Due to the increasing availability of NIR imaging devices, the described methods are readily scalable.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figure

Emotion research by the people, for the people

Emotion research will leap forward when its focus changes from comparing averaged statistics of self-report data across people experiencing emotion in laboratories to characterizing patterns of data from individuals and clusters of similar individuals experiencing emotion in real life. Such an advance will come about through engineers and psychologists collaborating to create new ways for people to measure, share, analyze, and learn from objective emotional responses in situations that truly matter to people. This approach has the power to greatly advance the science of emotion while also providing personalized help to participants in the research

Practical quantum realization of the ampere from the electron charge

One major change of the future revision of the International System of Units (SI) is a new definition of the ampere based on the elementary charge \emph{e}. Replacing the former definition based on Amp\`ere's force law will allow one to fully benefit from quantum physics to realize the ampere. However, a quantum realization of the ampere from \emph{e}, accurate to within $10^{-8}$ in relative value and fulfilling traceability needs, is still missing despite many efforts have been spent for the development of single-electron tunneling devices. Starting again with Ohm's law, applied here in a quantum circuit combining the quantum Hall resistance and Josephson voltage standards with a superconducting cryogenic amplifier, we report on a practical and universal programmable quantum current generator. We demonstrate that currents generated in the milliampere range are quantized in terms of $ef_\mathrm{J}$ ($f_\mathrm{J}$ is the Josephson frequency) with a measurement uncertainty of $10^{-8}$. This new quantum current source, able to deliver such accurate currents down to the microampere range, can greatly improve the current measurement traceability, as demonstrated with the calibrations of digital ammeters. Beyond, it opens the way to further developments in metrology and in fundamental physics, such as a quantum multimeter or new accurate comparisons to single electron pumps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification

Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection

Understanding Ambulatory and Wearable Data for Health and Wellness

In our research, we aim (1) to recognize human internal states and behaviors (stress level, mood and sleep behaviors etc), (2) to reveal which features in which data can work as predictors and (3) to use them for intervention. We collect multi-modal (physiological, behavioral, environmental, and social) ambulatory data using wearable sensors and mobile phones, combining with standardized questionnaires and data measured in the laboratory. In this paper, we introduce our approach and some of our projects

Recognition of Sleep Dependent Memory Consolidation with Multi-modal Sensor Data

This paper presents the possibility of recognizing sleep dependent memory consolidation using multi-modal sensor data. We collected visual discrimination task (VDT) performance before and after sleep at laboratory, hospital and home for N=24 participants while recording EEG (electroencepharogram), EDA (electrodermal activity) and ACC (accelerometer) or actigraphy data during sleep. We extracted features and applied machine learning techniques (discriminant analysis, support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor) from the sleep data to classify whether the participants showed improvement in the memory task. Our results showed 60–70% accuracy in a binary classification of task performance using EDA or EDA+ACC features, which provided an improvement over the more traditional use of sleep stages (the percentages of slow wave sleep (SWS) in the 1st quarter and rapid eye movement (REM) in the 4th quarter of the night) to predict VDT improvement

SenseGlass: using google glass to sense daily emotions

For over a century, scientists have studied human emotions in laboratory settings. However, these emotions have been largely contrived -- elicited by movies or fake "lab" stimuli, which tend not to matter to the participants in the studies, at least not compared with events in their real life. This work explores the utility of Google Glass, a head-mounted wearable device, to enable fundamental advances in the creation of affect-based user interfaces in natural settings.Google (Firm)MIT Media Lab ConsortiumNational Science Foundation (U.S.). Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (NSF CCF-1029585

Acted vs. natural frustration and delight: many people smile in natural frustration

This work is part of research to build a system to combine facial and prosodic information to recognize commonly occurring user states such as delight and frustration. We create two experimental situations to elicit two emotional states: the first involves recalling situations while expressing either delight or frustration; the second experiment tries to elicit these states directly through a frustrating experience and through a delightful video. We find two significant differences in the nature of the acted vs. natural occurrences of expressions. First, the acted ones are much easier for the computer to recognize. Second, in 90% of the acted cases, participants did not smile when frustrated, whereas in 90% of the natural cases, participants smiled during the frustrating interaction, despite self-reporting significant frustration with the experience. This paper begins to explore the differences in the patterns of smiling that are seen under natural frustration and delight conditions, to see if there might be something measurably different about the smiles in these two cases, which could ultimately improve the performance of classifiers applied to natural expressions