Daniela D'Auria

A Low-Cost Haptic System for Wrist Rehabilitation

While the regular treatment for wrist stiffness is physical therapy or surgery, researchers are looking for an alternative, more efficient and automatic procedure by means of robotic applications. In this paper, we propose a low-cost system exploiting a haptic interface aided by a glove sensorized on the wrist allowing the identification of the wrist orientation, in this way, by using virtual reality, the patient is able to make some motions that are very essential for his/her rehabilitation process and, by exploiting the wrist orientation tracking, he/she can be trained and guided to reach different goals of increasing complexity.

Caruso: Interactive headphones for a dynamic 3D audio application in the cultural heritage context

One of the most important qualities of the physical environment in which humans live is spatial dimensionality. Talking about 3D, we usually think of 3D video, even if it is not the only existing channel of natural interaction. In this paper, we present an interaction system based on spatialized sounds. We developed an application in the cultural heritage context; a personal guide, in 3D sound, attracting the tourists attention toward monuments or buildings, offering soundscapes of augmented reality. The designed system interacts with smart headphones, remotely takes the orientation of the listeners head and properly generates an audio output, which also takes into account the listeners position and orientation in the environment. Thus, an innovative headphones using an inertial measurement unit for determination of the orientation of a users head have been designed and developed in open-ear mode, in order to locate the user in the real context.

Human-Computer Interaction in Healthcare: How to Support Patients during Their Wrist Rehabilitation

The increasing use of IT/Informatics within the healthcare context is more and more helpful for both medical doctors and patients in all the surgical specialities. In this paper, we propose a low-cost system exploiting a haptic interface aided by a glove sensorized on the wrist allowing the identification of the wrist orientation for supporting patients during their wrist rehabilitation.

ICT Solutions for the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A. Project: From Personalized Selection to Enhanced Fruition of Cultural Heritage Data

This work discusses the ICT solutions designed and developed within the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A. Project. The mission of such an industrial and experimental project (Organization of Cultural Heritage and Smart Tourism and Real-time Accessibility) consists in developing some technological solutions for tourists and inhabitants aimed at appraising the cultural heritage of the historic centre of Naples. The project is based on a Social Innovation approach where services are created engaging all the possible actors in an ecosystem oriented to Smart Culture and tourism (companies, research groups and final users). Thus, in this work some innovative solutions in the cultural heritage domain are promoted and described in order to improve at the same time both the cultural knowledge to offer to different kinds of users (for instance tourists, citizens and researchers) and its learning and its preservation and protection as well. More in detail, we describe how our developed system is able to assist users before visiting the city, by suggesting them the most interesting places to see according to their preferences, and during the visit as well, in order to make the trip more interactive and enjoyable.

Discovering Expected Activities in Medical Context Scientific Databases

Reasoning with temporal data has attracted the attention of many researchers from different backgrounds including artificial intelligence, database management, computational linguistics and biomedical informatics. Temporal information is crucial in the clinical domain especially in clinical research. More specifically, activity detection is a very important problem in a wide variety of application domains such as video surveillance, cyber security and fault detection. In this paper, we present a prototype architecture designed and developed for activity detection in the medical context. In more detail, we first real-time acquire data from a cricothyrotomy simulator, when used by medical doctors, then we store the acquired data into a scientific database and finally we use an Activity Detection Engine for finding expected activities, corresponding to specific performances obtained by the medical doctors when using the simulator. Some preliminary experiments using real data show the approach efficiency and effectiveness.

A tracked mobile robotic lab for monitoring the plants volume and health

Precision agriculture has been increasingly recognized for its potential ability to improve agricultural productivity, reduce production cost, and minimize damage to the environment. In this work, the current stage of our research in developing a mobile platform equipped with different sensors for orchard monitoring and sensing is presented. In particular, the mobile platform is conceived to monitor and assess both the geometric and volumetric conditions as well as the health state of the canopy. To do so, different sensors have been integrated and effective data-processing algorithms implemented for a reliable crop monitoring. Experimental tests have been performed allowing to obtain both a precise volume reconstruction of several plants and an NDVI mapping suitable for vegetation state evaluations.

A Distributed Framework for Event Detection in Video Surveillance Context

In latest years modern worlds needs of safety caused a speed spreading of video surveillance systems, more and more frequently collocated in the most crowded places. Thus, a lot of theoretical approaches working with data coming from heterogeneous sources and defining some very complex event detection algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present a distributed framework for event detection in video surveillance context. The overall process is described, starting from the video frames captured by different kinds of sensors and cameras till at the end some high-level event detection algorithms performed in a distributed environment for finding potentially dangerous activities are applied. The conducted experiments confirm the efficiency achieved by our distributed framework.

A Survey of Online Social Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become fundamental parts of our online lives, and their popularity is increasing at a surprising rate every day. However, besides the revolution the OSNs have generated in social networking, they have also introduced some issues; first, since the amount of multimedia data on the Internet is growing continuously, it is extremely important for users not only to share multimedia content with each other, but also to receive the specific content they are interested in; second, OSNs have introduced new threats to their users due to their attractiveness, the ever-increasing number of users, and the massive amount of personal information they share. For such reasons, in this paper we propose a survey of online social networks, which can hopefully support both researchers and social network users. More specifically, we focus our attention on the most relevant research challenges regarding semantics and security.

A Collaborative Robotic Cyber Physical System for Surgery Applications

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are more and more often embedded within objects used by human beings in their daily lives. However, more and more frequent is also their application in the medical robotic context, and even in robotic surgery. In fact, robots often assist surgeons during the surgical procedures, allowing them to perform even major surgeries that are definitely less invasive than the traditional methods. Thus, in this paper we highlight the relevance of the application of these systems in the robotic surgery context, and present the design methodology for a collaborative robotic cyber physical system for surgery applications aimed at reducing the vulnerability of robotic surgery systems.

A Methodology for Improving Vegetation Representation and Health Exploiting a Semantic Robotic System

The continuous development of technology has a strong effect on all the heterogeneous research areas and contexts including production agriculture. As a result, precision farming technologies have been increasingly recognized for their potential ability for improving agricultural productivity, reducing production cost, and minimizing damage to the environment. In this context, the main goal of this paper is to present a methodology that can be applied in order to extract semantic information, more specifically some vegetative indices from plants, in order to further improve the vegetation representation and health by means of a specific semantic robotic system.