ICT4AWE 2016 Abstracts

Area 1 - Ambient Assisted Living

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	12
Title:	Overnight Supervision of Alzheimer's Disease Patients in Nursing Homes - System Development and Field Trial
Authors:	Laura Montanini, Laura Raffaeli, Adelmo De Santis, Antonio Del Campo, Carlos Chiatti, Giorgio Rascioni, Ennio Gambi and Susanna Spinsante
Abstract:	The number of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease among the population is currently growing, while the availability of resources for their assistance is decreasing. A solution for this problem is provided by the use of Ambient Assisted Living technologies, with the objectives to prolong the independent living of patients at home, to relieve assistance burden on caregivers, and to improve care effectiveness in nursing homes. This paper describes an integrated system designed to support the work of nurses during the night, to ensure comfort and safety of Alzheimer's disease patients in nursing homes. The project started from a similar solution designed for home use, suitably re-engineered for adoption in nursing homes. The system has been designed according to nurses' requirements and expectations, both by revising some existing functionalities, and by developing new components. The results gained from an experimental trial are also presented and discussed.
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Paper Nr:	19
Title:	A Low-cost Approach for Detecting Activities of Daily Living using Audio Information: A Use Case on Bathroom Activity Monitoring
Authors:	Georgios Siantikos, Theodoros Giannakopoulos and Stasinos Konstantopoulos
Abstract:	In this paper, we present an architecture for recognizing events related to activities of daily living in the context of a health monitoring environment. The proposed approach explores the integration of a Raspberry PI singleboard PC both as an audio acquisition and analysis unit. A set of real-time feature extraction and classification procedures has been implemented and integrated on the Raspberry PI device, in order to provide continuous and online audio event recognition. In addition, a tuning and calibration workflow is presented, according to which the technicians installing the device in a fast ans user-friendly manner, without any requirements for machine learning expertise. The proposed approach has been evaluated against a particular scenario that is rather important in the context of any healthcare monitoring system for the elder, namely the ”bathroom scenario” according to which a single microphone installed on a Raspberry PI device is used to monitor bathroom activity in a 24/7 basis. Experimental results indicate a satisfactory performance rate on the classification process (around 70% for five bathroom-related audio classes) even when less than two minutes of annotated data are used for training in the installation procedure. This makes the whole procedure non demanding in terms of time and effort needed to be calibrated by the technician.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	4
Title:	Empowering the Elderly: Implementation of Navigation Assistance Application for Public Transportation
Authors:	Samuli Heinonen and Erkki Siira
Abstract:	When a human ages, the functional abilities could weaken, which can lead to isolation from the society. Applying technological aid for improving the quality of life of the elderly helps them to stay independent and active in their community across their life. This article introduces a system, which is empowering the elderly by aiding them in using public transportation in both rural and urban environments, and helps them in this way to maintain the mobility and activity. The ASSISTANT system provides a simple, yet effective, route info for user and shows only relevant information, at the right time and in the appropriate format. The system is communicating with the user via audio and visual guidance. In addition, it has an error detection functionality, which helps user in case of common navigation errors. End user evaluation performed in Helsinki (Finland), Vienna (Austria) and Donostia-San Sebastian area (Spain) confirms that the service works as intended and helps older people to use public transport by guiding them all the way from the start to the end of their journeys. The system was found to be particularly helpful on unfamiliar routes.
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Paper Nr:	18
Title:	A Robot-based Application for Physical Exercise Training
Authors:	Michalis Foukarakis, Ilia Adami, Danae Ioannidi, Asterios Leonidis, Damien Michel, Ammar Qammaz, Konstantinos Papoutsakis, Margherita Antona and Antonis Argyros
Abstract:	According to studies, performing physical exercise is beneficial for reducing the risk of falling in the elderly and prolonging their stay at home. In addition, regular exercising helps cognitive function and increases posi-tive behaviour for seniors with cognitive impairment and dementia. In this paper, a fitness application integrat-ed into a service robot is presented. Its aim is to motivate the users to perform physical training by providing relevant exercises and useful feedback on their progress. The application utilizes the robot vision system to track and recognize user movements and activities and supports multimodal interaction with the user. The pa-per describes the design challenges, the system architecture, the user interface and the human motion capturing module. Additionally, it discusses some results from user testing in laboratory and home-based trials.
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Paper Nr:	20
Title:	A Control Cycle for the Automatic Assisted Positioning of Auscultation Sensors
Authors:	Julio Cesar Bellido, Giuseppe De Pietro and Giovanna Sannino
Abstract:	The correct positioning of wearable biomedical sensors is crucial in the use of any automatic measurement systems. The effects of an inaccurate positioning can compromise the quality of the acquired vital waveforms, like phonocardiograms, and can make ineffective any healthcare application which uses wearable sensors. To solve this issue, this paper proposes an innovative control cycle for a control cycle to assist patients during the positioning of an auscultation sensor, a digital stethoscope, for a healthcare monitoring application. The control cycle runs on a user-friendly app and, through the use of a smartphone camera, suggests the auscultation sites overlapping the active camera view. In this way, the patient has a real-time feedback to ensure the correct positioning of the sensor.
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Paper Nr:	40
Title:	ReMindMe: Agent-based Support for Self-disclosure of Personal Memories in People with Alzheimer’s Disease
Authors:	Marieke M. M. Peeters
Abstract:	This paper presents work on the design rationale and architecture of ReMindMe. ReMindMe aims to provide agent-based support for people with Alzheimer’s disease and their social environment by playing music with a strong personal meaning to the patient so as to activate personal memory recall. ReMindMe stimulates reminiscence and self-disclosure of personal memories. Through long-term interaction with the patient, the ReMindMe agent gradually constructs a knowledge base containing information about the patient’s life stories. The agent uses this knowledge base to engage in mutual conversational self-disclosure about personal memories so as to stimulate reminiscence. Future research aims to develop and refine ReMindMe through coactive design and testing ‘in the wild’, i.e. at dementia care facilities. The envisioned outcome of the project is a usable and effective proof-of-concept of a conversational agent for the dementia care practice.
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Area 2 - TELEMEDICINE AND E-HEALTH

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	1
Title:	What Changes Need to be Made within the LNHS for Ehealth Systems to be Successfully Implemented?
Authors:	Mansour Ahwidy and Lyn Pemberton
Abstract:	This piece of work provides an assessment of the readiness levels within both urban and rural hospitals and clinics in Libya for the implementation of Ehealth systems. This then enabled the construction of a framework for Ehealth implementation in the Libyan National Health Service (LNHS). The study assessed how medications were prescribed, patients were referred, information communication technology (ICT) was utilised in recording patient records, how healthcare staff were trained to use ICT and the ways in which consultations were carried out by healthcare staff. The research was done in five rural healthcare institutions and five urban healthcare institutions and focused on the readiness levels of the technology, social attitudes, engagement levels and any other needs that were apparent (Jennett et al., 2010; Hasanain et al., 2014). Collection of the data was carried out using a mixed method approach with qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaires (Molina et al., 2010; Creswell and Plano, 2010; Mason, 2006; Cathain, 2009; Cathain et al. 2008). The study indicated that any IT equipment present was not being utilised for clinical purposes and there was no evidence of any Ehealth technologies being employed. This implies that the maturity level of the healthcare institutions studied was zero.
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Paper Nr:	14
Title:	A Collaborative Learning Environment of the Medical Diagnosis on the Basis of the Clinical Reasoning Theory
Authors:	Mohamed Abderraouf Ferradji and Abdelmadjid Zidani
Abstract:	In collaborative clinical learning field, several recent pertinent studies showed that gathering learners with their tutor still insufficient to improve students' learning quality and knowledge acquisition. Consequently, focusing attention on professional skills within a collaboration environment seems to be the most appropriate way to reach the wished learning objectives, particularly in a complex specialty such as medical diagnosis learning. In this paper, we firstly introduce the concept of medical diagnosis from cognitive studies view that have been performed in the field of medical education. Then, we will discuss our shared web environment designed to support distance diagnosis learning, which aims to promote knowledge coconstruction and collaboration between learners.
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Paper Nr:	38
Title:	Feature Selection Evaluation for Light Human Motion Identification in Frailty Monitoring System
Authors:	Evangelia Pippa, Iosif Mporas and Vasileios Megalooikonomou
Abstract:	In order to plan and deliver health care in a world with increasing number of older people, human motion monitoring is a must in their surveillance, since the related information is crucial for understanding their physical status. In this article, we focus on the physiological function and motor performance thus we present a light human motion identification scheme together with preliminary evaluation results, which will be further exploited within the FrailSafe Project. For this purpose, a large number of time and frequency domain features extracted from the sensor signals (accelerometer and gyroscope) and concatenated to a single feature vector are evaluated in a subject dependent cross-validation setting using SVMs. The mean classification accuracy reaches 96%. In a further step, feature ranking and selection is preformed prior to subject independent classification using the ReliefF ranking algorithm. The classification model using feature subsets of different size is evaluated in order to reveal the best dimensionality of the feature vector. The achieved accuracy is 97% which is a slight improvement compared to previous approaches evaluated on the same dataset. However, such an improvement can be considered significant given the fact that it is achieved with lighter processing using a smaller number of features.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	13
Title:	Exploring Personality and Game Preferences in the Younger and Older Population: A Pilot Study
Authors:	A. F. A. de Vette, M. Tabak, M. G. H. Dekker-van Weering and M. M. R. Vollenbroek-Hutten
Abstract:	Aim: Engagement in gamified applications can be increased by effectively meeting end-user preferences for game content. To design this tailored content insight in user preferences is necessary, obtained from user classification models. This pilot study aims to explore the hypothesised relation between personality traits and preference for game characteristics that is the basis for a new user classification model, deduced from the Five Domains of Play theory. Methods: An online questionnaire consisted of the 10-item Big Five Inventory to determine personality, and five questions on the preference for game examples to determine game preference. Results: 216 participants completed the questionnaire (M=39 years, SD=17). For the group of participants younger than 60, four out of five personality traits correlate significantly but weakly with their corresponding game preference domains (r=0,13-0,30, p<0,05). For the participants older than 60, no significant correlations were found. Conclusion: Personality and game preferences are weakly related in persons younger than sixty years old, while no relation was found for the older participants. For the latter, this may be due to a lack of gaming experience. We therefore propose to extend research towards a field study by providing actual games to play on beforehand.
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Paper Nr:	28
Title:	HTL Model: A Model for Extracting and Visualizing Medical Events from Narrative Text in Electronic Health Records
Authors:	Eddie Paul Hernández, Alexandra Pomares Quimbaya and Oscar Mauricio Muñoz
Abstract:	Electronic health records contain important information of a patient and it may serve as source to analyze and audit the process of diagnosis and treatment of a specific clinical condition. This information is registered in narrative text, which generates a limitation to identify medical events like doctor appointments, medications, treatments, surgical procedures, etc. As it is difficult to identify medical events in electronic health records, it is not easy to find a point of comparison between this electronic information with recommendations given by clinical practice guidelines. Such guides correspond to recommendations systematically developed to assist health professionals in taking appropriate decisions with respect to illness. This article presents “Health Text Line Model HTL”, a model for extraction, structuring and viewing medical events from narrative text in electronic health records. The HTL model was implemented in a framework that integrates the aforementioned processes to identify and timing medical events. HTL was validated in a general hospital giving good results on precision and recall.
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Paper Nr:	33
Title:	MoBio - A Mobile Application for Collecting Data from Sensors
Authors:	Petr Ježek and Roman Mouček
Abstract:	There are a lot of sensors for monitoring human health and/or fitness level on the market. They facilitate collection of data from the human body and advanced devices even facilitate data transfer to remote servers where the collected data are further processed. While health data, obtained e.g. from accelerometers or chest straps, are collected rather frequently, brain electrophysiology data, obtained from surface electrodes, are still collected relatively rarely. However, integration and correlation of brain signals with other sensory data would be very interesting for next research of physical and mental health. Although capturing brain signals in real environment still faces technological difficulties, current development of common infrastructure seems to be useful. Then this article deals with various architectures and data formats used for storage and transfer of sensory data and their possible integration with existing neuroinformatics approaches. As a solution we introduced a terminology describing data from a limited collection of sensors. The terminology is implemented in the odML format and integrated in a proof-of-concept Android application. Data transfer, storage and visualisation as well as integration with a remote neuroinformatics resource are presented.
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Paper Nr:	37
Title:	A Systematic Review of eHealth Interventions for Healthy Aging: Status of Progress
Authors:	Idrissa Beogo, Phillip Van Landuyt, Marie-Pierre Gagnon and Ronald Buyl
Abstract:	Worldwide, old age population is projected to attained 2 billion by 2050, raising challenges for healthcare, social security, pension and long-term care. Several eHealth interventions have been as proposed as promising avenues to support healthy aging (HA), but effectiveness has not been synthesised. This study aims to systematically review the effectiveness of eHealth interventions for HA. We performed standardized searches in relevant databases to identify (quasi)-experimental studies evaluating the effectiveness of eHealth interventions for HA. Outcomes of interest are: wellbeing, quality of life, activities of daily living, leisure activities, knowledge, evaluation of care, social support, skill acquisition and healthy behaviours. We also consider adverse effects such as social isolation, anxiety, and burden on informal caregivers. Two reviewers will independently assess studies for inclusion. Data extraction is based on standardised tools and done independently by two reviewers. An initial search led to 7039 potentially relevant citations. After screening titles and abstract, 60 full text articles were further assessed, of which 12 (presenting 11 studies) were finally retained for the review. Effect sizes related to each type of eHealth intervention will be calculated on the final selection. If not possible, we will present the findings in a narrative form. This systematic review will provide unique knowledge on the effectiveness of eHealth interventions for supporting HA.
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Paper Nr:	39
Title:	Protecting Medical Data Stored in Public Clouds
Authors:	Nikos Fotiou and George Xylomenos
Abstract:	Public Clouds offer a convenient way for storing and sharing large amounts of medical data. Nevertheless, using a shared infrastructure raises significant security and privacy concerns. Even if the data are encrypted, the data owner should share some information with the Cloud provider, in order to enable the latter to perform access control; given the high sensitivity of medical data, even such limited information may jeopardize enduser privacy. In this paper we employ an access control delegation scheme to enable the users themselves to perform access control on their data, which are stored in a public Cloud. To selectively provide access to these data without sacrificing their confidentiality we rely on encryption: our system encrypts data before storing them in the Cloud and applies proxy re-encryption so as to encrypt data separately for each (authorized) user.
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Paper Nr:	41
Title:	Towards Interoperability of EHR Systems: The Case of Italy
Authors:	Mario Ciampi, Angelo Esposito, Roberto Guarasci and Giuseppe De Pietro
Abstract:	The great benefits that Electronic Health Records are able to provide in terms of improvement of the quality of care and reduction of costs have led many international organizations to implement enabling systems. However, the systems designed and realized are very often not able to interoperate each other, due to several reasons, varying from the existence of different local needs to the use of diverse health informatics standards. The lack of interoperability among these systems can result in decreased levels of quality of patient care and waste of financial resources. In Italy, the autonomy about healthcare delivered by the Italian Constitution to each region caused the spread of heterogeneous regional EHR systems, thus not able to interoperate each other. This paper presents the result of an effort made within a convention between the National Research Council of Italy and the Agency for Digital Italy, for the specification of the Italian architecture for the interoperability of regional EHR systems. Such an architecture has been defined according to the requirements provided by Italian Laws recently issued and approved by a National Technical Board.
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Area 3 - Monitoring, Accessibility and User Interfaces

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	15
Title:	The MobiAct Dataset: Recognition of Activities of Daily Living using Smartphones
Authors:	George Vavoulas, Charikleia Chatzaki, Thodoris Malliotakis, Matthew Pediaditis and Manolis Tsiknakis
Abstract:	The use of smartphones for human activity recognition has become popular due to the wide adoption of smartphones and their rich sensing features. This article introduces a benchmark dataset, the MobiAct dataset, for smartphone-based human activity recognition. It comprises data recorded from the accelerometer, gyroscope and orientation sensors of a smartphone for fifty subjects performing nine different types of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and fifty-four subjects simulating four different types of falls. This dataset is used to elaborate an optimized feature selection and classification scheme for the recognition of ADLs, using the accelerometer recordings. Special emphasis was placed on the selection of the most effective features from feature sets already validated in previously published studies. An important qualitative part of this investigation is the implementation of a comparative study for evaluating the proposed optimal feature set using both the MobiAct dataset and another popular dataset in the domain. The results obtained show a higher classification accuracy than previous reported studies, which exceeds 99% for the involved ADLs.
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Paper Nr:	35
Title:	An Application Framework for Personalised and Adaptive Behavioural Change Support Systems
Authors:	Ulrich Reimer and Edith Maier
Abstract:	The paper analyzes current weaknesses of behavioural change support systems (BCSS) such as the failure of adequately taking into account the heterogeneity of target users. Based on this analysis the paper presents an application framework that comprises various components to accommodate user preferences and to adapt system interventions to individual users. Among these components is a goal hierarchy which can be set up to represent the goals a user wants to achieve. The higher-level goals can be broken down into more specific goals that can be measured and associated with appropriate activities. Furthermore, our BCSS framework includes components for adapting its interactions according to a user’s observed behavioural preferences as well as his or her previous reactions to system interventions. User adaptation also takes into account the preferences of similar users by employing a collaborative filtering approach. Thus, overall user acceptance should be improved and motivation for behavioural change sustained. The framework is currently being implemented and will subsequently be evaluated.
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Short Papers

Paper Nr:	32
Title:	Nursing Documentation Improvement at Post-Acute Care Settings
Authors:	Ryoma Seto and Toshitaka Inoue
Abstract:	Although nursing documentation is very important for patient safety, it forces nurses to spend increasing amounts of their working time completing it. In this study, I evaluated the time lag between patient events to completion of nursing documentation at two Post-Acute Care settings (called as “Care-Mixed Hospital” in Japan, similar to nursing home). The mean time lag at Hospital A, which did not implement an automatic documentation system (ADS) was 197.3 min [progress note regarding vital signs (VS), 208.2 min and the others, 196.1 min. The mean time lag at Hospital B, which had implemented ADS, was 3.2 min (only progress note regarding VS). ADS is effective in improving instantaneity on nursing documentation at post-acute care settings.
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Area 4 - Robotics and Devices for Independent Living

Short Papers

Paper Nr:	30
Title:	Preliminary Findings of Feasibility of a Wearable Soft-robotic Glove Supporting Impaired Hand Function in Daily Life - A Soft-robotic Glove Supporting ADL of Elderly People
Authors:	B. Radder, G. B. Prange-Lasonder, A. I. R. Kottink, L. Gaasbeek, J. Holmberg, T. Meyer, J. H. Buurke and J. S. Rietman
Abstract:	Elderly people frequently encounter difficulties in independently performing activities of daily living (ADL) due to a reduced hand function. Robotic assistive devices have the potential to provide the assistance that is necessary to perform ADL independently without the need of personal assistance. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to explore feasibility of a wearable soft-robotic glove (ironHand (iH) system) that can support hand function of elderly people in daily life. Thirty elderly people (>56 years) with a reduced hand function resulting in difficulties in performing ADL were recruited to perform six functional tasks three times with and without the iH system. Evaluation measurements consisted of functional tasks performance times and user-acceptance of the iH system, measured by the System Usability Scale (SUS). Participants improved their functional task performance after multiple attempts either with and without the glove, but performed significantly faster without the glove (p≤0.032). Besides, the mean of the SUS score for the iH system was 70.1%. Although this indicates a good probability for acceptance in the field, several design adaptations are necessary to have a user-friendly and accepted assistive device.
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Paper Nr:	17
Title:	Compressed Sensing and Classification of Cardiac Beats using Patient Specific Dictionaries
Authors:	Monica Fira, Liviu Goras, Victor-Andrei Maiorescu and Mihaela Catalina Luca
Abstract:	In this paper, we investigated the benefits of compressed acquisition for monitoring applications of patients with various heart diseases. The possibility of heartbeat acquisition followed by classification into one of two classes, namely, normal beats or pathological has been approached using patient-specific dictionaries. Moreover, several types of projection matrices (matrices with random i.i.d. elements sampled from the Gaussian or Bernoulli distributions, and matrices optimized for the particular dictionary used in reconstruction by means of appropriate algorithms) have been compared. The dictionaries used in the reconstruction phase were built with and without centred R waves.
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Area 5 - HCI for Ageing Populations

Full Papers

Paper Nr:	8
Title:	Reminiscence of People with Dementia Mediated by a Tangible Multimedia Book
Authors:	Alina Huldtgren, Fabian Mertl, Anja Vormann and Christian Geiger
Abstract:	With the growing senior population the number of people with dementia is rising rapidly. Besides –currently limited– pharmaceutical treatments, psychosocial interventions play a major role in ensuring the life quality for people with dementia. Among these is reminiscence therapy, which helps people to remember episodes of their past life and maintain their identity, while the disease progresses. The research presented in this paper explores the role of a tangible multimedia artifact to support reminiscence sessions. We describe the development of an interactive book that was tested in a care home with people with dementia and caregivers. We present findings on the interaction with the book, its potential to mediate reminiscence and communication, and on the perspective of caregivers using the book in the sessions.
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