— Recently, Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) have become popular, making it easier to experience Mixed Reality (MR) environments that fuse real and virtual space. With the ability of MR to locate virtual Three-Dimensional (3D) objects in the real space, our 3D perception may also change as this type of 3D experience increases. While there have been studies that measure 3D gaze in either virtual or real space, no studies have discussed how the MR affects 3D gaze. In this study, we developed a See-Through Head-Mounted Display (ST-HMD) to analyze the effect of MR environment on 3D gaze measurement. We conducted experiments in two different physical environments: a room with and without depth cues. Our results showed that there was no significant difference in the measured 3D gaze between rooms with and without depth cues. Experiments of tracking the gaze of a visual target moving from back to front showed that the scanpath of the 3D gaze followed the trajectory of the target's movement.
— Telemedicine seeks to improve the quality, efficiency and cost of healthcare by a variety of electronic means. It is originally designed to serve patients in remote areas. The service involves the use of technologies to support the connection between doctors and their patients without the need for in- person meetings. Nowadays, the COVID-19 outbreak could put a spotlight on Telemedicine as an important tool to avoid the community from infection. This study aims to examine public awareness and acceptability of telemedicine in Japan. Furthermore, it determines the main reasons which hinder the growth of the service in the COVID-19 era from the public’s views. To achieve our goals, 84 participants in the age ranging from 20 to 64 years were randomly selected, and data were collected from them using a questionnaire survey. The survey reveals that all participants are not telemedicine users. Fifty-nine (70%) participants are somewhat aware of telemedicine service, and 51% of them are very much interested in telemedicine. Only 3 (4%) participants are quite satisfied with the amount of information available on telemedicine. This is obvious as 50% of them have no detailed information about the service. Fifty-two (37%) participants state that online telemedicine education program is an effective way to raise awareness of telemedicine. The survey results also identify the major reasons for not using telemedicine service in the COVID-19 era. At present, there are various issues for a slow growth of telemedicine in Japan. Recommendations to increase awareness of telemedicine service have been made.
—Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a growing field in data analytics that is increasingly applied in healthcare for assessment of patients’ electronic records or patients’ dialogues to unearth medical issues, emotions, or cognition. Meanwhile, active research is taking place in the use of sensors and wearables in tracking patient phenotypes and physiologic status in diagnosis and management of diseases. This paper’s central purpose is to explore how natural language processing can be combined with wearables in healthcare, and how this approach can advance health service delivery and health system transformation. Our recommendations are to stimulate interest and lower barriers in order to implement this novel combination of solutions in healthcare industries, and to do so in consideration of various technical and ethical concerns.
This paper presents a rule-based approach towards spatial awareness for the deafblind through natural language constructs. The approach entails two components, a novel ontology for the interoperable representation of data pertaining the domain (objects, space, etc.) and a rule set to derive the natural language constructs for spatial awareness and answer related user queries. The rule set is expressed in SPARQL Inferencing Notation (SPIN), which enables simplicity and flexibility in rule definition as opposed to other frameworks. Both are applied in a use case scenario of the SUITCEYES platform for the deafblind, extending it with the ability to answer spatial awareness queries. More specifically, the ontology component uses rules to provide the users of the platform answers to queries regarding their environment. We present those rules and show how they inform the user of their surroundings, using natural language. Furthermore, we provide a differential population solution to avoid overloading the ontology with unnecessary data. Keywordsontology; rules; natural language; SPIN; deafblindness.
—The growing relevance of Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), the increasing importance of mHeatlh and the objective discrepancy documented between Patient Reported Outcomes and Observer Reported Outcomes are important aspects that need to be addressed when dealing with prostate cancer patients. The aim of this work was to develop an electronic Patient Reported Outcomes tool to systematically assess the impact of radiation therapy on prostate cancer patients’ quality of life. We elaborated a four-step process. In the first step, a general literature search was made. The next step was to generate a set of adequate questions and answers. The subsequent step was to identify a reliable scale to report adverse events, namely, the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events version 4.03 scale of toxicity. The last phase was to implement a user-friendly interface. We developed a new and innovative comprehensive list of items for prostate cancer patients receiving radiotherapy whose main characteristic is to link the Patient Reported Outcomes obtained from patients to a well-established scale of toxicity. The conclusive validation of this conceptually innovative tool should allow to provide both patients and physicians with a useful tool to reduce, and possibly prevent, adverse events during and after radiotherapy, with a consequence of improvement in terms of Quality of Life.
—Japan is facing a shortage of healthcare workers due to the declining birthrate and aging population. This issue is placing a heavy burden on them to address the growing demand for 24-hour medical services. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has opened up the possibility of collecting valuable data and providing insights for more control over patients' lives. Early approaches to detect accidental falling and wandering behavior using ICT include the use of invasive and non-invasive sensors. However, in order to put these approaches into practical use, further measures are needed. In this study, we propose a camera monitoring system to automatically detect typical patients’ behaviors, such as, rising from the bed, leaving the bed, falling down, and wandering. Our system utilizes infrared omnidirectional cameras that allows a wide range of monitoring actions during day and night. Skeletal information of multiple patients is captured using a computer vision-based pose detection to classify each behavior. Evaluation experiments demonstrated the feasibility of detecting typical patients’ behavior using the proposed system.
In recent years, the global population of the elderly has increased, and one of the challenges faced by this population is the increased vulnerability to falls. Two approaches to alleviate this problem are determining actions that cause these falls and preventing falls using the detection results. A temporary change in walking (i.e., stumbling and staggering) is a typical cause of a fall. However, existing studies do not focus on a temporary change in walking; they only distinguish between walking or other activities and recognize walking speed. In this paper, we propose a method to detect the change in walking using change point detection (i.e., anomaly detection for time series data) and a classification method for the multiple types of change. Moreover, we assume four cases classified using available data, and we propose the parameter setting of the proposed method for each case to be applied in diverse scenarios. During the evaluation, four anomalous walking videos (where, anomaly represents a temporary change) are used. Thus, the accuracy of the anomaly detection of the proposed method is up to 93.5%, and the four types of detected anomalous walking are classified into three clusters in 89.1% of cases based on each characteristic. Keywords–Walking recognition; Classification; Anomaly detection; Human activity recognition.
—Though increasing physical activity level is essential for health promotion, inpatients are known to experience a drop in physical activity. However, even short-term rehabilitation treatment is expected to improve Activities of Daily Living (ADL), but accompanying changes in physical activity levels are unknown. This study evaluated change over one week in the Barthel Index (BI) and physical activity level in inpatients undergoing rehabilitation treatment and investigated the correlations between variability in these factors. The BI and physical activity levels were measured twice with a one-week interval between measurements for eight inpatients undergoing rehabilitation treatment at Iwate Medical University Hospital, Japan. The number of steps and time spent walking increased significantly from the first measurement to the second. On the other hand, there was no significant difference in BI score between initial measurement and after one week. However, 4 out of 8 inpatients showed the BI improved, and there was no inpatient showed worsened BI. Also, there were no significant correlations between the BI score variability and variability in the number of steps or time spent walking. The results suggested that rehabilitation treatment improved ADL ability and increased physical activity level among inpatients, but that variability in these factors is not correlated. A future study with an increased sample size divided by medical conditions is necessary.
People with diseases, such as hemiplegia, and latterstage elderly people often have a walking disability, which increases their risk of falling and injuring themselves. The magnitude of the angle velocity during the kicking the floor phase (raising the heel) and swinging the toe forward phase of walking is lower for disabled people than for healthy persons due to lower muscle power. We have developed a spring assist unit that fits in the heel of a shoe and helps disabled people raise their heel when beginning to walk. Experimental results demonstrated that it substantially assists gait walking, that there is a correlation between body weight and optimal spring stiffness, and that the spring assist unit does not affect the person’s walking posture. Keywords-walking disability; walking assit unit; spring; walking posture; muscle power.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that offers decentralised data management capabilities in a distributed ledger. While the initial and main domain of application has been and continues to be that of cryptocurrencies and their use in secure, digital economic transactions, blockchain’s inherent properties for security, immutability and transparency make it an excellent solution for various domains that deal with personal or even sensitive data such as the domain of healthcare. At the same time, the radical increase of digitisation in healthcare, as well as automation of processes, robotics, and the rise of medical sensors and devices also led to an unprecedented rise in medical data availability. This fact has brought forth citizen and societal concerns regarding the safety of their medical data and the transparency of data transactions that they engage in, especially given that medical data are sensitive. To address these and other concerns, in the European Union, the European Commission established in 2016 that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to establish user rights concerning their data as well as set out the obligations of an organisation that is responsible for storing, managing and processing said data. Some of the articles of the GDPR, while integral to safeguard a user’s rights, are opposite to the technical capabilities of innovative technologies, blockchain being one of them. The scope of this publication is to present blockchain, describe its potential in the healthcare domain, list limitations between blockchain and the GDPR, and finally provide guidelines to reconcile the two, acting as a roadmap for researchers and organisations who are developing blockchain applications in healthcare and other domains. Keywords-blockchain; healthcare; GDPR; sensitive data;
