Daily Life Environment Research Articles

HomeSound: Real-Time Audio Event Detection Based on High Performance Computing for Behaviour and Surveillance Remote Monitoring.

The consistent growth in human life expectancy during the recent years has driven governments and private organizations to increase the efforts in caring for the eldest segment of the population. These institutions have built hospitals and retirement homes that have been rapidly overfilled, making their associated maintenance and operating costs prohibitive. The latest advances in technology and communications envisage new ways to monitor those people with special needs at their own home, increasing their quality of life in a cost-affordable way. The purpose of this paper is to present an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) platform able to analyze, identify, and detect specific acoustic events happening in daily life environments, which enables the medic staff to remotely track the status of every patient in real-time. Additionally, this tele-care proposal is validated through a proof-of-concept experiment that takes benefit of the capabilities of the NVIDIA Graphical Processing Unit running on a Jetson TK1 board to locally detect acoustic events. Conducted experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by reaching an overall accuracy of 82% when identifying a set of 14 indoor environment events related to the domestic surveillance and patients’ behaviour monitoring field. Obtained results encourage practitioners to keep working in this direction, and enable health care providers to remotely track the status of their patients in real-time with non-invasive methods.

The Social Environment of Daily Life and Perceptions of Police and/or Court Discrimination among African, Caribbean, and Black Youth

Recent deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police and the creation of the protest movement Black Lives Matter has brought public attention to claims of racial profiling and police discrimination in the United States. In Canada, concerns about racial profiling centre on the disproportionate number of visible minority, particularly African-diasporic, individuals targeted in “street checks” or “carding.” This study used multivariate block logistic regression to compare the explanatory power of variables measuring different aspects of the social environment of daily life drawn from three theoretical frameworks (broken windows, routine activities, and critical race theory) when considering contact with police and perceptions of police and court discrimination in a sample of African-diasporic youth (N=529) who self-identify as African, Caribbean, or Black in a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. All measures of the social environment contributed significantly to explaining contact and perceived discrimination. In addition, the significant increase in the variance explained for both contact and perceived discrimination with each successive block supports the conclusion that consideration of the social environment of daily life contributes to an understanding of youth–police contact and youth perceptions of police and courts. The study's findings add to the discussion of inequality and youth–police contacts and experiences, as well as to the Canadian criminological literature exploring relationships between police and racialized youth.

Active Mobility and Environment: A Pilot Qualitative Study for the Design of a New Questionnaire

It is generally accepted that active mobility, mainly walking and cycling, contributes to people’s physical and mental health. One of the current challenges is to improve our understanding of this type of behaviour. This study aims to identify factors from the daily-life environment that may be related to active mobility behaviours, in order to design a new questionnaire for a quantitative study of a large adult population. The new questionnaire obtained through this pilot study combines information from interviews with existing questionnaires materials in order to introduce new factors while retaining the factors already assessed. This approach comprises three stages. The first was a content analysis (Reinert method) of interviews with a sample of participants about daily living activities as well as mobility. This stage led to a typology of factors suggested by interviews. The second was a scoping review of the literature in order to identify the active mobility questionnaires currently used in international literature. The last stage was a cross-tabulation of the factors resulting from the written interviews and the questionnaires. A table of the inter-relationships between the interview-based typology and the questionnaires shows discrepancies between factors considered by the existing questionnaires, and factors coming from individual interviews. Independent factors which were ignored in or absent from the questionnaires are the housing situation within the urban structure, overall consideration of the activity space beyond the limits of the residential neighbourhood, the perception of all the transportation modes, and the time scheduling impacting the modes actually used. Our new questionnaire integrates both the usual factors and the new factors that may be related to active mobility behaviours.

Photoplethysmograph measurement using mail tip sensor in daily life environment

Photoplethysmograph measurement using mail tip sensor in daily life environment

胴体姿勢推定を用いた高速なヒューマノイドロボットの全身動作生成

In daily-life environments, humanoid robots are expected to perform household tasks instead of humans. Humanoid robots can move over a large workspace but generating their motions is still very time consuming. We aim to improve the realtimeness of whole-body motion generation for humanoid robots. In this paper, we introduce a rapid whole-body controller which uses regression of the torso posture. By estimating the torso posture, we reduce the calculation cost of inverse kinematics, as we solve it separately for the legs and arms. We apply the proposed method to the humanoid robot HRP-4 for the task of reaching low-height positions which requires hunkering down. This motion takes 3 seconds.

Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network に基づく一人称視点画像から のロボッ ト の自己位置推定

Many robots are pervading environments of human daily life. It is crucial for those robots to estimate the current self-positions. This is called robot localization. In this paper, we propose a method using a recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN), which is known as one of deep learning, to achieve robot localization. RCNN is a neural network model that has a convolutional architecture known as CNN with recurrent nodes. We train RCNN to estimate the current position of a robot from the view images of the first person perspectives. Our experimental results show that the estimation error decrease when the successive view images are given and it can estimate the current position accurately.

(Invited) Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Self-Powering Small Electronics

Energy harvesting systems based on triboelectric materials are in great demand, as they can provide routes for the development of self-powered devices which are highly flexible, stretchable, mechanically durable, and can be used in a wide range of applications. Further recently smart systems met a large success. At the origin of the internet of things, they are a key driving force for the development of wireless, sustainable and independent autonomous smart systems. The autonomy is critical and despite all the progresses in low power electronics and battery, energy harvesters are becoming increasingly important. Thus harvesting mechanical energy is essential as it is widespread and abundant in our daily life environment. Among harvesters, flexible triboelectric nanogenerators exhibit good performances and are easy to integrate which make it the perfect candidate for many applications, and therefore crucial to develop. In this talk, I will address the importance of nanogenerators as well as the recent advances in power generation through triboelectric nanogenerators with the power generation mechanism. Furthermore recent research and design efforts for enhancing the power generation to commercialize nanogenerators for self-powering portable and wearable devices with low power consumption will also be presented.

Visual Presentation Effects on Identification of Multiple Environmental Sounds.

This study examined how the contents and timing of a visual stimulus affect the identification of mixed sounds recorded in a daily life environment. For experiments, we presented four environment sounds as auditory stimuli for 5 s along with a picture or a written word as a visual stimulus that might or might not denote the source of one of the four sounds. Three conditions of temporal relations between the visual stimuli and sounds were used. The visual stimulus was presented either: (a) for 5 s simultaneously with the sound; (b) for 5 s, 1 s before the sound (SOA between the audio and visual stimuli was 6 s); or (c) for 33 ms, 1 s before the sound (SOA was 1033 ms). Participants reported all identifiable sounds for those audio–visual stimuli. To characterize the effects of visual stimuli on sound identification, the following were used: the identification rates of sounds for which the visual stimulus denoted its sound source, the rates of other sounds for which the visual stimulus did not denote the sound source, and the frequency of false hearing of a sound that was not presented for each sound set. Results of the four experiments demonstrated that a picture or a written word promoted identification of the sound when it was related to the sound, particularly when the visual stimulus was presented for 5 s simultaneously with the sounds. However, a visual stimulus preceding the sounds had a benefit only for the picture, not for the written word. Furthermore, presentation with a picture denoting a sound simultaneously with the sound reduced the frequency of false hearing. These results suggest three ways that presenting a visual stimulus affects identification of the auditory stimulus. First, activation of the visual representation extracted directly from the picture promotes identification of the denoted sound and suppresses the processing of sounds for which the visual stimulus did not denote the sound source. Second, effects based on processing of the conceptual information promote identification of the denoted sound and suppress the processing of sounds for which the visual stimulus did not denote the sound source. Third, processing of the concurrent visual representation suppresses false hearing.

Robot Cloud: Bridging the power of robotics and cloud computing

Cloud computing is shaping the cyber world and evolves as a key computing and service platform for sharing resources including platforms, software applications and everything in the form of services. This is known “X as a Service”. Although it brings our age unparalleled computing ability and economic benefits, the application of cloud computing is still limited currently in the cyberspace due to the cloud services can only reside in cloud instead of our daily life environment. In fact, there are still a plethora of physical position based on-site service demands that cloud computing could help little due to the “cyber limitation”. In this paper, we aim to integrate the cyber world and the physical world by bringing up the idea of “Robot Cloud” to bridge the power of robotics and cloud computing. To make it possible, we design a novel Robot Cloud stack to support our idea and adopt the service-oriented architecture (SOA) to make the functional modules in the Robot Cloud more flexible, extensible and reusable. Then we develop a prototype of Robot Cloud using the popular Google App Engine to demonstrate our design method. Finally, we conduct the simulation experiments with a “robot show” application scenario to evaluate our scheduling policy and identify the effect of different request distributions and robot center solutions.

Due antichi quartieri romani sotto la lente di ingrandimento: un’analisi space syntax dei quartieri delle città antiche e della loro vita sociale

Neighbourhoods and the social use of space are areas of growing interest. By combining archaeological methods and space syntax, the article offers new insights into the physical environment of daily life in the Roman city. The detailed examination of two city blocks from Ostia (Rome’s imperial port-town), allows the authors to identify spaces which fostered social cohesion and community building. The shared courtyards and passage spaces of Block IV ii suggest continued community focus (2nd - 5th centuries AD). In contrast, Block IV iv lacks common spaces and revealed self-contained buildings centred on individual access to public space. Block IV ii enjoyed shared spaces within its own perimeter, while Block IV iv looks toward external community building, with activities centred on the street confining the block. The results show the flexibility of Roman urban structures and allow for suggestive glimpses into the community that sustained the city in the long-term.

Evaluation of a Smartphone-based Human Activity Recognition System in a Daily Living Environment

An evaluation method that includes continuous activities in a daily-living environment was developed for Wearable Mobility Monitoring Systems (WMMS) that attempt to recognize user activities. Participants performed a pre-determined set of daily living actions within a continuous test circuit that included mobility activities (walking, standing, sitting, lying, ascending/descending stairs), daily living tasks (combing hair, brushing teeth, preparing food, eating, washing dishes), and subtle environment changes (opening doors, using an elevator, walking on inclines, traversing staircase landings, walking outdoors). To evaluate WMMS performance on this circuit, fifteen able-bodied participants completed the tasks while wearing a smartphone at their right front pelvis. The WMMS application used smartphone accelerometer and gyroscope signals to classify activity states. A gold standard comparison data set was created by video-recording each trial and manually logging activity onset times. Gold standard and WMMS data were analyzed offline. Three classification sets were calculated for each circuit: (i) mobility or immobility, ii) sit, stand, lie, or walking, and (iii) sit, stand, lie, walking, climbing stairs, or small standing movement. Sensitivities, specificities, and F-Scores for activity categorization and changes-of-state were calculated. The mobile versus immobile classification set had a sensitivity of 86.30% ± 7.2% and specificity of 98.96% ± 0.6%, while the second prediction set had a sensitivity of 88.35% ± 7.80% and specificity of 98.51% ± 0.62%. For the third classification set, sensitivity was 84.92% ± 6.38% and specificity was 98.17 ± 0.62. F1 scores for the first, second and third classification sets were 86.17 ± 6.3, 80.19 ± 6.36, and 78.42 ± 5.96, respectively. This demonstrates that WMMS performance depends on the evaluation protocol in addition to the algorithms. The demonstrated protocol can be used and tailored for evaluating human activity recognition systems in rehabilitation medicine where mobility monitoring may be beneficial in clinical decision-making.

A Road Congestion Detection System Using Undedicated Mobile Phones

Road congestion has been one of the major issues in most metropolises, and thus, it is crucial to detect road congestions effectively and efficiently. Traditional solutions require the deployment of dedicated sensors on the roadside or on the vehicles, which suffer from high installation and maintenance costs and limited coverage. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution by exploiting the sensing ability of mobile phones. However, it is challenging to detect road congestions in a daily-living environment using undedicated mobile phones while guaranteeing energy efficiency. The proposed system only depends on the accelerometer and cellular signal, which have been proven to be energy efficient as compared with other built-in sensors (e.g., GPS). It consists of three interactive modules: (a) an accelerometer-based vehicular movement detection module for detecting the periods when the mobile phone user is traveling by vehicle; (b) a map-matching module relying on the cellular signal for determining the traveled road segments; and (c) a road congestion estimation module for inferring the congestion degree of the traveled road segments. We evaluated the proposed system based on real-world datasets, with promising results.

Preparatory Activity in Posterior Temporal Cortex Causally Contributes to Object Detection in Scenes.

Theories of visual selective attention propose that top-down preparatory attention signals mediate the selection of task-relevant information in cluttered scenes. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have provided correlative evidence for this hypothesis, finding increased activity in target-selective neural populations in visual cortex in the period between a search cue and target onset. In this study, we used online TMS to test whether preparatory neural activity in visual cortex is causally involved in naturalistic object detection. In two experiments, participants detected the presence of object categories (cars, people) in a diverse set of photographs of real-world scenes. TMS was applied over a region in posterior temporal cortex identified by fMRI as carrying category-specific preparatory activity patterns. Results showed that TMS applied over posterior temporal cortex before scene onset (-200 and -100 msec) impaired the detection of object categories in subsequently presented scenes, relative to vertex and early visual cortex stimulation. This effect was specific to category level detection and was related to the type of attentional template participants adopted, with the strongest effects observed in participants adopting category level templates. These results provide evidence for a causal role of preparatory attention in mediating the detection of objects in cluttered daily-life environments.

Daily activity space and exposure: A comparative study of Hong Kong's public and private housing residents' segregation in daily life

Differences in individuals' exposure to social/physical environment in daily life or activity–space segregation have aroused renewed interests in socio-spatial separation in geography and urban studies. However, there are not many empirical studies that comprehensively assess activity–space segregation perhaps due to the scarcity of detailed data to define and characterize activity space. This paper aims to help fill in this gap by contributing an empirical study in Hong Kong. We compare the daily life experiences of public and private housing residents in terms of activity space and exposure to people in their daily life. We find that inhabitants of public housing in Hong Kong are disadvantaged in many ways. Public housing residents' lower socio-economic status, smaller homes, and lower car ownership distinguish them from inhabitants of private housing. We also find that the activity spaces of these residents are not necessarily smaller than those of private housing residents. Public housing residents in fact have more extensive activity spaces and spend more time out of the home. However, their activity spaces are socio-economically different from those of private housing residents. They are more likely exposed to people similar to themselves than private housing residents. This study offers some important empirical evidence on activity–space segregation as well as improves the understanding about socio-spatial distance between public and private housing residents of Hong Kong.

An Optimized LBS Technology for In-Hospital Environment

Wireless sense network is very popular in our daily life environment. It can be used in data communication, signal application, and indoor positing. This study proposal a Blind Geometry Indoor Positioning Technique by RSS signal and can be applied on general android mobile equipment for hospital staff or patients to provide a real time guiding map for ordinary or emergency situation.

Survey on daily life and indoor thermal environment of the elderly in winter

Survey on daily life and indoor thermal environment of the elderly in winter

(Invited) Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Self-Powering Small Electronics

Recently autonomous smart systems met a large success. Especially, the internet of things is a key driving force for the development of wireless, sustainable and independent smart systems. Therefore, their autonomy is critical and despite the progresses in low power electronics and battery, it is not enough and energy harvesters are becoming increasingly important. For this, harvesting mechanical energy is essential as it is widespread and abundant in our daily life environment. Among harvesters, flexible triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) have good performances and are easy to integrate which make it the perfect candidate for many applications, and so crucial to develop. In this presentation, I first briefly introduce the fundamentals of TENGs, including the four basic operation modes. Then I discuss the different improvement parameters. I will also address some progresses made in terms of performances and integration which have been realized through the understanding of each operation mode and the development of innovative structures. Finally I present the last trends, structures and materials in view of better performances and applications.

Recent Progress on Flexible Triboelectric Nanogenerators for SelfPowered Electronics.

Recently, smart systems have met with large success. At the origin of the internet of things, they are a key driving force for the development of wireless, sustainable, and independent autonomous smart systems. In this context, autonomy is critical, and despite all the progress that has been made in low-power electronics and batteries, energy harvesters are becoming increasingly important. Thus, harvesting mechanical energy is essential, as it is widespread and abundant in our daily life environment. Among harvesters, flexible triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) exhibit good performance, and they are easy to integrate, which makes them perfect candidates for many applications and, therefore, crucial to develop. In this review paper, we first introduce the fundamentals of TENGs, including their four basic operation modes. Then, we discuss the different improvement parameters. We review some progress made in terms of performance and integration that have been possible through the understanding of each operation mode and the development of innovative structures. Finally, we present the latest trends, structures, and materials in view of future improvements and applications.

Are patients with cardiac implants protected against electromagnetic interference in daily life and occupational environment?

Utilization of cardiac implants such as pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators is now commonplace among heart disease patients. The ever-increasing technological complexity of these devices is matched by the near omnipresent exposure to electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields (EMFs), both in everyday life and the occupational environment. Given that electromagnetic interferences (EMIs) are associated with potential risk in device patients, physicians are increasingly confronted with managing device patients with intermittent EMI and chronic occupational exposure. The current review aims to provide a contemporary overview of cardiovascular implantable electronic devices, their function and susceptibility of non-medical EMFs and provide recommendations for physicians caring for cardiac device patients presenting with EMI.

Changes in metamorphopsia in daily life after successful epiretinal membrane surgery and correlation with M-CHARTS score.

PurposeTo determine the correlation between the changes in metamorphopsia in daily life environment and the M-CHARTS scores after epiretinal membrane (ERM) removal, and to determine the criterion for determining whether clinically significant changes in the metamorphopsia score have occurred in M-CHARTS.MethodsWe studied 65 eyes undergoing vitrectomy for unilateral ERM. Self-administered questionnaires were used to examine the metamorphopsia in their daily life. The degree of metamorphopsia was determined by M-CHARTS. The receiver operating characteristic curve was used to determine the best predictor of the changes in metamorphopsia in daily life. To determine the reproducibility of the M-CHARTS score, another set of 56 eyes with ERM was tested twice on two different days.ResultsThe postoperative changes in the logarithm of the M-CHARTS score was defined as M2-value. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the M2-value as a predictor of the changes in metamorphopsia in daily life was larger than area under the receiver operating characteristic curve obtained for any other parameter. The optimal cutoff value was −0.4. The 95% limits of agreement between test and retest measurements had a reproducibility of ±0.3 logarithm of the M-CHARTS score. Taking into account not only the reproducibility but also the consistency with the subjective changes, we determined the criterion for clinically significant changes in the M-CHARTS scores as a change of the M2-value by ≥0.4.ConclusionEvaluating the changes in the M-CHARTS scores in logarithmic form is favorable not only theoretically but also from the perspective of consistency with the subjective changes.