PETRA

Recent advances in computing and robot technology create new opportunities for building robots with increasingly more sophisticated interactivity. One such application is the visual interaction between humans and humanoid in tasks such as mimicking and ...

In health assistive environments the possibility of knowing patient's position can be very important, since may represent a valid support to medical activities and assistance strategies. However, we cannot assume in general that the utility of having ...

Music listening is an important activity for many people. Advances in technology have made possible the creation of music collections with thousands of songs in portable music players. Navigating these large music collections is challenging especially ...

Simulation and analysis of assistive environments are important because they provide a first step towards creating an actual application for the real world. This work details the development of simulation and analysis tools for the Assistive Living ...

In this paper we introduce the Spatio Temporal Filtering Language (STFL), which is a language framework that aims to provide the primitives for easily defining rules and sequences of rules and constraints. These sequences of rules can be used to convert ...

An assistive environment is a smart domestic space based on pervasive computing to support the elderly and disabled. Unlike sensors, which can only provide passive monitoring, a robot can be an active element to improve the quality of life for the ...

Due to the increasing number of the elderly, more and more people need to have additional health care such as medical or environmental monitoring information at home or nursing facility. Most elderly people are likely to have a sudden behavioral changes ...

There has been significant research in adapting the Semantic Web technologies to create flexible context aware pervasive systems to enhance fields such as assisted living or smart environments. Several ontology based techniques have been proposed to ...

The development of context-aware applications makes face to many challenges. These applications must take into account context definition, representation, interpretation and reuse. Most ubiquitous applications focus on the development of legacy ...

AmbienNet environment has been developed with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of accessible intelligent environments designed to support people with disabilities and older persons living independently. Its main purpose is to examine in depth ...

In this work it is assumed that some interaction must occur when introducing robots into an environment for the purpose of assisting humans. This interaction may take several forms, but the one considered here is following, which means the robot(s) ...

Service Component Architecture (SCA) defines how to create components and how to combine those components into complete applications. SCA defines a general approach to doing both of these things at design time of applications. In ubiquitous, we consider ...

Ubiquitous Computing has the main goal of building computing systems that support and facilitate the daily lives of users, but being the least intrusive possible. There are many technological advances reported in literature, but the current scenario is ...

The paper presents the concept and an initial implementation of a patient status awareness system that may be used for patient activity interpretation and emergency recognition in cases like elder falls. The system utilizes audio and video data captured ...

Human-machine interaction by gestures helps to improve communication: it utilizes means of communication which are common to humans but alien to machines. We consider ergonomic, functional and semantic issues in gesture-based interfaces without visual ...

This paper describes work towards designing a computer vision system for helping users look up the meaning of a sign. Sign lookup is treated as a video database retrieval problem. A video database is utilized that contains one or more video examples for ...

As the population is aging, more and more people require additional health care, either at home, in the work place or in a nursing facility. Now, a need exists for health monitoring outside of hospital conditions. These new conditions make this ...

We have successfully designed and built a human computer interface system to interface with the computer by human eye EOG signal (Electrooculography). The EOG signal has very low voltage and very sensitive to interference. This paper introduces the ...

In this work we address the problem of managing the evolution of different context dimensions in context-aware pervasive environments. We postulate that, in addition to the correlation of different observed/measured values from different sensors, the ...

We propose a system to identify people in a sensor network. The system fuses motion information measured from wearable accelerometer nodes with motion traces of each person detected by a camera node. This allows people to be uniquely identified with the ...

This paper describes a personalised rehabilitation application using a smart phone (PDA) and wireless (bio) sensors. It instructs and motivates patients to follow their exercise programme and keeps track of their progress. It also monitors the relevant ...

Monitoring and ensuring the well being of elderly citizen has become an important part of our social care network. Many technologies have been successfully deployed for collecting vital health statistics of elderly and disabled people. We propose a ...

At least 60% of the world's population is not sufficiently active to benefit their health. This can be attributed in part to reduced participation in active leisure pursuits, and an increase in sedentary behavior in the workplace. Another key factor is ...

Remote healthcare monitoring and on demand provision of support attracts a lot of interest due to the ability to provide assistance to elderly and patients when needed; thus on one side the hospitals demand less personnel to be engaged in monitoring ...

As home automation systems become more and more present, we propose a new solution by addressing some of the shortcomings of current solutions. We are developing an open system specially built for existing environments which need flexible automation ...

In this paper, we describe applications of computing assisted technology to home environments of elderly persons.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims to enhance quality of life of elder and impaired people. Thanks to the advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and medical technologies, it is now possible to support new home healthcare services to ...

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise involving many individuals and organizations that coordinate their efforts toward promoting quality and efficient delivery of healthcare. In cases where healthcare delivery is intended to be ...

The emerging need for peer to peer communication in multi-user environments as well as the breakthrough of ubiquitous computing have contributed to the evolution of Personal Networking towards multiple network collaboration, namely the Personal Networks ...

Assistive environments employ multiple types of devices to monitor human actions and identify critical events for physical safety. Some of the devices must be wireless in order to be nonintrusive. This introduces the problem of authenticating these ...