Sensor-driven agenda for intelligent home care of the elderly

The exponential increase of home-bound persons who live alone and are in need of continuous monitoring requires new solutions to current problems. Most of these cases present illnesses such as motor or psychological disabilities that deprive of a normal living. Common events such as forgetfulness or falls are quite common and have to be prevented or dealt with. This paper introduces a platform to guide and assist these persons (mostly elderly people) by providing multisensory monitoring and intelligent assistance. The platform operates at three levels. The lower level, denominated ‘‘Data acquisition and processing’’performs the usual tasks of a monitoring system, collecting and processing data from the sensors for the purpose of detecting and tracking humans. The aim is to identify their activities in an intermediate level called ‘‘activity detection’’. The upper level, ‘‘Scheduling and decision-making’’, consists of a scheduler which provides warnings, schedules events in an intelligent manner and serves as an interface to the rest of the platform. The idea is to use mobile and static sensors performing constant monitoring of the user and his/her environment, providing a safe environment and an immediate response to severe problems. A case study on elderly fall detection in a nursery home bedroom demonstrates the usefulness of the proposal.

Privacy and Data Protection in Elderly Healthcare: Threats and Legal Warranties

The progressive aging of the population requires new kinds of social and medical intervention and the availability of different services provided to the elder population. New applications have been developed and some services are now provided at home, allowing the older people to stay home instead of having to stay in hospitals. But an adequate response to the needs of the users will imply a high percentage of use of personal data and information, including the building up and maintenance of user profiles, feeding the systems with the data and information needed for a proactive intervention in scheduling of events in which the user may be involved. Fundamental Rights may be at stake, so a legal analysis must also be considered.

The need for standardized tests to evaluate the reliability of data transport in wireless medical systems

Wireless medical systems are comprised of four stages, namely the medical device, the data transport, the data collection and the data evaluation stages. Whereas the performance of the first stage is highly regulated, the others are not. This paper concentrates on the data transport stage and argues that it is necessary to establish standardized tests to be used by medical device manufacturers to provide comparable results concerning the communication performance of the wireless networks used to transport medical data. Besides, it suggests test parameters and procedures to be used to produce comparable communication performance results.

A brief survey on online analysis of movement data

The increasing availability of mobility data and the awareness of its importance and value have been motivating many researchers to the development of models and tools for analyzing movement data. This paper presents a brief survey of significant research works about modeling, processing and visualization of data about moving objects. We identified some key research fields that will provide better features for online analysis of movement data. As result of the literature review, we suggest a generic multi-layer architecture for the development of an online analysis processing software tool, which will be used for the definition of the future work of our team.

COORDINSPECTOR: a tool for extracting coordination data from legacy code

More and more current software systems rely on non trivial coordination logic for combining autonomous services typically running on different platforms and often owned by different organizations. Often, however, coordination data is deeply entangled in the code and, therefore, difficult to isolate and analyse separately. COORDINSPECTOR is a software tool which combines slicing and program analysis techniques to isolate all coordination elements from the source code of an existing application. Such a reverse engineering process provides a clear view of the actually invoked services as well as of the orchestration patterns which bind them together. The tool analyses Common Intermediate Language (CIL) code, the native language of Microsoft .Net Framework. Therefore, the scope of application of COORDINSPECTOR is quite large: potentially any piece of code developed in any of the programming languages which compiles to the .Net Framework. The tool generates graphical representations of the coordination layer together and identifies the underlying business process orchestrations, rendering them as Orc specifications

People Detection and Tracking using Depth Camera

In this paper we present a method for real-time detection and tracking of people in video captured by a depth camera. For each object to be assessed, an ordered sequence of values that represents the distances between its center of mass to the boundary points is calculated. The recognition is based on the analysis of the total distance value between the above sequence and some pre-defined human poses, after apply the Dynamic Time Warping. This similarity approach showed robust results in people detection.

Criminal Liability of Organizations, Corporations, Legal Persons, and Similar Entities on Law of Portuguese Cybercrime: A Brief Discussion on the Issue of Crimes of “False Information,” the “Damage on Other Programs or Computer Data,” the “Computer-Software Sabotage,” the “Illegitimate Access,” the “Unlawful Interception,” and “Illegitimate Reproduction of the Protected Program”

Abstract: in Portugal, and in much of the legal systems of Europe, «legal persons» are likely to be criminally responsibilities also for cybercrimes. Like for example the following crimes: «false information»; «damage on other programs or computer data»; «computer-software sabotage»; «illegitimate access»; «unlawful interception» and «illegitimate reproduction of protected program». However, in Portugal, have many exceptions. Exceptions to the «question of criminal liability» of «legal persons». Some «legal persons» can not be blamed for cybercrime. The legislature did not leave! These «legal persons» are v.g. the following («public entities»): legal persons under public law, which include the public business entities; entities utilities, regardless of ownership; or other legal persons exercising public powers. In other words, and again as an example, a Portuguese public university or a private concessionaire of a public service in Portugal, can not commit (in Portugal) any one of cybercrime pointed. Fair? Unfair. All laws should provide that all legal persons can commit cybercrimes. PS: resumo do artigo em inglês.

Collecting system percutaneous access using real-time tracking sensors: first pig model in vivo experience

Purpose: Precise needle puncture of the renal collecting system is an essential but challenging step for successful percutaneous nephrolithotomy. We evaluated the efficiency of a new real-time electromagnetic tracking system for in vivo kidney puncture. Materials and Methods: Six anesthetized female pigs underwent ureterorenoscopy to place a catheter with an electromagnetic tracking sensor into the desired puncture site and ascertain puncture success. A tracked needle with a similar electromagnetic tracking sensor was subsequently navigated into the sensor in the catheter. Four punctures were performed by each of 2 surgeons in each pig, including 1 each in the kidney, middle ureter, and right and left sides. Outcome measurements were the number of attempts and the time needed to evaluate the virtual trajectory and perform percutaneous puncture. Results: A total of 24 punctures were easily performed without complication. Surgeons required more time to evaluate the trajectory during ureteral than kidney puncture (median 15 seconds, range 14 to 18 vs 13, range 11 to 16, p ¼ 0.1). Median renal and ureteral puncture time was 19 (range 14 to 45) and 51 seconds (range 45 to 67), respectively (p ¼ 0.003). Two attempts were needed to achieve a successful ureteral puncture. The technique requires the presence of a renal stone for testing. Conclusions: The proposed electromagnetic tracking solution for renal collecting system puncture proved to be highly accurate, simple and quick. This method might represent a paradigm shift in percutaneous kidney access techniques

Eigenvalue computations in the context of data-sparse approximations of integral operators

In this work, we consider the numerical solution of a large eigenvalue problem resulting from a finite rank discretization of an integral operator. We are interested in computing a few eigenpairs, with an iterative method, so a matrix representation that allows for fast matrix-vector products is required. Hierarchical matrices are appropriate for this setting, and also provide cheap LU decompositions required in the spectral transformation technique. We illustrate the use of freely available software tools to address the problem, in particular SLEPc for the eigensolvers and HLib for the construction of H-matrices. The numerical tests are performed using an astrophysics application. Results show the benefits of the data-sparse representation compared to standard storage schemes, in terms of computational cost as well as memory requirements.

Real-time 3D interactive segmentation of echocardiographic data through user-based deformation of B-spline explicit active surfaces

Image segmentation is an ubiquitous task in medical image analysis, which is required to estimate morphological or functional properties of given anatomical targets. While automatic processing is highly desirable, image segmentation remains to date a supervised process in daily clinical practice. Indeed, challenging data often requires user interaction to capture the required level of anatomical detail. To optimize the analysis of 3D images, the user should be able to efficiently interact with the result of any segmentation algorithm to correct any possible disagreement. Building on a previously developed real-time 3D segmentation algorithm, we propose in the present work an extension towards an interactive application where user information can be used online to steer the segmentation result. This enables a synergistic collaboration between the operator and the underlying segmentation algorithm, thus contributing to higher segmentation accuracy, while keeping total analysis time competitive. To this end, we formalize the user interaction paradigm using a geometrical approach, where the user input is mapped to a non-cartesian space while this information is used to drive the boundary towards the position provided by the user. Additionally, we propose a shape regularization term which improves the interaction with the segmented surface, thereby making the interactive segmentation process less cumbersome. The resulting algorithm offers competitive performance both in terms of segmentation accuracy, as well as in terms of total analysis time. This contributes to a more efficient use of the existing segmentation tools in daily clinical practice. Furthermore, it compares favorably to state-of-the-art interactive segmentation software based on a 3D livewire-based algorithm.

Improving FEM crash simulation accuracy through local thickness estimation based on CAD data

In this paper, we present a method for estimating local thickness distribution in nite element models, applied to injection molded and cast engineering parts. This method features considerable improved performance compared to two previously proposed approaches, and has been validated against thickness measured by di erent human operators. We also demonstrate that the use of this method for assigning a distribution of local thickness in FEM crash simulations results in a much more accurate prediction of the real part performance, thus increasing the bene ts of computer simulations in engineering design by enabling zero-prototyping and thus reducing product development costs. The simulation results have been compared to experimental tests, evidencing the advantage of the proposed method. Thus, the proposed approach to consider local thickness distribution in FEM crash simulations has high potential on the product development process of complex and highly demanding injection molded and casted parts and is currently being used by Ford Motor Company.

Towards a model for the measurement of data quality in websites

Websites are, nowadays, the face of institutions, but they are often neglected, especially when it comes to contents. In the present paper, we put forth an investigation work whose final goal is the development of a model for the measurement of data quality in institutional websites for health units. To that end, we have carried out a bibliographic review of the available approaches for the evaluation of website content quality, in order to identify the most recurrent dimensions and the attributes, and we are currently carrying out a Delphi Method process, presently in its second stage, with the purpose of reaching an adequate set of attributes for the measurement of content quality.

A model for the evaluation of data quality in health unit website

This article presents a research work, the goal of which was to achieve a model for the evaluation of data quality in institutional websites of health units in a broad and balanced way. We have carried out a literature review of the available approaches for the evaluation of website content quality, in order to identify the most recurrent dimensions and the attributes, and we have also carried out a Delphi method process with experts in order to reach an adequate set of attributes and their respective weights for the measurement of content quality. The results obtained revealed a high level of consensus among the experts who participated in the Delphi process. On the other hand, the different statistical analysis and techniques implemented are robust and attach confidence to our results and consequent model obtained.

Collecting system percutaneous access using real-time tracking sensors: first pig model in vivo experience

Purpose: Precise needle puncture of the renal collecting system is an essential but challenging step for successful percutaneous nephrolithotomy. We evaluated the efficiency of a new real-time electromagnetic tracking system for in vivo kidney puncture. Materials and Methods: Six anesthetized female pigs underwent ureterorenoscopy to place a catheter with an electromagnetic tracking sensor into the desired puncture site and ascertain puncture success. A tracked needle with a similar electromagnetic tracking sensor was subsequently navigated into the sensor in the catheter. Four punctures were performed by each of 2 surgeons in each pig, including 1 each in the kidney, middle ureter, and right and left sides. Outcome measurements were the number of attempts and the time needed to evaluate the virtual trajectory and perform percutaneous puncture. Results: A total of 24 punctures were easily performed without complication. Surgeons required more time to evaluate the trajectory during ureteral than kidney puncture (median 15 seconds, range 14 to 18 vs 13, range 11 to 16, p ¼ 0.1). Median renal and ureteral puncture time was 19 (range 14 to 45) and 51 seconds (range 45 to 67), respectively (p ¼ 0.003). Two attempts were needed to achieve a successful ureteral puncture. The technique requires the presence of a renal stone for testing. Conclusions: The proposed electromagnetic tracking solution for renal collecting system puncture proved to be highly accurate, simple and quick. This method might represent a paradigm shift in percutaneous kidney access techniques.

Preliminary clinical trial in percutaneous nephrolithotomy using a real-time navigation system for percutaneous kidney access

Background: Precise needle puncture of renal calyces is a challenging and essential step for successful percutaneous nephrolithotomy. This work tests and evaluates, through a clinical trial, a real-time navigation system to plan and guide percutaneous kidney puncture. Methods: A novel system, entitled i3DPuncture, was developed to aid surgeons in establishing the desired puncture site and the best virtual puncture trajectory, by gathering and processing data from a tracked needle with optical passive markers. In order to navigate and superimpose the needle to a preoperative volume, the patient, 3D image data and tracker system were previously registered intraoperatively using seven points that were strategically chosen based on rigid bone structures and nearby kidney area. In addition, relevant anatomical structures for surgical navigation were automatically segmented using a multi-organ segmentation algorithm that clusters volumes based on statistical properties and minimum description length criterion. For each cluster, a rendering transfer function enhanced the visualization of different organs and surrounding tissues. Results: One puncture attempt was sufficient to achieve a successful kidney puncture. The puncture took 265 seconds, and 32 seconds were necessary to plan the puncture trajectory. The virtual puncture path was followed correctively until the needle tip reached the desired kidney calyceal. Conclusions: This new solution provided spatial information regarding the needle inside the body and the possibility to visualize surrounding organs. It may offer a promising and innovative solution for percutaneous punctures.