Special Issue 'Fighting COVID-19: Emerging Techniques and Aid Systems for Prevention, Forecasting and Diagnosis'

Since its emergence at the end of 2019, the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus has led to multiple changes in health protocols around the world [...]

IoT garment for remote elderly care network.

The elderly is a continuous growth sector thanks to the life expectancy increase in Western society. This sector is especially at risk from the appearance of respiratory diseases and, therefore, is the most affected sector in the COVID-19 epidemic. Many of these elderly require continuous care in residences or by specialized caregivers, but these personal contacts put this sector at risk. In this work, an IoT system for elderly remote monitoring is studied, designed, developed and tested. This system is composed by a smart garment that records information from various physiological sensors in order to detect falls, sudden changes in body temperature, heart problems and heat stroke; This information is sent to a cloud server through a gateway located in the patient's residence, allowing to real-time monitor remotely patient's activity using a customized App, as well as receiving alerts in dangerous situations. This system has been tested with professional caregivers, obtaining usability and functionality surveys; and, in addition, a detailed power-consumption study has been carried out. The results, compared with other similar systems, demonstrate that the proposed one is useful, usable, works in real time and has a decent power consumption that allows the patient to carry it during all day without charging the battery.

AnkFall-Falls, Falling Risks and Daily-Life Activities Dataset with an Ankle-Placed Accelerometer and Training Using Recurrent Neural Networks.

Falls are one of the leading causes of permanent injury and/or disability among the elderly. When these people live alone, it is convenient that a caregiver or family member visits them periodically. However, these visits do not prevent falls when the elderly person is alone. Furthermore, in exceptional circumstances, such as a pandemic, we must avoid unnecessary mobility. This is why remote monitoring systems are currently on the rise, and several commercial solutions can be found. However, current solutions use devices attached to the waist or wrist, causing discomfort in the people who wear them. The users also tend to forget to wear the devices carried in these positions. Therefore, in order to prevent these problems, the main objective of this work is designing and recollecting a new dataset about falls, falling risks and activities of daily living using an ankle-placed device obtaining a good balance between the different activity types. This dataset will be a useful tool for researchers who want to integrate the fall detector in the footwear. Thus, in this work we design the fall-detection device, study the suitable activities to be collected, collect the dataset from 21 users performing the studied activities and evaluate the quality of the collected dataset. As an additional and secondary study, we implement a simple Deep Learning classifier based on this data to prove the system's feasibility.

Does Two-Class Training Extract Real Features? A COVID-19 Case Study

Diagnosis aid systems that use image analysis are currently very useful due to the large workload of health professionals involved in making diagnoses. In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been used to help in these tasks. For this reason, multiple studies that analyze the detection precision for several diseases have been developed. However, many of these works distinguish between only two classes: healthy and with a specific disease. Based on this premise, in this work, we try to answer the questions: When training an image classification system with only two classes (healthy and sick), does this system extract the specific features of this disease, or does it only obtain the features that differentiate it from a healthy patient? Trying to answer these questions, we analyze the particular case of COVID-19 detection. Many works that classify this disease using X-ray images have been published;some of them use two classes (with and without COVID-19), while others include more classes (pneumonia, SARS, influenza, etc.). In this work, we carry out several classification studies with two classes, using test images that do not belong to those classes, in order to try to answer the previous questions. The first studies indicate problems in these two-class systems when using a third class as a test, being classified inconsistently. Deeper studies show that deep learning systems trained with two classes do not correctly extract the characteristics of pathologies, but rather differentiate the classes based on the physical characteristics of the images. After the discussion, we conclude that these two-class trained deep learning systems are not valid if there are other diseases that cause similar symptoms.