How to use robot interventions in intramural psychogeriatric care; A feasibility study.

BACKGROUND: Social robots, with Paro being an example, offer new opportunities for innovative approaches in dementia care. OBJECTIVES: To investigate how interventions, with the socially assistive robot Paro, can be implemented in daily care practice. DESIGN: Paro was used according to individualized interventions, aiming at predefined specific care problems, during a 3-week period. Selected residents were offered Paro once or twice a week. SETTING: Small scale care units (8-10 residents each) in three Dutch care institutions for intramural psychogeriatric care. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 23 dementia patients, 22 female and 1 male, participated. INTERVENTION: Three intervention types were applied, one for therapeutic purposes, one for facilitating daily care activities and one to support social visits. MEASUREMENTS: The experience of care staff, informal caregivers and patients with Paro were registered qualitatively by means of a registration form in which each occasion of Paro use was briefly reported. Additionally, care staff was interviewed using a semi-structured qualitative questionnaire. RESULTS: The 23 residents were involved in 36 individually defined interventions, and in total 71 sessions were carried out. In the majority of cases, care staff and patients considered the Paro interventions to be of added value for the care provided. CONCLUSION: The use of Paro can be well individualized to the needs of patients, the resulting individual Paro intervention can be well implemented in day to day care, and Paro may have added value when used in a well-directed way.

In-vivo real-time tracking of surgical instruments in endoscopic video.

Tracking instruments during surgery is becoming a useful acquisition tool for different applications. This article presents a tracking system to detect and track instruments in endoscopic video using biocompatible colour markers. The system tracks single or multiple instruments in the video. The originality of this method is that it combines continuously adaptive shift algorithm with Kalman-filter for real-time tracking of single and multiple surgical instruments during surgery. Preliminary results show that the proposed method has a real-time performance. Moreover it is robust to partial occlusion and smoke. The system shows high sensitivity and specificity results for blue, green and yellow colours. The achieved sensitivity and specificity results are sufficient to apply the system for real-time registration of surgical workflow in-vivo during surgery.

Photo2Video: Semantic-Aware Deep Learning-Based Video Generation from Still Content.

Applying machine learning (ML), and especially deep learning, to understand visual content is becoming common practice in many application areas. However, little attention has been given to its use within the multimedia creative domain. It is true that ML is already popular for content creation, but the progress achieved so far addresses essentially textual content or the identification and selection of specific types of content. A wealth of possibilities are yet to be explored by bringing the use of ML into the multimedia creative process, allowing the knowledge inferred by the former to influence automatically how new multimedia content is created. The work presented in this article provides contributions in three distinct ways towards this goal: firstly, it proposes a methodology to re-train popular neural network models in identifying new thematic concepts in static visual content and attaching meaningful annotations to the detected regions of interest; secondly, it presents varied visual digital effects and corresponding tools that can be automatically called upon to apply such effects in a previously analyzed photo; thirdly, it defines a complete automated creative workflow, from the acquisition of a photograph and corresponding contextual data, through the ML region-based annotation, to the automatic application of digital effects and generation of a semantically aware multimedia story driven by the previously derived situational and visual contextual data. Additionally, it presents a variant of this automated workflow by offering to the user the possibility of manipulating the automatic annotations in an assisted manner. The final aim is to transform a static digital photo into a short video clip, taking into account the information acquired. The final result strongly contrasts with current standard approaches of creating random movements, by implementing an intelligent content- and context-aware video.

Effectiveness of Robot Paro in Intramural Psychogeriatric Care: A Multicenter Quasi-Experimental Study.

BACKGROUND: Together with care professionals, specific psychogeriatric care applications were developed for the seal robot Paro. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to evaluate the outcomes of the developed Paro interventions, applying the robot in psychogeriatric care. DESIGN: A multicenter quasi-experimental time series ABAB study (n = 91) with within-subject comparison was conducted to assess both the short-term effects of the Paro interventions for therapeutic applications, and the facilitation of daily care activities by care providers. SETTING: Small-scale care units (8-10 residents each), spread over 6 different locations, in 3 Dutch care institutions for intramural psychogeriatric care. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 91 patients with dementia, in all stages of dementia. INTERVENTION: Two user-centered intervention types were applied, one for therapeutic purposes and one for the facilitation of daily care activities. MEASUREMENTS: Effectiveness was measured with a goal attainment scale (IPPA) and a mood scale (Coop/Wonca), by means of a registration form. RESULTS: A total of 106 user-specific interventions were defined for 91 participants; 71 participants completed the study, 14 were men and 57 were women. All interventions combined show a significant effect (P < .001). CONCLUSION: Paro should be seen as a tool for care staff and not as a replacement of care. Successful implementation of Paro in daily intramural psychogeriatric care practice can increase the quality of care and the quality of life for the elderly.

Accurate gaze direction measurements with free head movement for strabismus angle estimation.

We present the Delft Assessment Instrument for Strabismus in Young children (DAISY) a device designed to measure angles of strabismus in young children fast and accurately. DAISY allows for unrestrained head movements by the mean of a triple camera vision system that simultaneously estimates the head rotation and the eye pose. The device combines two different methods to record bilateral eye position: corneal reflections (Purkinje images) and pupillary images. Detailed results are provided on three orthotropic subjects (age 25-27). Three different conditions were tested: 1) gaze ahead, 2) gaze ahead with different head rotations, and 3) fixed head with different eye positions. Systematic errors occurred between subjects that need further study. The system reached sufficient accuracy to be applied for the measurement of angles of strabismus, almost independent from the head pose.

Socially assistive robots in elderly care: a systematic review into effects and effectiveness.

The ongoing development of robotics on the one hand and, on the other hand, the foreseen relative growth in number of elderly individuals suffering from dementia, raises the question of which contribution robotics could have to rationalize and maintain, or even improve the quality of care. The objective of this review was to assess the published effects and effectiveness of robot interventions aiming at social assistance in elderly care. We searched, using Medical Subject Headings terms and free words, in the CINAHL, MEDLINE, Cochrane, BIOMED, PUBMED, PsycINFO, and EMBASE databases. Also the IEEE Digital Library was searched. No limitations were applied for the date of publication. Only articles written in English were taken into account. Collected publications went through a selection process. In the first step, publications were collected from major databases using a search query. In the second step, 3 reviewers independently selected publications on their title, using predefined selection criteria. In the third step, publications were judged based on their abstracts by the same reviewers, using the same selection criteria. In the fourth step, one reviewer made the final selection of publications based on complete content. Finally, 41 publications were included in the review, describing 17 studies involving 4 robot systems. Most studies reported positive effects of companion-type robots on (socio)psychological (eg, mood, loneliness, and social connections and communication) and physiological (eg, stress reduction) parameters. The methodological quality of the studies was, mostly, low. Although positive effects were reported, the scientific value of the evidence was limited. The positive results described, however, prompt further effectiveness research in this field.

Prediction of intraoperative complexity from preoperative patient data for laparoscopic cholecystectomy.

OBJECTIVE: Different reasons may cause difficult intraoperative surgical situations. This study aims to predict intraoperative complexity by classifying and evaluating preoperative patient data. The basic prediction problem addressed in this paper involves the classification of preoperative data into two classes: easy (Class 0) and complex (Class 1) surgeries. METHODS AND MATERIAL: preoperative patient data were collected from 337 patients admitted to the Klinikum rechts der Isar hospital in Munich, Germany for laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LAPCHOL) in the period of 2005-2008. The data include the patient's body mass index (BMI), sex, inflammation, wall thickening, age and history of previous surgery, as well as the name and level of experience of the operating surgeon. The operating surgeon was asked to label the intraoperative complexity after the surgery: '0' if the surgery was easy and '1' if it was complex. For the classification task a set of classifiers was evaluated, including linear discriminant classifier (LDC), quadratic discriminant classifier (QDC), Parzen and support vector machine (SVM). Moreover, feature-selection was applied to derive the optimal preoperative patient parameters for predicting intraoperative complexity. RESULTS: Classification results indicate a preference for the LDC in terms of classification error, although the SVM classifier is preferred in terms of results concerning the area under the curve. The trained LDC or SVM classifier can therefore be used in preoperative settings to predict complexity from preoperative patient data with classification error rates below 17%. Moreover, feature-selection results identify bias in the process of labelling surgical complexity, although this bias is irrelevant for patients with inflammation, wall thickening, male sex and high BMI. These patients tend to be at high risk for complex LAPCHOL surgeries, regardless of labelling bias. CONCLUSIONS: Intraoperative complexity can be predicted before surgery according to preoperative data with accuracy up to 83% using an LDC or SVM classifier. The set of features that are relevant for predicting complexity includes inflammation, wall thickening, sex and BMI score.