Current physiotherapy services may not be effective or suitable for certain patients due to lack of motivation, poor adherence to exercises, insufficient supervision and feedback or, in the worst case, refusal to continue with the rehabilitation plan. This paper introduces a novel approach for rehabilitation of upper limbs through KineActiv, a platform based on Microsoft Kinect v2 and developed in Unity Engine. KineActiv proposes exergames to encourage patients to perform rehabilitation exercises prescribed by a specialist, controls the patient′s performance, and corrects execution errors on the fly. KineActiv comprises a web platform where the physiotherapist can review session results, monitor patient health, and adjust rehabilitation routines. We recruited 10 patients for assessing the system usability as well as the system performance. Results show that KineActiv is a usable, enjoyable and reliable system, that does not cause any negative feelings.

Virtually every country in the world is facing an unprecedented challenge: society is aging. Assistive technologies are expected to play a key role in promoting healthy lifestyles in the elderly. This paper presents a Kinect-based interactive system for home-assisted healthy aging, which guides, supervises, and corrects older users when they perform scheduled physical exercises. Interactions take place in gamified environments with augmented reality. Many graphical user interface elements and workflows have been designed considering the sensory, physical and technological shortcomings of the elderly, adapting accordingly the interaction methods, graphics, exercises, tolerance margins, physical goals, and scoring criteria. Experiments involved 57 participants aged between 65 and 80 who performed the same physical routine six times during 15 days. After each session, participants completed a usability survey. Results provided significant evidence that support (1) the effectiveness of the system in assisting older users of different age ranges, (2) the accuracy of the system in measuring progress in physical achievement of the elderly, and (3) a progressive acceptance of the system as it was used. As a main conclusion, the experiments verified that despite their poor technological skills, older people can adapt positively to the use of an interactive assistance tool for active aging if they experience clear benefits.

The increasing availability of remote sensing data raises important challenges in terms of operational data provision and spatial coverage for conducting global studies and analyses. In this regard, existing multi-temporal mosaicing techniques are generally limited to produce spectral image composites without considering the particular features of higher-level biophysical and other derived products, such as those provided by the Sentinel-3 (S3) and Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) tandem missions. To relieve these limitations, this paper proposes a novel multi-temporal mosaicing algorithm specially designed for operational S3 derived products and also studies its applicability within the FLEX mission context. Specifically, we design a new operational methodology to automatically produce multi-temporal mosaics from derived S3/FLEX products with the objective of facilitating the automatic processing of high-level data products where weakly, monthly, seasonal or annual biophysical mosaics can be generated by means of four processes proposed in this work: (1) operational data acquisition, (2) spatial mosaicing and rearrangement, (3) temporal compositing and (4) confidence measures. The experimental part of the work tests the consistency of the proposed framework over different S3 product collections while showing its advantages with respect to other standard mosaicing alternatives. The source codes of this work will be made available for reproducible research.