Active Assistance for Senior Healthcare: A Wearable System for Fall Detection

Elders lose independence and wellbeing, accompanied by decreased functions in terms of hearing, vision, strength and coordination abilities. These factors contribute to balance difficulties that eventually lead to falls. The injuries due to falls, at this age, are risky, since most of the times may cause a significant – and permanent – decrease of quality of life or, in extreme cases, death. In this context, a fall detection system can bring an added value to assist elderly people.This paper describes a system consisting of a wearable sensor unit, a smartphone and a website. When the sensor detects a fall it sends an alert using the smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0, to notify the family members or stakeholders. The sensor device includes an inertial unit, a barometer, and a temperature and humidity sensor. The website displays the log of previous falls and enables the configuration of emergency contact numbers. The proposed fall detection system is one of multiple components within a larger project under development that offers a holistic perspective on falls; the complete wearable solution will also feature, among others, physical protection (minimizing the impact of falls that occur).

Piezoresistive sensors for force mapping of hip-prostheses

The success of artificial prosthetic replacements depends on the fixation of the artificial prosthetic component after being implanted in the thighbone. The materials for fixation are subject to mechanical stresses, which originate permanent deformations, incipient cracks and even fatigue fractures. This work shows the possibility of monitoring the mechanical stress over time in prosthesis. In this way, highly sensitive silicon thin-film piezoresistive sensors were developed attached to prosthesis and their results compared with commercial strain gauge sensors. Mechanical stress-strain experiments were performed in compressive mode, during 10,000 cycles. Experimental data was acquired at mechanical vibration frequencies of 0.5 Hz, 1 Hz and 5 Hz, and sent to a computer by means of a wireless link. The results show that there is a decrease in sensitivity of the thin-film silicon piezoresistive sensors when they are attached to the prosthesis, but this decrease does not compromise its monitoring performance. The sensitivity, compared to that of commercial strain gauges, is much larger due to their higher gauge factors (-23.5), when compared to the GFs of commercial sensors (2).

An interactive state monad example

A common problem among information systems is the storage and maintenance of permanent information identified by a key. Such systems are typically known as data base engines or simply as data bases. Today the systems information market is full of solutions that provide mass storage capacities implemented in different operating system and with great amounts of extra functionalities. In this paper we will focus on the formal high level specification of data base systems in the Haskell language. We begin by introducing a high level view of a data base system with a specification of the most common operations in a functional point of view. We then augment this specification by lifting to the state monad which is then modified once again to permit input/output operations between the computations

Dashboard services for pragmatics-based interoperability in cloud and ubiquitous manufacturing

The real Cloud and Ubiquitous Manufacturing systems require effectiveness and permanent availability of resources, their capacity and scalability. One of the most important problems for applications management over cloud based platforms, which are expected to support efficient scalability and resources coordination following SaaS implementation model, is their interoperability. Even application dashboards need to easily incorporate those new applications, their interoperability still remains a big problem to override. So, the possibility to expand these dashboards with efficiently integrated communicational cloud based services (cloudlets) represents a relevant added value as well as contributes to solving the interoperability problem. Following the architecture for integration of enriched existing cloud services, as instances of manufacturing resources, this paper: a) proposes a cloud based web platform to support dashboard integrating communicational services, and b) describe an experimentation to sustain the theory that the effective and efficient interoperability, especially in dynamic environments, could be achieved only with human intervention.