A Telemedicine Robot System for Assisted and Independent Living.

The emerging demographic trends toward an aging population, demand new ways and solutions to improve the quality of elderly life. These include, prolonged independent living, improved health care, and reduced social isolation. Recent technological advances in the field of assistive robotics bring higher sophistication and various assistive abilities that can help in achieving these goals. In this paper, we present design and validation of a low-cost telepresence robot that can assist the elderly and their professional caregivers, in everyday activities. The developed robot structure and its control objectives were tested in, both, a simulation and experimental environment. On-field experiments were done in a private elderly care center involving elderly persons and caregivers as participants. The goal of the evaluation study was to test the software architecture and the robot capabilities for navigation, as well as the robot manipulator. Moreover, participants' reactions toward a possible adoption of the developed robot system in everyday activities were assessed. The obtained results of the conducted evaluation study are also presented and discussed.

Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring as a Basis for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) - Review of Methodologies and Devices.

Blood pressure (BP) is a bio-physiological signal that can provide very useful information regarding human's general health. High or low blood pressure or its rapid fluctuations can be associated to various diseases or conditions. Nowadays, high blood pressure is considered to be an important health risk factor and major cause of various health problems worldwide. High blood pressure may precede serious heart diseases, stroke and kidney failure. Accurate blood pressure measurement and monitoring plays fundamental role in diagnosis, prevention and treatment of these diseases. Blood pressure is usually measured in the hospitals, as a part of a standard medical routine. However, there is an increasing demand for methodologies, systems as well as accurate and unobtrusive devices that will permit continuous blood pressure measurement and monitoring for a wide variety of patients, allowing them to perform their daily activities without any disturbance. Technological advancements in the last decade have created opportunities for using various devices as a part of ambient assisted living for improving quality of life for people in their natural environment. The main goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of various methodologies for continuous cuff-less blood pressure measurement, as well as to evidence recently developed devices and systems for continuous blood pressure measurement that can be used in ambient assisted living applications.

Novel approach for automating medical emergency protocol in military environment.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Categorization of the casualties in accordance with medical care priorities is crucial in a military environment. Automation of the triage process is still a challenging task. The goal of the paper is to propose a novel algorithm for automation of medical emergency protocol in the military environment by the creation of classifiers that can provide accurate prioritization of injured soldier cases. It is a part of a complex military telemedicine system that provides continuous monitoring of soldiers' vital data gathered on-site using an unobtrusive set of sensors. METHODS: After pre-processing the collected raw physiological data and eliminating the outliers using Naïve Bayesian Classifier, the system is capable of calculating the risk level and categorizing the victims based on Markov Decision Process. The NBC has been trained with a dataset that has contained labels and 6 features. Training set has held 8000 randomly chosen samples. Twenty percent of the determined dataset has been used for the validation set. RESULTS: For algorithm verification, several evaluation scenarios have been created. In each scenario, randomly generated vital sign data describing the hypothetical health condition of soldiers was contemporarily assessed by the system as well as by 50 experienced military medical physicians. CONCLUSION: The obtained correlation result of the proposed algorithm and medical physicians' classifications is strong evidence that the system can be implemented in warfare emergency medicine.

Evaluation of an Assistive Telepresence Robot for Elderly Healthcare.

In this paper we described the telepresence robot system designed to improve the well-being of elderly by supporting them to do daily activities independently, to facilitate social interaction in order to overcome a sense of social isolation and loneliness as well as to support the professional caregivers in everyday care. In order to investigate the acceptance of the developed robot system, evaluation study involved elderly people and professional caregivers, as two potential user groups was conducted. The results of this study are also presented and discussed.

Connected-Health Algorithm: Development and Evaluation.

Nowadays, there is a growing interest towards the adoption of novel ICT technologies in the field of medical monitoring and personal health care systems. This paper proposes design of a connected health algorithm inspired from social computing paradigm. The purpose of the algorithm is to give a recommendation for performing a specific activity that will improve user's health, based on his health condition and set of knowledge derived from the history of the user and users with similar attitudes to him. The algorithm could help users to have bigger confidence in choosing their physical activities that will improve their health. The proposed algorithm has been experimentally validated using real data collected from a community of 1000 active users. The results showed that the recommended physical activity, contributed towards weight loss of at least 0.5 kg, is found in the first half of the ordered list of recommendations, generated by the algorithm, with the probability > 0.6 with 1 % level of significance.

Towards computational improvement of DNA database indexing and short DNA query searching.

In order to facilitate and speed up the search of massive DNA databases, the database is indexed at the beginning, employing a mapping function. By searching through the indexed data structure, exact query hits can be identified. If the database is searched against an annotated DNA query, such as a known promoter consensus sequence, then the starting locations and the number of potential genes can be determined. This is particularly relevant if unannotated DNA sequences have to be functionally annotated. However, indexing a massive DNA database and searching an indexed data structure with millions of entries is a time-demanding process. In this paper, we propose a fast DNA database indexing and searching approach, identifying all query hits in the database, without having to examine all entries in the indexed data structure, limiting the maximum length of a query that can be searched against the database. By applying the proposed indexing equation, the whole human genome could be indexed in 10 hours on a personal computer, under the assumption that there is enough RAM to store the indexed data structure. Analysing the methodology proposed by Reneker, we observed that hits at starting positions [Formula: see text] are not reported, if the database is searched against a query shorter than [Formula: see text] nucleotides, such that [Formula: see text] is the length of the DNA database words being mapped and [Formula: see text] is the length of the query. A solution of this drawback is also presented.

MR Neurography: Advances.

High resolution and high field magnetic resonance neurography (MR neurography, MRN) is shown to have excellent anatomic capability. There have been considerable advances in the technology in the last few years leading to various feasibility studies using different structural and functional imaging approaches in both clinical and research settings. This paper is intended to be a useful seminar for readers who want to gain knowledge of the advancements in the MRN pulse sequences currently used in clinical practice as well as learn about the other techniques on the horizon aimed at better depiction of nerve anatomy, pathology, and potential noninvasive evaluation of nerve degeneration or regeneration.