Survey on virtual coaching for older adults.

Virtual coaching has emerged as a promising solution to extend independent living for older adults. A virtual coach system is an always-attentive personalized system that continuously monitors user's activity and surroundings and delivers interventions - that is, intentional messages - in the appropriate moment. This article presents a survey of different approaches in virtual coaching for older adults, from the less technically supported tools to the latest developments and future avenues for research. It focuses on the technical aspects, especially on software architectures, user interaction and coaching personalization. Nevertheless, some aspects from the fields of personality/social psychology are also presented in the context of coaching strategies. Coaching is considered holistically, including matters such as physical and cognitive training, nutrition, social interaction and mood.

A Subject-Specific Kinematic Model to Predict Human Motion in Exoskeleton-Assisted Gait.

The relative motion between human and exoskeleton is a crucial factor that has remarkable consequences on the efficiency, reliability and safety of human-robot interaction. Unfortunately, its quantitative assessment has been largely overlooked in the literature. Here, we present a methodology that allows predicting the motion of the human joints from the knowledge of the angular motion of the exoskeleton frame. Our method combines a subject-specific skeletal model with a kinematic model of a lower limb exoskeleton (H2, Technaid), imposing specific kinematic constraints between them. To calibrate the model and validate its ability to predict the relative motion in a subject-specific way, we performed experiments on seven healthy subjects during treadmill walking tasks. We demonstrate a prediction accuracy lower than 3.5° globally, and around 1.5° at the hip level, which represent an improvement up to 66% compared to the traditional approach assuming no relative motion between the user and the exoskeleton.

Fully automatic detection and segmentation of abdominal aortic thrombus in post-operative CTA images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

Computerized Tomography Angiography (CTA) based follow-up of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms (AAA) treated with Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (EVAR) is essential to evaluate the progress of the patient and detect complications. In this context, accurate quantification of post-operative thrombus volume is required. However, a proper evaluation is hindered by the lack of automatic, robust and reproducible thrombus segmentation algorithms. We propose a new fully automatic approach based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for robust and reproducible thrombus region of interest detection and subsequent fine thrombus segmentation. The DetecNet detection network is adapted to perform region of interest extraction from a complete CTA and a new segmentation network architecture, based on Fully Convolutional Networks and a Holistically-Nested Edge Detection Network, is presented. These networks are trained, validated and tested in 13 post-operative CTA volumes of different patients using a 4-fold cross-validation approach to provide more robustness to the results. Our pipeline achieves a Dice score of more than 82% for post-operative thrombus segmentation and provides a mean relative volume difference between ground truth and automatic segmentation that lays within the experienced human observer variance without the need of human intervention in most common cases.