Evaluation of a Head-Tracking Pointing Device for Users with Motor Disabilities

Development of a low-cost wearable device for Covid-19 self-quarantine monitoring system

Driver sleepiness is one of the most contributing factors in car accidents. Preventions to this problem have been made with various types of driver’s sleepiness detection system, such as systems based on face detection and electrocardiography approaches. However, these approaches require sophisticated systems and impractical design that are not suitable for the low-cost wearable device for daily use. Photoplethysmography based sensor is very favorable to be implemented in the low-cost wearable device to monitor the driver’s heart rate due to its reliability in measurement and simplicity in design. In this study we propose a photoplethysmography based wearable device that is low-cost, wearable, simple to build, and good reliability. We have shown that our wearable device exhibits less than 4% difference in average heart rate with the standard instruments, moreover, our low-cost wearable device is successfully detecting sleepiness based on heart rate reduction of the subjects, which in sleepy condition the heart rate decreases typically ~30 % from the normal condition. Here, we design a sleepiness detection device with 3 levels of sleepiness alarm based on heart rate reduction, furthermore, our wearable device is low-cost and practical to be used daily for the car driver.

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death in women worldwide. It happens when cells grow out of control and invade nearby tissues. Early detection of breast cancer is important to improve the survival rate of the patient. Common modalities used in the detection are mammography, ultrasound and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, these methods are impractical to be used as personal monitoring device due to its high cost and uncomfortable procedures on the patient. Therefore, this study proposes the use of multiple thermal sensors positioned on brassiere cloth covering all four quadrants to provide continuous monitoring of temperature changes on the breasts. To test the reliability of the developed device, breast phantom and heater were used to mimic women breasts and the tumor respectively. Thermal imaging camera was used to verify the changes of surface temperature on breast phantom. Result obtained shows that the reading of thermal sensors on each quadrant with a tumor to have higher temperature compared to the rest. Comparative analysis shows that there were no significant differences on the reading obtained by the thermal sensors and thermal imaging camera which indicates that this low-cost wearable device can be potentially used as breast cancer monitoring tool.

The comfort experienced driving a motorcycle is becoming a subject of great importance, indeed, the driver is exposed to vibrations, which in some cases may cause troublesome problems. The vibrations, during the driving of a motorcycles, are caused by irregular profiles of the road surface or by the wear of the latter; these conditions, unfortunately, are present in almost all the driving conditions, reason why each driver is exposed to it. The aim of the paper is to give the opportunity for the driver to know the exposure to the vibration during a ride using a low-cost wearable device (smart watch) considering the suggestion of the ISO 5349 for the calculation of the hand transmitted vibrations index. A suitable measurement system has been designed and tested on a real motorcycle in order to acquire in real-time the acceleration signals through a Bluetooth communication, which interface a wearable device with a microcontroller unit useful to calculate the hand transmitted vibrations index suggested by the ISO 5349 and store it into a data logger.

Design and Validation of a Low-Cost Wearable Assistive Device for Carrying Back Loads

Air quality monitoring (AQM) is key to maintaining healthy air in cities. This is crucial in low- and middle-income countries due to increasing evidence of poor air quality but lack of monitors to consistently collect evaluate air quality data and effect policy changes, mainly because of the costs of monitoring devices. In participating in a challenge for the development of low-cost AQM devices in low-resource regions, an Arduino-based device with sensors for particulate matter size, temperature, and humidity data acquisition was developed for deployment in Port Harcourt, a city in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, exposed to poor air quality partly due to gas and oil production activities. During the project, challenges to AQM were encountered, including inadequate awareness of air quality issues, lack of necessary AQM device components, unavailability of trained manpower and partnerships, and lack of funding. However, lack of a means of calibrating the device was a major hindrance, as no reference AQM instrument was available, rendering the data acquired largely qualitative, educational, and useless for regulatory purposes. There is an urgent need for AQM in such cities. However, a robust AQM strategy must be designed and used to address these constraints, especially whilst using low-cost devices, for significant progress in acquiring robust air quality data in such low-resource regions to be made.

Machine type communications (MTC) is defined as data communication among devices without the need for human interaction. With the decommissioning of legacy cellular systems, migration of MTC devices to LTE is under investigation by many operators. It is desirable that the cost of LTE MTC devices is similar to that of existing GSM devices. Several cost reduction techniques have been studied. This paper summarizes cost reduction techniques for MTC devices and examines system impacts from such devices being introduced in LTE. Performance is evaluated for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure used in smart grid. It is seen that LTE offers significant capacity for smart metering even with low-cost devices. For a system with 10 MHz bandwidth, approximately 2% of the system resource is required to support AMI in an urban deployment scenario.

Medical devices are often expensive, so people in low-income countries cannot afford them. This paper presents the design of a low-cost wearable medical device to measure vital signs of a patient including heart rate, blood oxygen saturation level (SpO2) and respiratory rate. The wearable medical device mainly consists of a microcontroller and two biomedical sensors including airflow thermal sensor to measure respiratory rate and pulse oximeter sensor to measure SpO2 and heart rate. We can monitor the vital signs from a smartphone using a web browser through IEEE802.11 wireless connectivity to the wearable medical device. Furthermore, the wearable medical device requires simple management to operate; hence, it can be easily used. Performance evaluation results show that the designed wearable medical device works as good as a standard SpO2 device and it can measure the respiratory rate properly. The designed wearable medical device is inexpensive and appropriate for low-resource settings. Moreover, as its components are commonly available in the market, it easy to assembly and repair locally.

The remote monitoring of vital signs and healthcare provision has become an urgent necessity due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. Blood oxygen level, heart rate, and body temperature data are crucial for managing the disease and ensuring timely medical care. This study proposes a low-cost wearable device employing non-contact sensors to monitor, process, and visualize critical variables, focusing on body temperature measurement as a key health indicator. The wearable device developed offers a non-invasive and continuous method to gather wrist and forehead temperature data. However, since there is a discrepancy between wrist and actual forehead temperature, this study incorporates statistical methods and machine learning to estimate the core forehead temperature from the wrist. This research collects 2130 samples from 30 volunteers, and both the statistical least squares method and machine learning via linear regression are applied to analyze these data. It is observed that all models achieve a significant fit, but the third-degree polynomial model stands out in both approaches. It achieves an R2 value of 0.9769 in the statistical analysis and 0.9791 in machine learning.

The use of haptic peripherals to mediate spatial information to visually impaired users is a problem which has recently been examined thoroughly, however the main issue of almost all current approaches is the use of custom made peripheral devices, the high cost of which renders their massive deployment infeasible. We have focused on using low-cost haptic devices to allow visually impaired users to navigate in and inspect a virtual environment. In this paper we describe our approach to navigation in virtual environments by using force feedback joystick and haptic mouse. We also employ the spatial sound to enhance the information perception. We discuss two different navigation modes of avatar in the virtual environment (joystick and mouse based) and several information mediation techniques. Numerous tests have also been performed. Results show that the efficiency and usability of our solution is comparable with tactile exploration of physical paper models of an environment.KeywordsVirtual EnvironmentForce FeedbackHaptic DevicePeripheral DeviceHuman Auditory SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Silicon-conductive nanopaper for Li-ion batteries

This study reports the case of a lung cancer patient with increasing difficulties in falling asleep and frequent periods of wakefulness. Severe dyspnea related to pneumonitis caused as a side effect of immunotherapy worsened the situation. Eventually, a fear of falling asleep developed, including panic attacks and anxiety around choking, which was shown to lead to nights of complete wakefulness. The patient did not only sleep poorly; he did not sleep at all at night for several days, as evidenced by the notes he made during the night. Polygraphy showed no evidence of sleep-disordered breathing, but frequent periods of wakefulness and a reduced basal saturation of around 90% during sleep due to lung changes such as an extensive functional failure of the left upper lobe with position-dependent shunts. The authors hypothesized that the symptoms described were causally related to a drop in oxygen saturation in the patient’s blood. Therefore, they pursued the goal of finding a measurement technique that is as inexpensive as possible and that the patient can operate without outside assistance and great effort. Thus, the patient started using a low-cost wearable device that allows simultaneous measurements of blood oxygen content, pulse rate, and movement intensity. It consists of a finger ring with a pulse oximetry sensor and a wristband with a control unit containing a vibration motor. The described device reliably warned of disturbances in the oxygen concentration in the blood during the night with its vibration alarm. By use of that device during the whole night at home, the events of reduced oxygen saturation and anxiety symptoms were reduced. Sleep disturbances with sudden awakenings did not occur when using the device. The patient benefited from the security gained in this way and slept much more peacefully, and he could spend nights without waking up again. In conclusion, wearable oximeters with vibration alarms can be recommended for patients’ home care in lung cancer patients.

Introduction: Wearable assistive devices for the visually impaired whose technology is based on video camera devices represent a challenge in rapid evolution, where one of the main problems is to find computer vision algorithms that can be implemented in low-cost embedded devices. Objectives and Methods: This work presents a Tiny You Only Look Once architecture for pedestrian detection, which can be implemented in low-cost wearable devices as an alternative for the development of assistive technologies for the visually impaired. Results: The recall results of the proposed refined model represent an improvement of 71% working with four anchor boxes and 66% with six anchor boxes compared to the original model. The accuracy achieved on the same data set shows an increase of 14% and 25%, respectively. The F1 calculation shows a refinement of 57% and 55%. The average accuracy of the models achieved an improvement of 87% and 99%. The number of correctly detected objects was 3098 and 2892 for four and six anchor boxes, respectively, whose performance is better by 77% and 65% compared to the original, which correctly detected 1743 objects. Discussion: Finally, the model was optimized for the Jetson Nano embedded system, a case study for low-power embedded devices, and in a desktop computer. In both cases, the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit were tested, and a documented comparison of solutions aimed at serving visually impaired people was performed. Conclusion: We performed the desktop tests with a RTX 2070S graphics card, and the image processing took about 2.8ms. The Jetson Nano board could process an image in about 110ms, offering the opportunity to generate alert notification procedures in support of visually impaired mobility.

In recent years, the interest of the scientific community towards new technologies for sensor fabrication has grown, in particular with regards to the possibility of creating flexible and low-cost sensors, devices and electronic circuits, motivated by the need to increasingly reduce development times and costs manufacturing of sensors and electronic devices. The ever-widening diffusion of applications that use wearable, disposable and low-cost devices has raised also the needing of producing sensors based on sustainable production technologies, possibly recyclable and, anyway, with a low environmental impact, after their useful life. The research team at the SensorLab@DIEEI of the University of Catania, Italy, has been involved, since decades, in research activities on new technologies, such as Inkjet printing and Micromilling for the rapid prototyping of sensors, silicon-based MEMS, flexible polymeric sensors and Biopolymer-based sensors. In this paper, the technologies are introduced and a set of meaningful examples are briefly described. In particular, for the sake of comparison, the selected examples are in all the cases accelerometers.

Sleep disturbances are common after stroke and may affect recovery and rehabilitation outcomes. Sleep monitoring in the hospital environment is not routine practice yet may offer insight into how the hospital environment influences post-stroke sleep quality while also enabling us to investigate the relationships between sleep quality and neuroplasticity, physical activity, fatigue levels, and recovery of functional independence while undergoing rehabilitation. Commonly used sleep monitoring devices can be expensive, which limits their use in clinical settings. Therefore, there is a need for low-cost methods to monitor sleep quality in hospital settings. This study compared a commonly used actigraphy sleep monitoring device with a low-cost commercial device. Eighteen adults with stroke wore the Philips Actiwatch to monitor sleep latency, sleep time, number of awakenings, time spent awake, and sleep efficiency. A sub-sample (n = 6) slept with the Withings Sleep Analyzer in situ, recording the same sleep parameters. Intraclass correlation coefficients and Bland–Altman plots indicated poor agreement between the devices. Usability issues and inconsistencies were reported between the objectively measured sleep parameters recorded by the Withings device compared with the Philips Actiwatch. While these findings suggest that low-cost devices are not suitable for use in a hospital environment, further investigations in larger cohorts of adults with stroke are needed to examine the utility and accuracy of off-the-shelf low-cost devices to monitor sleep quality in the hospital environment.