Alistair Lawson

Sagittal joint kinematics, moments, and powers are predominantly characterized by speed of progression, not age, in normal children.

Twenty-six healthy 7-year-old children were enrolled in a 5-year longitudinal study to examine the importance of age and speed in the characterization of sagittal joint angles, moments, and powers. In 740 gait trials, children walking at self-selected speeds were examined on the basis of age and normalized speed [speed/(height ×g)1/2]. The kinematics and kinetics in these children were characterized predominantly by normalized speed of progression and not age. The clinical relevance of these findings is that normalized speed of walking, rather than age, should be considered when comparing normal with pathologic gait.

Normalisation of gait data in children

The comparative effect of semi-dimensional (SD) and non-dimensional (ND) normalisation on the results of a longitudinal study of gait in 5-12-year old children was investigated. The use of both height and leg length in the normalisation was examined. Only ND analysis could be used to identify subjects with the same accelerations. ND analysis of the childrens gait indicated that there was little change in the combination of step length and cadence used to achieve a particular velocity between 5 and 12. The first peak and mid-stance trough values of the vertical component of ground reaction force did not change with age. We recommend the use of ND normalisation rather that SD to allow comparisons between individuals of differing size and mass.

DACAR Platform for eHealth Services Cloud

The use of digital technologies in providing health care services is collectively known as eHealth. Considerable progress has been made in the development of eHealth services, but concerns over service integration, large scale deployment, and security, integrity and confidentiality of sensitive medical data still need to be addressed. This paper presents a solution proposed by the Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference (DACAR) project to overcoming these challenges. The key contributions of this paper include a Single Point of Contact (SPoC), a novel rule based information sharing policy syntax, and Data Buckets hosted by a scalable and cost-effective Cloud infrastructure. These key components and other system services constitute DACARs eHealth platform, which allows the secure capture, storage and consumption of sensitive health care data. Currently, a prototype of the DACAR platform has been implemented. To assess the viability and performance of the platform, a demonstration application, namely the Early Warning Score (EWS), has been developed and deployed within a private Cloud infrastructure at Edinburgh Napier University. Simulated experimental results show that the end-to-end communication latency of 97.8% of application messages were below 100ms. Hence, the DACAR platform is efficient enough to support the development and integration of time critical eHealth services. A more comprehensive evaluation of the DACAR platform in a real life clinical environment is under development at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London.

A Role for Immunology in “Next Generation” Robot Controllers

Much of current robot research is about learning tasks in which the task to be achieved is pre-specified, a suitable technology for the task is chosen and the learning process is then experimentally investigated. A more interesting research question is how can robot be provided with an architecture that would enable it to developmentally ‘grow-up’ and accomplish complex tasks by building on basic built-in capabilities. Previous work by the authors defined the requirements of a robot architecture that would enable this to happen – in this paper, we describe how some components of such an architecture can be achieved using an immune network model, and present preliminary results that show the plausibility of the suggested approach.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) in pervasive healthcare

Active and passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology are available and licensed for the use in hospitals, and can be used to establish highly reliable pervasive environments within healthcare facilities. They should not be understood as competing technologies and complement each other when intelligently integrated in compact frameworks. This paper describes the state-of-the-art of RFID technology and the current use in the healthcare industry, and points out recent developments and future options.

Controlling a Simulated Khepera with an XCS Classifier System with Memory

Autonomous agents commonly suffer from perceptual aliasing in which differing situations are perceived as identical by the robots sensors, yet require different courses of action. One technique for addressing this problem is to use additional internal states within a reinforcement learning system, in particular a learning classifier system. Previous research has shown that adding internal memory states can allow an animat within a cellular world to successfully navigate complex mazes. However, the technique has not previously been applied to robotic environments in which sensory data is noisy and somewhat unpredictable. We present results of using XCS with additional internal memory in the simulated Khepera environment, and show that control rules can be evolved to allow the robot to navigate a variety of problems.

Can transverse plane rotations be estimated from video tape gait analysis

The use of video tape in gait analysis is widespread and is frequently used when more sophisticated 3-dimensional analysis systems are not available or cannot be used. Its major shortcoming however is that it does not readily yield information about rotations in the transverse plane which may be amongst the most diagnostically significant features of pathological gait. This paper describes an inexpensive device which may be used, in conjunction with video taping, to aid visual estimation of transverse plane rotations, and quantifies the accuracy with which this was done by experienced observers. Copyright 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.

Crime risk evaluation within information sharing between the police and community partners

The aim of this paper is to provide profiles for crimes, profiles that can be used to model the context for information-sharing between the police and community partner organisations. This context can then be integrated with information-sharing syntax used by Single Point of Contact (SPoC) agents to process information sharing requests (Uthmani et al., 2010). The questionnaires attempt to classify crimes into categories, with identifying profiles of crime-types, according to the level of information sharing they necessitate between community partner organisations. Crimes are separated into classifications, which are based on the perceived level of necessary information-exchange among police and community partners. The aim of the questionnaire is to gather academic responses to identify the level of risk in order that it can be defined as risk assessment level, which is crucial to enhancing the publics reassurance in the police.

Interagency data exchange protocols as computational data protection law

The paper describes a collaborative project between computer scientists, lawyers, police officers, medical professionals and social workers to develop a communication infrastructure that allows information sharing while observing Data Protection law “by design”, through a formal representation of legal rules in a firewall type system.

Requirements for Getting a Robot to Grow up

Much of current robot research is about learning tasks in which the task to be achieved is pre-specified, a suitable technology for the task is chosen and the learning process is then experimentally investigated. In this paper we discuss a different kind of problem: how to get a robot to ‘grow up’ through experience of its world. We discuss what this means and what it seems to require in a robot architecture. The main contribution of this paper is to suggest a particular research agenda for the community.