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- Intelligent Wheelchair Manual Control MethodsPublication . Faria, Brígida Mónica; Ferreira, Luís Miguel; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, Nuno; Petry, MarceloAssistive Technologies may greatly contribute to give autonomy and independence for individuals with physical limitations. Electric wheelchairs are examples of those assistive technologies and nowadays each time becoming more intelligent due to the use of technology that provides assisted safer driving. Usually, the user controls the electric wheelchair with a conventional analog joystick. However, this implies the need for an appropriate methodology to map the position of the joystick handle, in a Cartesian coordinate system, to the wheelchair wheels intended velocities. This mapping is very important since it will determine the response behavior of the wheelchair to the user manual control. This paper describes the implementation of several joystick mappings in an intelligent wheelchair (IW) prototype. Experiments were performed in a realistic simulator using cerebral palsy users with distinct driving abilities. The users had 6 different joystick control mapping methods and for each user the usability and the users’ preference order was measured. The results achieved show that a linear mapping, with appropriate parameters, between the joystick’s coordinates and the wheelchair wheel speeds is preferred by the majority of the users.
- Patient classification and automatic configuration of an intelligent wheelchairPublication . Faria, Brígida Mónica; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, Nuno; Soares, João Couto; Vasconcelos, SérgioThe access to instruments that allow higher autonomy to people is increasing and the scientific community is giving special attention on designing and developing such systems. Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are an example of how the knowledge on robotics and artificial intelligence may be applied to this field. IWs can have different interfaces and multimodal interfaces enabling several inputs such as head movements, joystick, facial expressions and voice commands. This paper describes the foundations for creating a simple procedure for extracting user profiles, which can be used to adequately select the best IW command mode for each user. The methodology consists on an interactive wizard composed by a flexible set of simple tasks presented to the user, and a method for extracting and analyzing the user’s execution of those tasks. The results showed that it is possible to extract simple user profiles, using the proposed method.
- A Survey on Intelligent Wheelchair Prototypes and SimulatorsPublication . Faria, Brigida Monica; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, NunoNowadays more than 700 million persons around the world have some kind of disability or handicap. During the last decades the elderly population in most of the European countries and across all the most civilized countries is also growing at an increasing pace. This phenomenon is receiving increasing attention from the scientific community, during the last years, and several solutions are being proposed in order to allow a more independent life to the people belonging to those groups. In this context Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are instruments that are a natural development of the scientific work that has been conducted to improve the traditional Wheelchair characteristics using health informatics, assistive robotics and human computer interface technologies. Some of the most important features of the IW are their navigation capabilities and automatic adaptation of their interface to the user. This paper presents the evolution and state of art concerning IWs prototypes and simulators and intelligent human-computer interfaces in the context of this devices. Our study enabled us to conclude that although several Intelligent Wheelchair prototypes are being developed in a large number of research projects, around the world, the adaptation of their user interface to the patient is an often neglected research topic. Thus, projects aiming at developing new concepts of Intelligent Wheelchairs are needed mainly using multimodal interfaces and wheelchair interfaces adapted to the user characteristics.
- Intelligent wheelchair driving: a comparative study of cerebral palsy adults with distinct boccia experiencePublication . Faria, Brígida Mónica; Silva, Ana; Faias, Joaquim; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, NunoAn electronic wheelchair facilitates the autonomy and independence of a person, however specific cognitive, sensorial and perceptual skills are needed to conduct the assistive technology. These skills are also inherent to the sport boccia. Thus, the aim of this study is to understand the relationship between the experience of the participant in driving a wheelchair in relation to their autonomy and independence and also examine the practice of boccia in relation to the cognitive skills and performance in driving an intelligent wheelchair using a simulator. It was performed an evaluation of 28 participants, 6 of whom had no experience driving an electronic wheelchair and 22 had experience, 15 practice boccia and 13 did not practice this type of adapted sports. In the collection of data was tested three interfaces command of a smart wheelchair in a simulator. It was showed a good performance of the participants with experience in using electronic wheelchair and practitioners of boccia. It was also possible to observe that the autonomous and independent participants showed good results.
- Assessing diabetes health literacy, knowledge and empowerment in northern PortugalPublication . Morais, Carminda S.; Pimenta, Rui; Ferreira, Pedro Lopes; Boavida, José M.; Amorim, José P.We evaluated the disease management, knowledge and quality of life (QoL) of people with type 2 diabetes, followed in the ambulatory of a Hospital in the North of Portugal. A questionnaire of socio-demographic and clinical characterization, and Portuguese versions of the DES-SF, DKT and EQ-5D were administered to a random sample of 260 individuals. The results showed that people in general feel able of self-management, with a mean±SD score of 3.7±0.7. DKT registered 63.4±12.3% of correct answers among diabetes non-insulin-treated individuals and 65.7±12.4% among the insulin-treated (p<0.001). The QoL, evaluated through EQ-5D index, presented a mean value of 0.65±0.3. We evidenced a significant positive correlation between the ability to control, the knowledge and the QoL. The conclusions obtained may help promote QoL and literacy enhancement, as well as the empowerment of individuals with type 2 diabetes.
- Using serious games to train children and elicit fire safety behaviourPublication . Almeida, João E.; Rossetti, Rosaldo J. F.; Faria, Brígida Mónica; Coelho, António LeçaSerious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is two-fold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.
- Invited paper: multimodal interface for an intelligent wheelchairPublication . Reis, Luís Paulo; Faria, Brigida Monica; Vasconcelos, Sérgio; Lau, NunoSince the demographics of population, with respect to age, are continuously changing, politicians and scientists start to pay more attention to the needs of senior individuals. Additionally, the well-being and needs of disabled individuals are also becoming highly valued in the political and entrepreneurial society. Intelligent wheelchairs are adapted electric wheelchairs with environmental perception, semi-autonomous behaviour and flexible human-machine-interaction. This paper presents the specification and development of a user-friendly multimodal interface, as a component of the IntellWheels Platform project. The developed prototype combines several input modules, allowing the control of the wheelchair through flexible user defined input sequences of distinct types (speech, facial expressions, head movements and joystick). To validate the effectiveness of the prototype, two experiments were performed with a number of individuals who tested the system firstly by driving a simulated wheelchair in a virtual environment. The second experiment was performed using the real IntellWheels wheelchair prototype. The results achieved proved that the multimodal interface may be successfully used by people, due to the interaction flexibility it provides.
- Intelligent wheelchair driving: bridging the gap between virtual and real intelligent wheelchairsPublication . Faria, Brígida Mónica; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, Nuno; Moreira, António Paulo; Petry, Marcelo; Ferreira, Luís MiguelWheelchairs are important locomotion devices for handicapped and senior people. With the increase in the number of senior citizens and the increment of people bearing physical deficiencies, there is a growing demand for safer and more comfortable wheelchairs. So the new Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) concept was introduced. Like many other robotic systems, the main capabilities of an intelligent wheelchair should be: autonomous navigation with safety, flexibility and capability of avoiding obstacles; intelligent interface with the user; communication with other devices. In order to achieve these capabilities a good testbed is needed on which trials and users’ training may be safely conducted. This paper presents an extensible virtual environment simulator of an intelligent wheelchair to fulfill that purpose. The simulator combines the main features of robotic simulators with those built for training and evaluation of prospective wheelchair users. Experiments with the real prototype allowed having results and information to model the virtual intelligent wheelchair. Several experiments with real users of electric wheelchairs (suffering from cerebral palsy) and potential users of an intelligent wheelchair were performed. The System Usability Score allowed having the perception of the users in terms of the usability of the IW in the virtual environment. The mean score was 72 indicating a satisfactory level of the usability. It was possible to conclude with the experiments that the virtual intelligent wheelchair and environment are usable instruments to test and train potential users.
- A data mining approach to predict falls in humanoid robot locomotionPublication . André, João; Faria, Brigida Monica; Santos, Cristina; Reis, Luís PauloThe inclusion of perceptual information in the operation of a dynamic robot (interacting with its environment) can provide valuable insight about its environment and increase robustness of its behaviour. In this regard, the concept of Associative Skill Memories (ASMs) has provided a great contributions regarding an effective and practical use of sensor data, under a simple and intuitive framework [2, 13]. Inspired by [2], this paper presents a data mining solution to the fall prediction problem in humanoid biped robotic locomotion. Sensor data from a large number of simulations was recorded and four data mining algorithms were applied with the aim of creating a classifier that properly identifies failure conditions. Using Support Vector Machines, on top of sensor data from a large number of simulation trials, it was possible to build an accurate and reliable offline fall predictor, achieving accuracy, sensitivity and specificity values up to 95.6%, 96.3% and 94.5%, respectively.
- Recommendations for a new portuguese teacher placement systemPublication . Santos, Danilo; e Sá, Jorge Oliveira; Reis, Luís Paulo; Faria, Brígida MnicaPortuguese teacher placements’ system is a centralized system managed by the Portuguese government, specifically by the Ministry of Education and Science. It is a system with some issues and, therefore, has been criticized by its stakeholders, mainly by teachers. This paper aims to do a systematic review and a meta-analysis of the Portuguese teacher placements’ system. An objective is to understand and describe how similar system works in European Union countries. Another objective is to interview school specialists, in this particular case—teachers, to find solutions for teacher placements’ system. Finally, from solutions from European Union countries and from solutions arising from schools’ specialists, a set of requirements is identified that the teacher placements’ system should take into account, in order to avoid the issues identified.
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