For more than six month we collected data from wireless sensor networks in assisted living apartments ‘de Flank’ in Naarderheem. Together with the elderly users and all researchers we had a dinner at which we explained the first results and new plans.
March 16. 2012, we had the kick-off meeting of the ‘Balance-IT’ project in which we work on intelligent camera surveillance systems for care applications, in particular fall detection, fall prevention and wandering detection. We collaborate with 10 SME’s in the field of computer vision and care technology.
At the Hogeschool van Amsterdam I coordinate a minor programme on ‘Ambient Interaction’. Students learn about new technologies, interaction design and research methods for interaction in ambient intelligent environments. Students perform small research projects for innovative companies like IJsfontein, Ngage media, or living labs like Healthlab or Naarderheem. This week the students and researchers visited Philips Experience Labs. And had some fun on the ice!
In collaboration with the group of Maarten van der Steen from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Hayley Hung and Gwenn Englebienne from my group at UvA, carried out a unique experiment using a wireless sensor network. The experiment addresses two simple questions:
This experiment is quite unique, if only due to the size of the wireless network, consisting of over 200 mobile nodes. To the best of our knowledge, an equivalent experiment of this size has not been conducted before, ever. 70 of the mobile nodes logged accelerometer data. We want to check if we can discriminate between the different wearers from their activity patterns.
Data was gathered during the event ‘30 Years of Informatics Education in Amsterdam’, which was held in ‘De Rode Hoed’. The joint meeting featured talks by both past and present researchers of both VU University Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, addressing the past, present and future of the field.
Because I became professor in ‘Ambient Robotics’ I held my inaugural speech on ‘Living in a Robot’. The full speech is available as web lecture. In my speech I focussed on the societal developments, the technology, the impact on novel research methods like ‘living labs’ and their role for the educational programs.
With the presentation ‘Beyond Ubicomp – Computing is Changing the Way we Live’ Albrecht Schmidt from Stuttgart University closed a successful AmI-11, the international conference on ambient intelligence, that I organized this week in Amsterdam.
With in total more then 220 people visiting AmI-11 (more than 140 visited the 9 workshops, of which a large part participated also in the conference) it was a very lively event, with demos, industry and posters. The theme of the conference being ‘Shaping the Next Decade’, it became clear that ambient intelligence is now more than just interconnected smart devices but has really entered everybody’s life and has tremendous social impact. Therefore the position of the human and the social place of the new technology was stressed by both the opening speech of Emile Aarts, Philips, and in the plenary of Margareth Morris of Intel Labs. We also had a great time at the boat ride and the dinner in De Waag.
In the project ‘Zorgen voor morgen‘ (Taking care of tomorrow), ICT innovations in caregiving are studied. The Hogeschool and University of Amsterdam studied activity monitoring of elderly using sensor networks. We mounted simple sensors in 6 assisted living apartments in Naarderheem. The activities of the inhabitants are automatically recognized with a Hidden Markov model. We compare the performance of the system with the ADL scores of a professional occupational therapist.We presented the system at the closing conference of the project.
In the project we also carried out user studies to investigate the needs and requirements by the end users; both inhabitants and caregivers. A novel methodology was developed by Marije Kanis in the form of a tangible maquette of the elderly home, equipped with sensors. Using this maquette the (future) users of the system could express their ideas about what sort of activities were relevant to be measured, and which persons (caregivers, family, ..) were allowed to see the information.
The program ‘De Rekenkamer’ of 21 October 2011 focused on the costs of elderly care. They made recordings in our lab to see the possibilities of camera surveillance for fall detection.
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With the Health-Lab team we had a workshop on user characterization for telemonitoring and coaching systems. We discussed about differences between user groups, gender etcetera. Results will be incorporated in our system.
The EU FP7 project ACCOMPANY has started! In this project we develop and test robotic systems for ‘re-enablement of elderly’: how can robots help a fragile elder to live independently. We will study novel ways of combining ambient sensors with robot sensors so that the robot system gets a more advanced awareness of the environment of the older user. We collaborate with University of Hertfordshire, Madopa, Fraunhofer Institute, Hogeschool Zuyd, University of Sienna and University of Birmingham