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Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018
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Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 September 2018) | Viewed by 129039

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
Interests: smart sensors; sensing technology; WSN; IoT; ICT; smart grid; energy harvesting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Edward Sazonov

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA
Interests: biomedical signal processing; pattern recognition; wearable sensors
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Human-centered sensor technologies are rapidly evolving and extending their reach to critical applications of wellness and healthcare. Ambient sensors integrate into the home, office, or point-of-care environments, and allows for transparent, unobtrusive monitoring for sensitive populations. Wearable technologies allow to extend monitoring into the community and have been used in many research and clinical applications, including monitoring of healthy, elderly and frail individuals, measuring levels of physical activity in disease-association studies, and so on. Combined, ambient and wearable sensors create unique capabilities of continuous monitoring of physiological health indicators and health-related behaviors at home and in the community. Real-time sensing, signal processing, recognition, characterization and interpretation of health metrics and behaviors form sensor data present a challenging problem. Measured variables of interest quite often are contaminated with artifacts originating from activities of daily living, the complexity and variability of real-life behaviors complicate the inference of the information of interest. Substantial advances in the sensor technology and sensor informatics are needed to develop practically deployable solutions relying on ambient and wearable sensors.

The goal of this Special Issue is to highlight state-of-the-art applications of ambient and wearable sensors with focus on wellness and healthcare applications of the technology. Of special interest is research work that combines ambient and wearable sensing approaches into a unified framework; applications of wearable and/or ambient sensors for continuous assessment of physiology or behaviors; use of sensors in just-in-time interventions. Additionally of interest are advances in the design of the on-body and ambient sensors; wearable biomedical and physiological sensors; associated electronics and software; signal processing; pattern recognition; analysis of high-density sensor data; inferring health and behavioral states from the sensor data; application of ambient and wearable sensors in wellness and healthcare; advances in technologies for ambient assisted living; healthcare and wellness applications based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

Prof. Dr. Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay
Prof. Dr. Edward Sazonov
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (19 papers)

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Research

32 pages, 1166 KiB  
Article
Towards a Cascading Reasoning Framework to Support Responsive Ambient-Intelligent Healthcare Interventions
by Mathias De Brouwer, Femke Ongenae, Pieter Bonte and Filip De Turck
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3514; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103514 - 18 Oct 2018
Cited by 26 | Viewed by 4209
Abstract
In hospitals and smart nursing homes, ambient-intelligent care rooms are equipped with many sensors. They can monitor environmental and body parameters, and detect wearable devices of patients and nurses. Hence, they continuously produce data streams. This offers the opportunity to collect, integrate and [...] Read more.
In hospitals and smart nursing homes, ambient-intelligent care rooms are equipped with many sensors. They can monitor environmental and body parameters, and detect wearable devices of patients and nurses. Hence, they continuously produce data streams. This offers the opportunity to collect, integrate and interpret this data in a context-aware manner, with a focus on reactivity and autonomy. However, doing this in real time on huge data streams is a challenging task. In this context, cascading reasoning is an emerging research approach that exploits the trade-off between reasoning complexity and data velocity by constructing a processing hierarchy of reasoners. Therefore, a cascading reasoning framework is proposed in this paper. A generic architecture is presented allowing to create a pipeline of reasoning components hosted locally, in the edge of the network, and in the cloud. The architecture is implemented on a pervasive health use case, where medically diagnosed patients are constantly monitored, and alarming situations can be detected and reacted upon in a context-aware manner. A performance evaluation shows that the total system latency is mostly lower than 5 s, allowing for responsive intervention by a nurse in alarming situations. Using the evaluation results, the benefits of cascading reasoning for healthcare are analyzed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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16 pages, 12122 KiB  
Article
StraightenUp+: Monitoring of Posture during Daily Activities for Older Persons Using Wearable Sensors
by Gabriela Cajamarca, Iyubanit Rodríguez, Valeria Herskovic, Mauricio Campos and Juan Carlos Riofrío
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3409; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103409 - 11 Oct 2018
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5692
Abstract
Monitoring the posture of older persons using portable sensors while they carry out daily activities can facilitate the process of generating indicators with which to evaluate their health and quality of life. The majority of current research into such sensors focuses primarily on [...] Read more.
Monitoring the posture of older persons using portable sensors while they carry out daily activities can facilitate the process of generating indicators with which to evaluate their health and quality of life. The majority of current research into such sensors focuses primarily on their functionality and accuracy, and minimal effort is dedicated to understanding the experience of older persons who interact with the devices. This study proposes a wearable device to identify the bodily postures of older persons, while also looking into the perceptions of the users. For the purposes of this study, thirty independent and semi-independent older persons undertook eight different types of physical activity, including: walking, raising arms, lowering arms, leaning forward, sitting, sitting upright, transitioning from standing to sitting, and transitioning from sitting to standing. The data was classified offline, achieving an accuracy of 93.5%, while overall device user perception was positive. Participants rated the usability of the device, in addition to their overall user experience, highly. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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13 pages, 1758 KiB  
Article
A Biomechanical Re-Examination of Physical Activity Measurement with Accelerometers
by Jonatan Fridolfsson, Mats Börjesson and Daniel Arvidsson
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3399; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103399 - 11 Oct 2018
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 4698
Abstract
ActiGraph is the most common accelerometer in physical activity research, but it has measurement errors due to restrictive frequency filtering. This study investigated biomechanically how different frequency filtering of accelerometer data affects assessment of activity intensity and age-group differences when measuring physical activity. [...] Read more.
ActiGraph is the most common accelerometer in physical activity research, but it has measurement errors due to restrictive frequency filtering. This study investigated biomechanically how different frequency filtering of accelerometer data affects assessment of activity intensity and age-group differences when measuring physical activity. Data from accelerometer at the hip and motion capture system was recorded during treadmill walking and running from 30 subjects in three different age groups: 10, 15, and >20 years old. Acceleration data was processed to ActiGraph counts with original band-pass filter at 1.66 Hz, to counts with wider filter at either 4 or 10 Hz, and to unfiltered acceleration according to “Euclidian norm minus one” (ENMO). Internal and external power, step frequency, and vertical displacement of center of mass (VD) were estimated from the motion capture data. Widening the frequency filter improved the relationship between higher locomotion speed and counts. It also removed age-group differences and decreased within-group variation. While ActiGraph counts were almost exclusively explained by VD, the counts from the 10 Hz filter were explained by VD and step frequency to an equal degree. In conclusion, a wider frequency filter improves assessment of physical activity intensity by more accurately capturing individual gait patterns. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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20 pages, 7042 KiB  
Article
FaceLooks: A Smart Headband for Signaling Face-to-Face Behavior
by Taku Hachisu, Yadong Pan, Soichiro Matsuda, Baptiste Bourreau and Kenji Suzuki
Sensors 2018, 18(7), 2066; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18072066 - 28 Jun 2018
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 6036
Abstract
Eye-to-eye contact and facial expressions are key communicators, yet there has been little done to evaluate the basic properties of face-to-face; mutual head orientation behaviors. This may be because there is no practical device available to measure the behavior. This paper presents a [...] Read more.
Eye-to-eye contact and facial expressions are key communicators, yet there has been little done to evaluate the basic properties of face-to-face; mutual head orientation behaviors. This may be because there is no practical device available to measure the behavior. This paper presents a novel headband-type wearable device called FaceLooks, used for measuring the time of the face-to-face state with identity of the partner, using an infrared emitter and receiver. It can also be used for behavioral healthcare applications, such as for children with developmental disorders who exhibit difficulties with the behavior, by providing awareness through the visual feedback from the partner’s device. Two laboratory experiments showed the device’s detection range and response time, tested with a pair of dummy heads. Another laboratory experiment was done with human participants with gaze trackers and showed the device’s substantial agreement with a human observer. We then conducted two field studies involving children with intellectual disabilities and/or autism spectrum disorders. The first study showed that the devices could be used in the school setting, observing the children did not remove the devices. The second study showed that the durations of children’s face-to-face behavior could be increased under a visual feedback condition. The device shows its potential to be used in therapy and experimental fields because of its wearability and its ability to quantify and shape face-to-face behavior. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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17 pages, 1341 KiB  
Article
A User-Adaptive Algorithm for Activity Recognition Based on K-Means Clustering, Local Outlier Factor, and Multivariate Gaussian Distribution
by Shizhen Zhao, Wenfeng Li and Jingjing Cao
Sensors 2018, 18(6), 1850; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18061850 - 06 Jun 2018
Cited by 49 | Viewed by 5063
Abstract
Mobile activity recognition is significant to the development of human-centric pervasive applications including elderly care, personalized recommendations, etc. Nevertheless, the distribution of inertial sensor data can be influenced to a great extent by varying users. This means that the performance of an activity [...] Read more.
Mobile activity recognition is significant to the development of human-centric pervasive applications including elderly care, personalized recommendations, etc. Nevertheless, the distribution of inertial sensor data can be influenced to a great extent by varying users. This means that the performance of an activity recognition classifier trained by one user’s dataset will degenerate when transferred to others. In this study, we focus on building a personalized classifier to detect four categories of human activities: light intensity activity, moderate intensity activity, vigorous intensity activity, and fall. In order to solve the problem caused by different distributions of inertial sensor signals, a user-adaptive algorithm based on K-Means clustering, local outlier factor (LOF), and multivariate Gaussian distribution (MGD) is proposed. To automatically cluster and annotate a specific user’s activity data, an improved K-Means algorithm with a novel initialization method is designed. By quantifying the samples’ informative degree in a labeled individual dataset, the most profitable samples can be selected for activity recognition model adaption. Through experiments, we conclude that our proposed models can adapt to new users with good recognition performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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11 pages, 568 KiB  
Article
Integrated Framework of Load Monitoring by a Combination of Smartphone Applications, Wearables and Point-of-Care Testing Provides Feedback that Allows Individual Responsive Adjustments to Activities of Daily Living
by Peter Düking, Silvia Achtzehn, Hans-Christer Holmberg and Billy Sperlich
Sensors 2018, 18(5), 1632; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18051632 - 19 May 2018
Cited by 42 | Viewed by 8244
Abstract
Athletes schedule their training and recovery in periods, often utilizing a pre-defined strategy. To avoid underperformance and/or compromised health, the external load during training should take into account the individual’s physiological and perceptual responses. No single variable provides an adequate basis for planning, [...] Read more.
Athletes schedule their training and recovery in periods, often utilizing a pre-defined strategy. To avoid underperformance and/or compromised health, the external load during training should take into account the individual’s physiological and perceptual responses. No single variable provides an adequate basis for planning, but continuous monitoring of a combination of several indicators of internal and external load during training, recovery and off-training as well may allow individual responsive adjustments of a training program in an effective manner. From a practical perspective, including that of coaches, monitoring of potential changes in health and performance should ideally be valid, reliable and sensitive, as well as time-efficient, easily applicable, non-fatiguing and as non-invasive as possible. Accordingly, smartphone applications, wearable sensors and point-of-care testing appear to offer a suitable monitoring framework allowing responsive adjustments to exercise prescription. Here, we outline 24-h monitoring of selected parameters by these technologies that (i) allows responsive adjustments of exercise programs, (ii) enhances performance and/or (iii) reduces the risk for overuse, injury and/or illness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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17 pages, 332 KiB  
Article
Feature Extraction and Selection for Myoelectric Control Based on Wearable EMG Sensors
by Angkoon Phinyomark, Rami N. Khushaba and Erik Scheme
Sensors 2018, 18(5), 1615; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18051615 - 18 May 2018
Cited by 210 | Viewed by 11129
Abstract
Specialized myoelectric sensors have been used in prosthetics for decades, but, with recent advancements in wearable sensors, wireless communication and embedded technologies, wearable electromyographic (EMG) armbands are now commercially available for the general public. Due to physical, processing, and cost constraints, however, these [...] Read more.
Specialized myoelectric sensors have been used in prosthetics for decades, but, with recent advancements in wearable sensors, wireless communication and embedded technologies, wearable electromyographic (EMG) armbands are now commercially available for the general public. Due to physical, processing, and cost constraints, however, these armbands typically sample EMG signals at a lower frequency (e.g., 200 Hz for the Myo armband) than their clinical counterparts. It remains unclear whether existing EMG feature extraction methods, which largely evolved based on EMG signals sampled at 1000 Hz or above, are still effective for use with these emerging lower-bandwidth systems. In this study, the effects of sampling rate (low: 200 Hz vs. high: 1000 Hz) on the classification of hand and finger movements were evaluated for twenty-six different individual features and eight sets of multiple features using a variety of datasets comprised of both able-bodied and amputee subjects. The results show that, on average, classification accuracies drop significantly ( p < 0.05) from 2% to 56% depending on the evaluated features when using the lower sampling rate, and especially for transradial amputee subjects. Importantly, for these subjects, no number of existing features can be combined to compensate for this loss in higher-frequency content. From these results, we identify two new sets of recommended EMG features (along with a novel feature, L-scale) that provide better performance for these emerging low-sampling rate systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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19 pages, 7250 KiB  
Article
Heart Rate Estimated from Body Movements at Six Degrees of Freedom by Convolutional Neural Networks
by Hyunwoo Lee and Mincheol Whang
Sensors 2018, 18(5), 1392; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18051392 - 01 May 2018
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 4259
Abstract
Cardiac activity has been monitored continuously in daily life by virtue of advanced medical instruments with microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology. Seismocardiography (SCG) has been considered to be free from the burden of measurement for cardiac activity, but it has been limited in its [...] Read more.
Cardiac activity has been monitored continuously in daily life by virtue of advanced medical instruments with microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology. Seismocardiography (SCG) has been considered to be free from the burden of measurement for cardiac activity, but it has been limited in its application in daily life. The most important issues regarding SCG are to overcome the limitations of motion artifacts due to the sensitivity of motion sensor. Although novel adaptive filters for noise cancellation have been developed, they depend on the researcher’s subjective decision. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract significant features from data automatically without a researcher’s subjective decision, so that signal processing has been recently replaced as CNNs. Thus, this study aimed to develop a novel method to enhance heart rate estimation from thoracic movement by CNNs. Thoracic movement was measured by six-axis accelerometer and gyroscope signals using a wearable sensor that can be worn by simply clipping on clothes. The dataset was collected from 30 participants (15 males, 15 females) using 12 measurement conditions according to two physical conditions (i.e., relaxed and aroused conditions), three body postures (i.e., sitting, standing, and supine), and six movement speeds (i.e., 3.2, 4.5, 5.8, 6.4, 8.5, and 10.3 km/h). The motion data (i.e., six-axis accelerometer and gyroscope) and heart rate (i.e., electrocardiogram (ECG)) were determined as the input data and labels in the dataset, respectively. The CNN model was developed based on VGG Net and optimized by testing according to network depth and data augmentation. The ensemble network of the VGG-16 without data augmentation and the VGG-19 with data augmentation was determined as optimal architecture for generalization. As a result, the proposed method showed higher accuracy than the previous SCG method using signal processing in most measurement conditions. The three main contributions are as follows: (1) the CNN model enhanced heart rate estimation with the benefits of automatic feature extraction from the data; (2) the proposed method was compared with the previous SCG method using signal processing; (3) the method was tested in 12 measurement conditions related to daily motion for a more practical application. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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12 pages, 375 KiB  
Article
Using Sleep Time Data from Wearable Sensors for Early Detection of Migraine Attacks
by Pekka Siirtola, Heli Koskimäki, Henna Mönttinen and Juha Röning
Sensors 2018, 18(5), 1374; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18051374 - 28 Apr 2018
Cited by 26 | Viewed by 7427
Abstract
The migraine is a chronic, incapacitating neurovascular disorder, characterized by attacks of severe headache and autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Among the working age population, the costs of migraine are 111 billion euros in Europe alone. The early detection of migraine attacks would reduce [...] Read more.
The migraine is a chronic, incapacitating neurovascular disorder, characterized by attacks of severe headache and autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Among the working age population, the costs of migraine are 111 billion euros in Europe alone. The early detection of migraine attacks would reduce these costs, as it would shorten the migraine attack by enabling correct timing when taking preventive medication. In this article, whether it is possible to detect migraine attacks beforehand using wearable sensors is studied, and t preliminary results about how accurate the recognition can be are provided. The data for the study were collected from seven study subjects using a wrist-worn Empatica E4 sensor, which measures acceleration, galvanic skin response, blood volume pulse, heart rate and heart rate variability, and temperature. Only sleep time data were used in this study. A novel method to increase the number of training samples is introduced, and the results show that, using personal recognition models and quadratic discriminant analysis as a classifier, balanced accuracy for detecting attacks one night prior is over 84%. While this detection rate is high, the results also show that balance accuracy varies greatly between study subjects, which shows how complicated the problem actually is. However, at this point, the results are preliminary as the data set contains only seven study subjects, so these do not cover all migraine types. If the findings of this article can be confirmed in a larger population, it may potentially contribute to early diagnosis of migraine attacks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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18 pages, 2745 KiB  
Article
Real-Life/Real-Time Elderly Fall Detection with a Triaxial Accelerometer
by Angela Sucerquia, José David López and Jesús Francisco Vargas-Bonilla
Sensors 2018, 18(4), 1101; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18041101 - 05 Apr 2018
Cited by 76 | Viewed by 8904
Abstract
The consequences of a fall on an elderly person can be reduced if the accident is attended by medical personnel within the first hour. Independent elderly people often stay alone for long periods of time, being in more risk if they suffer a [...] Read more.
The consequences of a fall on an elderly person can be reduced if the accident is attended by medical personnel within the first hour. Independent elderly people often stay alone for long periods of time, being in more risk if they suffer a fall. The literature offers several approaches for detecting falls with embedded devices or smartphones using a triaxial accelerometer. Most of these approaches have not been tested with the target population or cannot be feasibly implemented in real-life conditions. In this work, we propose a fall detection methodology based on a non-linear classification feature and a Kalman filter with a periodicity detector to reduce the false positive rate. This methodology requires a sampling rate of only 25 Hz; it does not require large computations or memory and it is robust among devices. We tested our approach with the SisFall dataset achieving 99.4% of accuracy. We then validated it with a new round of simulated activities with young adults and an elderly person. Finally, we give the devices to three elderly persons for full-day validations. They continued with their normal life and the devices behaved as expected. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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16 pages, 7282 KiB  
Article
Multi-Residential Activity Labelling in Smart Homes with Wearable Tags Using BLE Technology
by Ghassem Mokhtari, Amjad Anvari-Moghaddam, Qing Zhang and Mohanraj Karunanithi
Sensors 2018, 18(3), 908; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18030908 - 19 Mar 2018
Cited by 26 | Viewed by 4621
Abstract
Smart home platforms show promising outcomes to provide a better quality of life for residents in their homes. One of the main challenges that exists with these platforms in multi-residential houses is activity labeling. As most of the activity sensors do not provide [...] Read more.
Smart home platforms show promising outcomes to provide a better quality of life for residents in their homes. One of the main challenges that exists with these platforms in multi-residential houses is activity labeling. As most of the activity sensors do not provide any information regarding the identity of the person who triggers them, it is difficult to label the sensor events in multi-residential smart homes. To deal with this challenge, individual localization in different areas can be a promising solution. The localization information can be used to automatically label the activity sensor data to individuals. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is a promising technology for this application due to how easy it is to implement and its low energy footprint. In this approach, individuals wear a tag that broadcasts its unique identity (ID) in certain time intervals, while fixed scanners listen to the broadcasting packet to localize the tag and the individual. However, the localization accuracy of this method depends greatly on different settings of broadcasting signal strength, and the time interval of BLE tags. To achieve the best localization accuracy, this paper studies the impacts of different advertising time intervals and power levels, and proposes an efficient and applicable algorithm to select optimal value settings of BLE sensors. Moreover, it proposes an automatic activity labeling method, through integrating BLE localization information and ambient sensor data. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed structure is also demonstrated in a real multi-resident smart home scenario. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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16 pages, 1236 KiB  
Article
Validation of the VitaBit Sit–Stand Tracker: Detecting Sitting, Standing, and Activity Patterns
by Nathalie M. Berninger, Gill A. Ten Hoor and Guy Plasqui
Sensors 2018, 18(3), 877; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18030877 - 15 Mar 2018
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 5978
Abstract
Sedentary behavior (SB) has detrimental consequences and cannot be compensated for through moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (PA). In order to understand and mitigate SB, tools for measuring and monitoring SB are essential. While current direct-to-customer wearables focus on PA, the VitaBit validated in this [...] Read more.
Sedentary behavior (SB) has detrimental consequences and cannot be compensated for through moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (PA). In order to understand and mitigate SB, tools for measuring and monitoring SB are essential. While current direct-to-customer wearables focus on PA, the VitaBit validated in this study was developed to focus on SB. It was tested in a laboratory and in a free-living condition, comparing it to direct observation and to a current best-practice device, the ActiGraph, on a minute-by-minute basis. In the laboratory, the VitaBit yielded specificity and negative predictive rates (NPR) of above 91.2% for sitting and standing, while sensitivity and precision ranged from 74.6% to 85.7%. For walking, all performance values exceeded 97.3%. In the free-living condition, the device revealed performance of over 72.6% for sitting with the ActiGraph as criterion. While sensitivity and precision for standing and walking ranged from 48.2% to 68.7%, specificity and NPR exceeded 83.9%. According to the laboratory findings, high performance for sitting, standing, and walking makes the VitaBit eligible for SB monitoring. As the results are not transferrable to daily life activities, a direct observation study in a free-living setting is recommended. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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13 pages, 4417 KiB  
Article
Wearable Smart System for Visually Impaired People
by Ali Jasim Ramadhan
Sensors 2018, 18(3), 843; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18030843 - 13 Mar 2018
Cited by 95 | Viewed by 15674
Abstract
In this paper, we present a wearable smart system to help visually impaired persons (VIPs) walk by themselves through the streets, navigate in public places, and seek assistance. The main components of the system are a microcontroller board, various sensors, cellular communication and [...] Read more.
In this paper, we present a wearable smart system to help visually impaired persons (VIPs) walk by themselves through the streets, navigate in public places, and seek assistance. The main components of the system are a microcontroller board, various sensors, cellular communication and GPS modules, and a solar panel. The system employs a set of sensors to track the path and alert the user of obstacles in front of them. The user is alerted by a sound emitted through a buzzer and by vibrations on the wrist, which is helpful when the user has hearing loss or is in a noisy environment. In addition, the system alerts people in the surroundings when the user stumbles over or requires assistance, and the alert, along with the system location, is sent as a phone message to registered mobile phones of family members and caregivers. In addition, the registered phones can be used to retrieve the system location whenever required and activate real-time tracking of the VIP. We tested the system prototype and verified its functionality and effectiveness. The proposed system has more features than other similar systems. We expect it to be a useful tool to improve the quality of life of VIPs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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20 pages, 3494 KiB  
Article
Human Identification by Cross-Correlation and Pattern Matching of Personalized Heartbeat: Influence of ECG Leads and Reference Database Size
by Irena Jekova, Vessela Krasteva and Ramun Schmid
Sensors 2018, 18(2), 372; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18020372 - 27 Jan 2018
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5599
Abstract
Human identification (ID) is a biometric task, comparing single input sample to many stored templates to identify an individual in a reference database. This paper aims to present the perspectives of personalized heartbeat pattern for reliable ECG-based identification. The investigations are using a [...] Read more.
Human identification (ID) is a biometric task, comparing single input sample to many stored templates to identify an individual in a reference database. This paper aims to present the perspectives of personalized heartbeat pattern for reliable ECG-based identification. The investigations are using a database with 460 pairs of 12-lead resting electrocardiograms (ECG) with 10-s durations recorded at time-instants T1 and T2 > T1 + 1 year. Intra-subject long-term ECG stability and inter-subject variability of personalized PQRST (500 ms) and QRS (100 ms) patterns is quantified via cross-correlation, amplitude ratio and pattern matching between T1 and T2 using 7 features × 12-leads. Single and multi-lead ID models are trained on the first 230 ECG pairs. Their validation on 10, 20, ... 230 reference subjects (RS) from the remaining 230 ECG pairs shows: (i) two best single-lead ID models using lead II for a small population RS = (10–140) with identification accuracy AccID = (89.4–67.2)% and aVF for a large population RS = (140–230) with AccID = (67.2–63.9)%; (ii) better performance of the 6-lead limb vs. the 6-lead chest ID model—(91.4–76.1)% vs. (90.9–70)% for RS = (10–230); (iii) best performance of the 12-lead ID model—(98.4–87.4)% for RS = (10–230). The tolerable reference database size, keeping AccID > 80%, is RS = 30 in the single-lead ID scenario (II); RS = 50 (6 chest leads); RS = 100 (6 limb leads), RS > 230—maximal population in this study (12-lead ECG). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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12 pages, 3190 KiB  
Article
An Enhanced Method to Estimate Heart Rate from Seismocardiography via Ensemble Averaging of Body Movements at Six Degrees of Freedom
by Hyunwoo Lee, Hana Lee and Mincheol Whang
Sensors 2018, 18(1), 238; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18010238 - 15 Jan 2018
Cited by 31 | Viewed by 5133
Abstract
Continuous cardiac monitoring has been developed to evaluate cardiac activity outside of clinical environments due to the advancement of novel instruments. Seismocardiography (SCG) is one of the vital components that could develop such a monitoring system. Although SCG has been presented with a [...] Read more.
Continuous cardiac monitoring has been developed to evaluate cardiac activity outside of clinical environments due to the advancement of novel instruments. Seismocardiography (SCG) is one of the vital components that could develop such a monitoring system. Although SCG has been presented with a lower accuracy, this novel cardiac indicator has been steadily proposed over traditional methods such as electrocardiography (ECG). Thus, it is necessary to develop an enhanced method by combining the significant cardiac indicators. In this study, the six-axis signals of accelerometer and gyroscope were measured and integrated by the L2 normalization and multi-dimensional kineticardiography (MKCG) approaches, respectively. The waveforms of accelerometer and gyroscope were standardized and combined via ensemble averaging, and the heart rate was calculated from the dominant frequency. Thirty participants (15 females) were asked to stand or sit in relaxed and aroused conditions. Their SCG was measured during the task. As a result, proposed method showed higher accuracy than traditional SCG methods in all measurement conditions. The three main contributions are as follows: (1) the ensemble averaging enhanced heart rate estimation with the benefits of the six-axis signals; (2) the proposed method was compared with the previous SCG method that employs fewer-axis; and (3) the method was tested in various measurement conditions for a more practical application. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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20 pages, 5313 KiB  
Article
A Continuous Identity Authentication Scheme Based on Physiological and Behavioral Characteristics
by Guannan Wu, Jian Wang, Yongrong Zhang and Shuai Jiang
Sensors 2018, 18(1), 179; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18010179 - 10 Jan 2018
Cited by 35 | Viewed by 5828
Abstract
Wearable devices have flourished over the past ten years providing great advantages to people and, recently, they have also been used for identity authentication. Most of the authentication methods adopt a one-time authentication manner which cannot provide continuous certification. To address this issue, [...] Read more.
Wearable devices have flourished over the past ten years providing great advantages to people and, recently, they have also been used for identity authentication. Most of the authentication methods adopt a one-time authentication manner which cannot provide continuous certification. To address this issue, we present a two-step authentication method based on an own-built fingertip sensor device which can capture motion data (e.g., acceleration and angular velocity) and physiological data (e.g., a photoplethysmography (PPG) signal) simultaneously. When the device is worn on the user’s fingertip, it will automatically recognize whether the wearer is a legitimate user or not. More specifically, multisensor data is collected and analyzed to extract representative and intensive features. Then, human activity recognition is applied as the first step to enhance the practicability of the authentication system. After correctly discriminating the motion state, a one-class machine learning algorithm is applied for identity authentication as the second step. When a user wears the device, the authentication process is carried on automatically at set intervals. Analyses were conducted using data from 40 individuals across various operational scenarios. Extensive experiments were executed to examine the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieved an average accuracy rate of 98.5% and an F1-score of 86.67%. Our results suggest that the proposed scheme provides a feasible and practical solution for authentication. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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1679 KiB  
Article
An Event-Triggered Machine Learning Approach for Accelerometer-Based Fall Detection
by I Putu Edy Suardiyana Putra, James Brusey, Elena Gaura and Rein Vesilo
Sensors 2018, 18(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18010020 - 22 Dec 2017
Cited by 86 | Viewed by 7696
Abstract
The fixed-size non-overlapping sliding window (FNSW) and fixed-size overlapping sliding window (FOSW) approaches are the most commonly used data-segmentation techniques in machine learning-based fall detection using accelerometer sensors. However, these techniques do not segment by fall stages (pre-impact, impact, and post-impact) and thus [...] Read more.
The fixed-size non-overlapping sliding window (FNSW) and fixed-size overlapping sliding window (FOSW) approaches are the most commonly used data-segmentation techniques in machine learning-based fall detection using accelerometer sensors. However, these techniques do not segment by fall stages (pre-impact, impact, and post-impact) and thus useful information is lost, which may reduce the detection rate of the classifier. Aligning the segment with the fall stage is difficult, as the segment size varies. We propose an event-triggered machine learning (EvenT-ML) approach that aligns each fall stage so that the characteristic features of the fall stages are more easily recognized. To evaluate our approach, two publicly accessible datasets were used. Classification and regression tree (CART), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), logistic regression (LR), and the support vector machine (SVM) were used to train the classifiers. EvenT-ML gives classifier F-scores of 98% for a chest-worn sensor and 92% for a waist-worn sensor, and significantly reduces the computational cost compared with the FNSW- and FOSW-based approaches, with reductions of up to 8-fold and 78-fold, respectively. EvenT-ML achieves a significantly better F-score than existing fall detection approaches. These results indicate that aligning feature segments with fall stages significantly increases the detection rate and reduces the computational cost. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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1200 KiB  
Article
Automating the Timed Up and Go Test Using a Depth Camera
by Amandine Dubois, Titus Bihl and Jean-Pierre Bresciani
Sensors 2018, 18(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18010014 - 22 Dec 2017
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5406
Abstract
Fall prevention is a human, economic and social issue. The Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is widely used to identify individuals with a high fall risk. However, this test has been criticized because its “diagnostic” is too dependent on the conditions in [...] Read more.
Fall prevention is a human, economic and social issue. The Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is widely used to identify individuals with a high fall risk. However, this test has been criticized because its “diagnostic” is too dependent on the conditions in which it is performed and on the healthcare professionals running it. We used the Microsoft Kinect ambient sensor to automate this test in order to reduce the subjectivity of outcome measures and to provide additional information about patient performance. Each phase of the TUG test was automatically identified from the depth images of the Kinect. Our algorithms accurately measured and assessed the elements usually measured by healthcare professionals. Specifically, average TUG test durations provided by our system differed by only 0.001 s from those measured by clinicians. In addition, our system automatically extracted several additional parameters that allowed us to accurately discriminate low and high fall risk individuals. These additional parameters notably related to the gait and turn pattern, the sitting position and the duration of each phase. Coupling our algorithms to the Kinect ambient sensor can therefore reliably be used to automate the TUG test and perform a more objective, robust and detailed assessment of fall risk. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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3844 KiB  
Article
Position Tracking During Human Walking Using an Integrated Wearable Sensing System
by Giulio Zizzo and Lei Ren
Sensors 2017, 17(12), 2866; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17122866 - 10 Dec 2017
Cited by 26 | Viewed by 5929
Abstract
Progress has been made enabling expensive, high-end inertial measurement units (IMUs) to be used as tracking sensors. However, the cost of these IMUs is prohibitive to their widespread use, and hence the potential of low-cost IMUs is investigated in this study. A wearable [...] Read more.
Progress has been made enabling expensive, high-end inertial measurement units (IMUs) to be used as tracking sensors. However, the cost of these IMUs is prohibitive to their widespread use, and hence the potential of low-cost IMUs is investigated in this study. A wearable low-cost sensing system consisting of IMUs and ultrasound sensors was developed. Core to this system is an extended Kalman filter (EKF), which provides both zero-velocity updates (ZUPTs) and Heuristic Drift Reduction (HDR). The IMU data was combined with ultrasound range measurements to improve accuracy. When a map of the environment was available, a particle filter was used to impose constraints on the possible user motions. The system was therefore composed of three subsystems: IMUs, ultrasound sensors, and a particle filter. A Vicon motion capture system was used to provide ground truth information, enabling validation of the sensing system. Using only the IMU, the system showed loop misclosure errors of 1% with a maximum error of 4–5% during walking. The addition of the ultrasound sensors resulted in a 15% reduction in the total accumulated error. Lastly, the particle filter was capable of providing noticeable corrections, which could keep the tracking error below 2% after the first few steps. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wearable and Ambient Sensors for Healthcare and Wellness Applications 2018)
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