This paper surveys indoor spatial models developed for research fields ranging from mobile robot mapping, to indoor location-based services (LBS), and most recently to context-aware navigation services applied to indoor environments. Over the past few years, several studies have evaluated the potential of spatial models for robot navigation and ubiquitous computing. In this paper we take a slightly different perspective, considering not only the underlying properties of those spatial models, but also to which degree the notion of context can be taken into account when delivering services in indoor environments. Some preliminary recommendations for the development of indoor spatial models are introduced from a context-aware perspective. A taxonomy of models is then presented and assessed with the aim of providing a flexible spatial data model for navigation purposes, and by taking into account the context dimensions

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing adoption of serious games in telerehabilitation by taking advantage of advanced multimedia technologies such as motion capture and virtual reality devices. Current serious game solutions for telerehabilitation suffer form lack of personalization and adaptiveness to patients’ needs and performance. This paper introduces “RehaBot”, a framework for adaptive generation of personalized serious games in the context of remote rehabilitation, using 3D motion tracking and virtual reality environments. A personalized and versatile gaming platform with embedded virtual assistants, called “Rehab bots”, is created. Utilizing these rehab bots, all workout session scenes will include a guide with various sets of motions to direct patients towards performing the prescribed exercises correctly. Furthermore, the rehab bots employ a robust technique to adjust the workout difficulty level in real-time to match the patients’ performance. This technique correlates and matches the patterns of the precalculated motions with patients’ motions to produce a highly engaging gamified workout experience. Moreover, multimodal insights are passed to the users pointing out the joints that did not perform as anticipated along with suggestions to improve the current performance. A clinical study was conducted on patients dealing with chronic neck pain to prove the usability and effectiveness of our adjunctive online physiotherapy solution. Ten participants used the serious gaming platform, while four participants performed the traditional procedure with an active program for neck pain relief, for two weeks (10 min, 10 sessions/2 weeks). Feasibility and user experience measures were collected, and the results of experiments show that patients found our game-based adaptive solution engaging and effective, and most of them could achieve high accuracy in performing the personalized prescribed therapies.

Event detection from social media aims at extracting specific or generic unusual happenings, such as, family reunions, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among others. This paper introduces a new perspective for the hybrid extraction and clustering of social events from big social data streams. We rely on a hybrid learning model, where supervised deep learning is used for feature extraction and topic classification, whereas unsupervised spatial clustering is employed to determine the event whereabouts. We present‘Deep-Eware’, a scalable and efficient event-aware big data platform that integrates data stream and geospatial processing tools for the hybrid extraction and dissemination of spatio-temporal events. We introduce a pure incremental approach for event discovery, by developing unsupervised machine learning and NLP algorithms and by computing events’ lifetime and spatial spanning. The system integrates a semantic keyword generation tool using KeyBERT for dataset preparation. Event classification is performed using CNN and bidirectional LSTM, while hierarchical density-based spatial clustering was used for location-inference of events. We conduct experiments over Twitter datasets to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of our system. The results demonstrate that this hybrid approach for spatio-temporal event extraction has a major advantage for real-time spatio-temporal event detection and tracking from social media. This leads to the development of unparalleled smart city applications, such as event-enriched trip planning, epidemic disease evolution, and proactive emergency management services.