As the Smart City concept evolves, it necessarily incorporates more sustainability and inclusiveness features. In this context, the mobility of people is still one of the major challenges for cities. Among the most vulnerable group of citizens are the elderly, as they demand special requirements in the design of smart mobility. At the same time, smart cities’ technologies could be used to maintain their quality of life. From an architectural and sociological point of view, smart cities change the meaning and the use of public spaces, from physical meeting places to relational public spaces, in which humans use interposed technological means and information flows. This leads to the concept of Interconnected Public Spaces: a mixture of physical and virtual environments, generating interconnections at a planetary scale, that can be used to attract elderly people for collectively sharing experiences outdoor in public spaces (parks, squares or bus stops, in any city on our planet), increasing their physical form and stimulating them mentally, socially and emotionally. This paper describes the development of an inclusive smart bus stop prototype and the use of its ICT infrastructure to build Interconnected Public Spaces.
The demographic and social changes are causing a gradual increase of the population in situation of dependency. The main concern of the elder people is their health and its consequences in terms of dependence and also is the primary cause of suffering and self-rated ill health. Since elder people have different health problems that the rest of the population, we need a deep change in national's health policy to get adapted to population aging. This paper describes the preliminary advances of "Virtual Cloud Carer" (VCC), a Spanish national R&D project, whose primary purpose is the creation of new health services for dependents and chronics elder lies, using technologies associated with internet of things and cloud computing.
Chronic patients could benefit from the technological advances, but the clinical approaches for this kind of patients are still limited. This paper describes a system for chronic patients monitoring both, in home and external environments. For this purpose, we used novel technologies as big data, cloud computing and internet of things (IoT). Additionally, the system has been validated for three use cases: cardiovascular disease (CVD), hypertension (HPN) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which were selected for their incidence in the population. This system is innovative within e-health, mainly due to the use of a big data architecture based on open-source components, also it provides a scalable and distributed environment for storage and processing of biomedical sensor data. The proposed system enables the incorporation of non-medical data sources in order to improve the self-management of chronic diseases and to develop better strategies for health interventions for chronic and dependents patients.
In this paper we present a new speech emotion dataset on Spanish. The database is created using an elicited approach and is composed by fifty non-actors expressing the Ekman’s six basic emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, plus neutral tone. This article describes how this database has been created from the recording step to the performed crowdsourcing perception test step. The crowdsourcing has facilitated to statistically validate the emotion of each collected audio sample and also to filter noisy data samples. Hence we obtained two datasets EmoSpanishDB and EmoMatchSpanishDB. The first includes those recorded audios that had consensus during the crowdsourcing process. The second selects from EmoSpanishDB only those audios whose emotion also matches with the originally elicited. Last, we present a baseline comparative study between different state of the art machine learning techniques in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall for both datasets. The results obtained for EmoMatchSpanishDB improves the ones obtained for EmoSpanishDB and thereof, we recommend to follow the methodology that was used for the creation of emotional databases.
1 July 2013 in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
The concept of the information society is now a common one, as opposed to the industrial society that dominated the economy during the last years. It is assumed that all sectors should have access to information and reap its benefits. Elderly people are, in this respect, a major challenge, due to their lack of interest in technological progress and their lack of knowledge regarding the potential benefits that information society technologies might have on their lives. The Naviga Project (An Open and Adaptable Platform for the Elderly and Persons with Disability to Access the Information Society) is a European effort, whose main goal is to design and develop a technological platform allowing elder people and persons with disability to access the internet and the information society. Naviga also allows the creation of services targeted to social networks, mind training and personalized health care. In this paper we focus on the health care and information services designed on the project, the technological platform developed and details of two representative elements, the virtual reality hand rehabilitation and the health information intelligent system.