João Ricardo Martins Ramos

Geo-localization System for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Technology is present in almost every simple aspect of the people’s daily life. As an instance, let us refer to the smartphone. This device is usually equipped with a GPS modulewhich may be used as an orientation system, if it carries the right functionalities. The problem is that these applications may be complex to operate and may not be within the bounds of everybody.

Orientation System for People with Cognitive Disabilities

In health care there has been a growing interest and investment in new tools to have a constant monitoring of patients. The increasing of average life expectation and, consequently, the costs in health care due to elderly population are the motivation for this investment.However, health monitoring is not only important to elderly people, it can be also applied to people with cognitive disabilities. In this article we present some systems, which try to support these persons on doing their day-to-day activities and how it can improve their life quality. Also, we present an idea to a project that tries to help the persons with cognitive disabilities by providing assistance in geo-guidance and keep their caregivers aware of their location.

An alert mechanism for orientation systems based on Speculative computation

The role of assistive technologies is to help users with diminished capabilities in the fulfillment of their everyday tasks. One of such tasks is orientation. It is crucial for the autonomy of an individual and, at the same time, it is one of the most challenging tasks for an individual with cognitive disabilities. Existing solutions that tackle this problem are mostly concerned with guidance, tracking and the display of information. However, there is a dimension that has not been the object of concern in existing projects, the prediction of user actions. This work presents a Speculative Module for an orientation system that is used to alert the user for potential mistakes in his path, anticipating possible shifts in the wrong direction in critical points of the route. With this module, it becomes possible to issue warnings to the user and increase his attention so as to avoid a deviation from the correct path.

Modelling an Orientation System Based on Speculative Computation

Progress is inherent to a living society, which may occur in several different areas (e.g. computation, healthcare) and manners. The present (or now) is the time that is associated with the events perceived directly and in the first time, making, for example, the society to be very inquisitive on assistive technologies and how they may improve the human beings quality of living. This application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes may help the user in his/her diminished capabilities, and, usually, implies a small adaptation on the part of the individual in the use of devices; indeed one of the die down potentials of people with cognitive disabilities is the one of spatial orientation. On the other hand several were the authors that have developed systems to help an human being to travel between two locations. However, once the system is set up the change in the configurations have to be done manually in order to better adjust the system to the user. In order to go round this drawback, in this work it is presented a framework of speculative computation to set up the computation of the next user step using default values. When the information is obtained the computation is revised. Thus, the system may have a faster reaction to the user stimulus or it may start warning the user before he/she takes the wrong direction.

Adapting the User Path Through Trajectory Data Mining

The pervasiveness of location based services such the GPS on mobile devices enabled the gathering of massive spatial-temporal data. These databases enabled the mining of new data in order to calculate frequent patterns and predict the movement of the objects. In the development of our system for guiding the user with cognitive disabilities (CogHelper) we are applying a trajectory data mining to adapt and adjust the path to user preferences. Indeed, the guiding process may be more useful and it increases the quality of life of the user through this new functionality (conciliated with the speculative computation module). Thus, instead of the user having to adapt to the application we are developing a system that adapts the path to the user. Rather than being guided through the shortest path he may be oriented by a longer but preferred path. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of the trajectory data mining which is incorporated in CogHelper system.

iBoccia: monitoring elderly while playing Boccia gameplay

We would like to acknowledge the financial support obtained from North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), Portugal 2020 and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from European Union through the project Symbiotic technology for societal efficiency gains: Deus ex Machina (DEM), NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026.

Orientation system based on speculative computation and trajectory mining

Assistive technologies help users with disabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual) to perform tasks that were difficult or impossible to execute. Thus, the user autonomy is increased through this technology. Although some adaptation of the user might be needed, the effort should be minimum in order to use devices that convey assistive functionalities. In cognitive disabilities a common diminished capacity is orientation, which is crucial for the autonomy of an individual. There are several research works that tackle this problem, however they are essentially concerned with user guidance and application interface (display of information). The work presented herein aims to overcome these systems through a framework of Speculative Computation, which adds a prediction feature for the next move of the user. With an anticipation feature and a trajectory mining module the user is guided through a preferred path receiving anticipated alerts before a possible shift in the wrong direction.

Automatic Verification of Design Rules in PCB Manufacturing

Nowadays, electronics can be found in almost every available device. At the core of electronic devices there are Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). To create a suitable PCB there is the need of complying with several constraints, both concerning electrical and layout design. Thus, the design rules related to the PCB manufacturing and assembly are very important since these restrictions are fundamental to ensure the creation of a viable physical PCB. Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) tools are able to automatically verify such rules, but they only consider a subset of the total required rules. The remaining rules are currently manually checked, which may increase the occurrence of errors and, consequently, increase the overall costs in designing and in the manufacturing process of a PCB. Being the design a crucial phase in the manufacturing procedure, a software system that automatically verifies all design rules and produce the corresponding assessment report is fundamental. Such software system is addressed in this paper.

A wearable and non-wearable approach for gesture recognition — Initial results

A natural way of communication between humans are gestures. Through this type of non-verbal communication, the human interaction may change since it is possible to send a particular message or capture the attention of the other peer. In the human-computer interaction the capture of such gestures has been a topic of interest where the goal is to classify human gestures in different scenarios. Applying machine learning techniques, one may be able to track and recognize human gestures and use the gathered information to assess the medical condition of a person regarding, for example, motor impairments. According to the type of movement and to the target population one may use different wearable or non-wearable sensors. In this work, we are using a hybrid approach for automatically detecting the ball throwing movement by applying a Microsoft Kinect (non-wearable) and the Pandlet (set of wearable sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, among others). After creating a dataset of 10 participants, a SVM model with a DTW kernel is trained and used as a classification tool. The system performance was quantified in terms of confusion matrix, accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, Area Under the Curve, and Mathews Correlation Coefficient metrics. The obtained results point out that the present system is able to recognize the selected throwing gestures and that the overall performance of the Kinect is better compared to the Pandlet.

iBoccia: A Framework to Monitor the Boccia Gameplay in Elderly

The increase of the elderly population has an enormous effect on the health care system of a country, as the rise of this population sets the mood to an exponential growth in assistance and care. Indeed, the inherent costs of this populational class are higher when comparing to the younger classes. Today paradigm focuses on the reduction of these costs by promoting a healthier lifestyle on all classes of the populations. Thus, the concern of a more active lifestyle is present in the elderly population, which has proven to reduce, for example, the risk of coronary problems. The stimulus on physical activity is now higher and it is possible to get several monitoring devices to keep track on the activity that was performed. Following this trend, the present paper presents a hybrid approach that employs the use of wearable devices, the Mio Fuse band and the pandlet, and a non-wearable device, the Kinect camera, to monitor elderly people during a Boccia game scenario. Preliminary tests were performed in laboratory. The results include data collected concerning a main movement that is used during a Boccia gameplay.