Iván Pau

Utilizing Smart Textiles-Enabled Sensorized Toy and Playful Interactions for Assessment of Psychomotor Development on Children

Utilizing Smart Textiles-Enabled Sensorized Toy and Playful Interactions for Assessment of Psychomotor Development on Children

An Intelligent Agents Reasoning Platform to Support Smart Home Telecare

Home telecare systems aim to support effective communications and emergency calls for people living in dependency situation but hardly provide reasoning capabilities to understand what to do in a problematic situation. This paper details the design and implementation of a reasoning platform to foresee or react in a smart way at home situations demanding care support for citizens from informal or remote carers. The system manages intelligent agents, whose behavior is defined and validated by ontologies and rules, to react in the elderly fall episode. A development methodology was adapted to sustain knowledge acquisition process from experts and to create the ontology for reasoning logic at homecare scenario. Thus, the platform is easily customizable to acquire data from telecare sensor networks, make reasoning according to each user profile and trigger ad hoc actions to communicate the problematic situation, to whom corresponds, or to interact with home appliances and residential gateways.

Adaptive Software Architecture Based on Confident HCI for the Deployment of Sensitive Services in Smart Homes

Smart spaces foster the development of natural and appropriate forms of human-computer interaction by taking advantage of home customization. The interaction potential of the Smart Home, which is a special type of smart space, is of particular interest in fields in which the acceptance of new technologies is limited and restrictive. The integration of smart home design patterns with sensitive solutions can increase user acceptance. In this paper, we present the main challenges that have been identified in the literature for the successful deployment of sensitive services (e.g., telemedicine and assistive services) in smart spaces and a software architecture that models the functionalities of a Smart Home platform that are required to maintain and support such sensitive services. This architecture emphasizes user interaction as a key concept to facilitate the acceptance of sensitive services by end-users and utilizes activity theory to support its innovative design. The application of activity theory to the architecture eases the handling of novel concepts, such as understanding of the system by patients at home or the affordability of assistive services. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of the architecture and compare the results with other architectures from the literature.

Home e-health system integration in the smart home through a common media server

Home e-health systems and services are revealed as one of the most important challenges to promote Quality of Life related to Health in the Information Society. Leading companies have worked on e-health systems although the majority of them are addressed to hospital or primary care settings. The solution detailed in this paper offers a personal health system to be integrated with Smart Home services platform to support home based e-care. Thus, the home e-health system and architecture detailed in this research work is ready to supply a seamless personal care solution both from the biomedical data analysis, service provision, security guarantee and information management´s point of view. The solution is ready to be integrated within the Accessible Digital Home, a living lab managed by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for R&D activities.

BioBlocks: Programming Protocols in Biology Made Easier

The methods to execute biological experiments are evolving. Affordable fluid handling robots and on-demand biology enterprises are making automating entire experiments a reality. Automation offers the benefit of high-throughput experimentation, rapid prototyping, and improved reproducibility of results. However, learning to automate and codify experiments is a difficult task as it requires programming expertise. Here, we present a web-based visual development environment called BioBlocks for describing experimental protocols in biology. It is based on Googles Blockly and Scratch, and requires little or no experience in computer programming to automate the execution of experiments. The experiments can be specified, saved, modified, and shared between multiple users in an easy manner. BioBlocks is open-source and can be customized to execute protocols on local robotic platforms or remotely, that is, in the cloud. It aims to serve as a de facto open standard for programming protocols in Biology.

Confidence: Dependencies and their critical role in fostering user acceptance in pervasive applications

Pervasive computing offers new scenarios where users are surrounded by invisible and proactive technology making smart spaces. Although the utility and power of solutions developed using this computer paradigm are proved, there are unresolved problems that hinder their acceptance and inclusion in our private life. Users have problems understanding the operations of a pervasive computing solution, and therefore they should trust that the solution works properly and according to their expectations. Nevertheless, the concept of trust is already framed in a specific use within the ecosystem of applications that can populate a smart space. To take this concept of trust to the whole space, we propose to study and define the concept of confidence. In contrast to the concept of trust, confidence has deeper psychological implications.

A Smart Telecare System at Digital Home: Perceived Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Expectations for Healthcare Professionals

Sensors, combined with intelligent systems, can enhance the quality of the Telecare services deployed at home, improving the capability for detection of risk situations and the users care. However, there are no specific studies that evaluate this kind of Telecare systems by professionals that work in a Telecare center. This paper shows the results of an assessment of the current satisfaction and future expectations of the Telecare professionals when using advanced Telecare solutions deployed at home. The study has been conducted through structured interviews with 24 Telecare experts working in the Telecare center of the Spanish Red Cross for attending alarm calls for elderly people. The interviews had the support of the TALISMAN Telecare system that is a next-generation Telecare service deployed in the accessible digital home of Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. All participants showed overall satisfaction with TALISMAN and their intention to use it. Results showed that perceived usefulness is an important influencing factor to the intention to use it and the Quality of the Information is a key factor in the perceived usefulness. TALISMAN, as an example of a next-generation Telecare system, is seen as a tool with high potential for improving the care of elderly people at home.

A Handheld and Textile-Enabled Bioimpedance System for Ubiquitous Body Composition Analysis. An Initial Functional Validation

In recent years, many efforts have been made to promote a healthcare paradigm shift from the traditional reactive hospital-centered healthcare approach towards a proactive, patient-oriented, and self-managed approach that could improve service quality and help reduce costs while contributing to sustainability. Managing and caring for patients with chronic diseases accounts over 75% of healthcare costs in developed countries. One of the most resource demanding diseases is chronic kidney disease (CKD), which often leads to a gradual and irreparable loss of renal function, with up to 12% of the population showing signs of different stages of this disease. Peritoneal dialysis and home haemodialysis are life-saving home-based renal replacement treatments that, compared to conventional in-center hemodialysis, provide similar long-term patient survival, less restrictions of life-style, such as a more flexible diet, and better flexibility in terms of treatment options and locations. Bioimpedance has been largely used clinically for decades in nutrition for assessing body fluid distributions. Moreover, bioimpedance methods are used to assess the overhydratation state of CKD patients, allowing clinicians to estimate the amount of fluid that should be removed by ultrafiltration. In this work, the initial validation of a handheld bioimpedance system for the assessment of body fluid status that could be used to assist the patient in home-based CKD treatments is presented. The body fluid monitoring system comprises a custom-made handheld tetrapolar bioimpedance spectrometer and a textile-based electrode garment for total body fluid assessment. The system performance was evaluated against the same measurements acquired using a commercial bioimpedance spectrometer for medical use on several voluntary subjects. The analysis of the measurement results and the comparison of the fluid estimations indicated that both devices are equivalent from a measurement performance perspective, allowing for its use on ubiquitous e-healthcare dialysis solutions.

Differentiated Services Classification in Next Generation IP Home Telehealth applications

In order to take all the advantage of Home Telehealth applications, it is necessary to classify the traffic of the different services and to guarantee each of them the appropriate performance parameters for multiple scenarios. In this paper we propose to use the Differentiated Services (Diff-Serv) architecture proposed by the IETF to formalize four service categories capable of supporting patient-to-doctor or patient-to-health centre secure data communication. With DiffServ, IP packets are marked in concordance with a previously agreed service classification, and nodes are configured to apply different PHBs to differently marked traffic flows. Our proposed architecture aims to guarantee network performance according to applications needs at patients’ home premises and health care centers.

An ecological approach to anomaly detection: The EIA model

The presented work proposes a new approach for anomaly detection. This approach is based on changes in a population of evolving agents under stress. If conditions are appropriate, changes in the population (modeled by the bioindicators) are representative of the alterations to the environment. This approach, based on an ecological view, improves functionally traditional approaches to the detection of anomalies. To verify this assertion, experiments based on Network Intrussion Detection Systems are presented. The results are compared with the behaviour of other bioinspired approaches and machine learning techniques.