Understanding User Needs, Persona Scenarios for Privacy-Preserving Visual System Development.

As the world's population ages, the demand for active and assisted living technologies that can support older adults maintain their independence, health, and quality of life is increasing. Video monitoring cameras can provide a sense of safety and peace of mind for both older adults and their caregivers. However, these visual sensing systems come with major privacy concerns. Researchers have developed various visual privacy preservation filters that can be used for video-based monitoring technology, such as blurring, pixelation, silhouette, or avatar. To understand the user's needs and fine-tune the system to their preferences, the persona scenario method was employed in this study. The goal-directed approach to persona design was followed. This scenario-based technique involves creating fictitious persona archetypes that represent the unique characteristics, needs, and goals of the target user group and other stakeholders involved in the process of care provision. A set of eight personas were created based on the qualitative data collected through interviews and focus groups in Spain. Data from 62 participants were analyzed, which represented different contributor groups such as older adults, direct caregivers, healthcare experts, and other stakeholders. The final personas are accessible to the public on a Blueprint persona repository.

Acceptance and Privacy Perceptions Toward Video-based Active and Assisted Living Technologies: Scoping Review.

BACKGROUND: The aging society posits new socioeconomic challenges to which a potential solution is active and assisted living (AAL) technologies. Visual-based sensing systems are technologically among the most advantageous forms of AAL technologies in providing health and social care; however, they come at the risk of violating rights to privacy. With the immersion of video-based technologies, privacy-preserving smart solutions are being developed; however, the user acceptance research about these developments is not yet being systematized. OBJECTIVE: With this scoping review, we aimed to gain an overview of existing studies examining the viewpoints of older adults and/or their caregivers on technology acceptance and privacy perceptions, specifically toward video-based AAL technology. METHODS: A total of 22 studies were identified with a primary focus on user acceptance and privacy attitudes during a literature search of major databases. Methodological quality assessment and thematic analysis of the selected studies were executed and principal findings are summarized. The PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines were followed at every step of this scoping review. RESULTS: Acceptance attitudes toward video-based AAL technologies are rather conditional, and are summarized into five main themes seen from the two end-user perspectives: caregiver and care receiver. With privacy being a major barrier to video-based AAL technologies, security and medical safety were identified as the major benefits across the studies. CONCLUSIONS: This review reveals a very low methodological quality of the empirical studies assessing user acceptance of video-based AAL technologies. We propose that more specific and more end user- and real life-targeting research is needed to assess the acceptance of proposed solutions.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on privacy awareness in lifelogging technology development.

Population aging resulting from demographic changes requires some challenging decisions and necessary steps to be taken by different stakeholders to manage current and future demand for assistance and support. The consequences of population aging can be mitigated to some extent by assisting technologies that can support the autonomous living of older individuals and persons in need of care in their private environments as long as possible. A variety of technical solutions are already available on the market, but privacy protection is a serious, often neglected, issue when using such (assisting) technology. Thus, privacy needs to be thoroughly taken under consideration in this context. In a three-year project PAAL ('Privacy-Aware and Acceptable Lifelogging Services for Older and Frail People'), researchers from different disciplines, such as law, rehabilitation, human-computer interaction, and computer science, investigated the phenomenon of privacy when using assistive lifelogging technologies. In concrete terms, the concept of Privacy by Design was realized using two exemplary lifelogging applications in private and professional environments. A user-centered empirical approach was applied to the lifelogging technologies, investigating the perceptions and attitudes of (older) users with different health-related and biographical profiles. The knowledge gained through the interdisciplinary collaboration can improve the implementation and optimization of assistive applications. In this paper, partners of the PAAL project present insights gained from their cross-national, interdisciplinary work regarding privacy-aware and acceptable lifelogging technologies.

Correction: Ambient Assisted Living: Scoping Review of Artificial Intelligence Models, Domains, Technology, and Concerns.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/36553.].

Ambient Assisted Living: Scoping Review of Artificial Intelligence Models, Domains, Technology, and Concerns.

BACKGROUND: Ambient assisted living (AAL) is a common name for various artificial intelligence (AI)-infused applications and platforms that support their users in need in multiple activities, from health to daily living. These systems use different approaches to learn about their users and make automated decisions, known as AI models, for personalizing their services and increasing outcomes. Given the numerous systems developed and deployed for people with different needs, health conditions, and dispositions toward the technology, it is critical to obtain clear and comprehensive insights concerning AI models used, along with their domains, technology, and concerns, to identify promising directions for future work. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to provide a scoping review of the literature on AI models in AAL. In particular, we analyzed specific AI models used in AАL systems, the target domains of the models, the technology using the models, and the major concerns from the end-user perspective. Our goal was to consolidate research on this topic and inform end users, health care professionals and providers, researchers, and practitioners in developing, deploying, and evaluating future intelligent AAL systems. METHODS: This study was conducted as a scoping review to identify, analyze, and extract the relevant literature. It used a natural language processing toolkit to retrieve the article corpus for an efficient and comprehensive automated literature search. Relevant articles were then extracted from the corpus and analyzed manually. This review included 5 digital libraries: IEEE, PubMed, Springer, Elsevier, and MDPI. RESULTS: We included a total of 108 articles. The annual distribution of relevant articles showed a growing trend for all categories from January 2010 to July 2022. The AI models mainly used unsupervised and semisupervised approaches. The leading models are deep learning, natural language processing, instance-based learning, and clustering. Activity assistance and recognition were the most common target domains of the models. Ambient sensing, mobile technology, and robotic devices mainly implemented the models. Older adults were the primary beneficiaries, followed by patients and frail persons of various ages. Availability was a top beneficiary concern. CONCLUSIONS: This study presents the analytical evidence of AI models in AAL and their domains, technologies, beneficiaries, and concerns. Future research on intelligent AAL should involve health care professionals and caregivers as designers and users, comply with health-related regulations, improve transparency and privacy, integrate with health care technological infrastructure, explain their decisions to the users, and establish evaluation metrics and design guidelines. TRIAL REGISTRATION: PROSPERO (International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews) CRD42022347590; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42022347590.

Bedtime Monitoring for Fall Detection and Prevention in Older Adults.

Life expectancy has increased, so the number of people in need of intensive care and attention is also growing. Falls are a major problem for older adult health, mainly because of the consequences they entail. Falls are indeed the second leading cause of unintentional death in the world. The impact on privacy, the cost, low performance, or the need to wear uncomfortable devices are the main causes for the lack of widespread solutions for fall detection and prevention. This work present a solution focused on bedtime that addresses all these causes. Bed exit is one of the most critical moments, especially when the person suffers from a cognitive impairment or has mobility problems. For this reason, this work proposes a system that monitors the position in bed in order to identify risk situations as soon as possible. This system is also combined with an automatic fall detection system. Both systems work together, in real time, offering a comprehensive solution to automatic fall detection and prevention, which is low cost and guarantees user privacy. The proposed system was experimentally validated with young adults. Results show that falls can be detected, in real time, with an accuracy of 93.51%, sensitivity of 92.04% and specificity of 95.45%. Furthermore, risk situations, such as transiting from lying on the bed to sitting on the bed side, are recognized with a 96.60% accuracy, and those where the user exits the bed are recognized with a 100% accuracy.

Dataset of acceleration signals recorded while performing activities of daily living.

Several research studies have investigated the human activity recognition (HAR) domain to detect and recognise patterns of daily human activities. However, the accurate and automatic assessment of activities of daily living (ADLs) through machine learning algorithms is still a challenge, especially due to limited availability of realistic datasets to train and test such algorithms. The dataset contains data from 52 participants in total (26 women, and 26 men). The data for these participants was collected in two phases: 33 participants initially, and 19 further participants later on. Participants performed up to 5 repetitions of 24 different ADLs. Firstly, we provide an annotated description of the dataset collected by wearing a wrist-worn measurement device, Empatica E4. Secondly, we describe the methodology of the data collection and the real context in which participants performed the selected activities. Finally, we present some examples of recent and relevant target applications where our dataset can be used, namely lifelogging, behavioural analysis and measurement device evaluation. The authors consider the dissemination of this dataset can highly benefit the research community, and specially those involved in the recognition of ADLs, and/or in the removal of cues that reveal identity.

Privacy-Preserving Human Action Recognition with a Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm.

Wrist-worn devices equipped with accelerometers constitute a non-intrusive way to achieve active and assisted living (AAL) goals, such as automatic journaling for self-reflection, i.e., lifelogging, as well as to provide other services, such as general health and wellbeing monitoring, personal autonomy assessment, among others. Human action recognition (HAR), and in particular, the recognition of activities of daily living (ADLs), can be used for these types of assessment or journaling. In this paper, a many-objective evolutionary algorithm (MaOEA) is used in order to maximise action recognition from individuals while concealing (minimising recognition of) gender and age. To validate the proposed method, the PAAL accelerometer signal ADL dataset (v2.0) is used, which includes data from 52 participants (26 men and 26 women) and 24 activity class labels. The results show a drop in gender and age recognition to 58% (from 89%, a 31% drop), and to 39% (from 83%, a 44% drop), respectively; while action recognition stays closer to the initial value of 68% (from: 87%, i.e., 19% down).

Towards Detecting Pneumonia Progression in COVID-19 Patients by Monitoring Sleep Disturbance Using Data Streams of Non-Invasive Sensor Networks.

Pneumonia caused by COVID-19 is a severe health risk that sometimes leads to fatal outcomes. Due to constraints in medical care systems, technological solutions should be applied to diagnose, monitor, and alert about the disease's progress for patients receiving care at home. Some sleep disturbances, such as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, can increase the risk for COVID-19 patients. This paper proposes an approach to evaluating patients' sleep quality with the aim of detecting sleep disturbances caused by pneumonia and other COVID-19-related pathologies. We describe a non-invasive sensor network that is used for sleep monitoring and evaluate the feasibility of an approach for training a machine learning model to detect possible COVID-19-related sleep disturbances. We also discuss a cloud-based approach for the implementation of the proposed system for processing the data streams. Based on the preliminary results, we conclude that sleep disturbances are detectable with affordable and non-invasive sensors.

Improved Action Recognition with Separable Spatio-Temporal Attention Using Alternative Skeletal and Video Pre-Processing.

The potential benefits of recognising activities of daily living from video for active and assisted living have yet to be fully untapped. These technologies can be used for behaviour understanding, and lifelogging for caregivers and end users alike. The recent publication of realistic datasets for this purpose, such as the Toyota Smarthomes dataset, calls for pushing forward the efforts to improve action recognition. Using the separable spatio-temporal attention network proposed in the literature, this paper introduces a view-invariant normalisation of skeletal pose data and full activity crops for RGB data, which improve the baseline results by 9.5% (on the cross-subject experiments), outperforming state-of-the-art techniques in this field when using the original unmodified skeletal data in dataset. Our code and data are available online.

A Research on the Classification and Applicability of the Mobile Health Applications.

Mobile health applications are applied for different purposes. Healthcare professionals and other users can use this type of mobile applications for specific tasks, such as diagnosis, information, prevention, treatment, and communication. This paper presents an analysis of mobile health applications used by healthcare professionals and their patients. A secondary objective of this article is to evaluate the scientific validation of these mobile health applications and to verify if the results provided by these applications have an underlying sound scientific foundation. This study also analyzed literature references and the use of mobile health applications available in online application stores. In general, a large part of these mobile health applications provides information about scientific validation. However, some mobile health applications are not validated. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the usability and user-perceived quality of mobile health applications and the challenges related to scientific validation of these mobile applications.

Promotion of Healthy Nutrition and Physical Activity Lifestyles for Teenagers: A Systematic Literature Review of The Current Methodologies.

Amid obesity problems in the young population and apparent trends of spending a significant amount of time in a stationary position, promoting healthy nutrition and physical activities to teenagers is becoming increasingly important. It can rely on different methodologies, including a paper diary and mobile applications. However, the widespread use of mobile applications by teenagers suggests that they could be a more suitable tool for this purpose. This paper reviews the methodologies for promoting physical activities to healthy teenagers explored in different studies, excluding the analysis of different diseases. We found only nine studies working with teenagers and mobile applications to promote active lifestyles, including the focus on nutrition and physical activity. Studies report using different techniques to captivate the teenagers, including questionnaires and gamification techniques. We identified the common features used in different studies, which are: paper diary, diet diary, exercise diary, notifications, diet plan, physical activity registration, gamification, smoking cessation, pictures, game, and SMS, among others.

Approach for the Development of a Framework for the Identification of Activities of Daily Living Using Sensors in Mobile Devices.

Sensors available on mobile devices allow the automatic identification of Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This paper describes an approach for the creation of a framework for the identification of ADL, taking into account several concepts, including data acquisition, data processing, data fusion, and pattern recognition. These concepts can be mapped onto different modules of the framework. The proposed framework should perform the identification of ADL without Internet connection, performing these tasks locally on the mobile device, taking in account the hardware and software limitations of these devices. The main purpose of this paper is to present a new approach for the creation of a framework for the recognition of ADL, analyzing the allowed sensors available in the mobile devices, and the existing methods available in the literature.

Recognition of Activities of Daily Living Based on Environmental Analyses Using Audio Fingerprinting Techniques: A Systematic Review.

An increase in the accuracy of identification of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) is very important for different goals of Enhanced Living Environments and for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) tasks. This increase may be achieved through identification of the surrounding environment. Although this is usually used to identify the location, ADL recognition can be improved with the identification of the sound in that particular environment. This paper reviews audio fingerprinting techniques that can be used with the acoustic data acquired from mobile devices. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in order to identify relevant English language works aimed at the identification of the environment of ADLs using data acquired with mobile devices, published between 2002 and 2017. In total, 40 studies were analyzed and selected from 115 citations. The results highlight several audio fingerprinting techniques, including Modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Gaussian mixture models (GMM), likelihood estimation, logarithmic moduled complex lapped transform (LMCLT), support vector machine (SVM), constant Q transform (CQT), symmetric pairwise boosting (SPB), Philips robust hash (PRH), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and discrete cosine transform (DCT).

The ethics of using cameras in care homes.

senior researcher, Digital Imaging Research There are concerns about how cameras in care homes might intrude on residents' and staff privacy but worries about resident abuse must be recognised. This article outlines an ethical way forward and calls for a rethink about cameras that focuses less on their ability to "see" and more on their use as data-gathering tools.

From Data Acquisition to Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Review and a Roadmap for the Identification of Activities of Daily Living Using Mobile Devices.

This paper focuses on the research on the state of the art for sensor fusion techniques, applied to the sensors embedded in mobile devices, as a means to help identify the mobile device user's daily activities. Sensor data fusion techniques are used to consolidate the data collected from several sensors, increasing the reliability of the algorithms for the identification of the different activities. However, mobile devices have several constraints, e.g., low memory, low battery life and low processing power, and some data fusion techniques are not suited to this scenario. The main purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the state of the art to identify examples of sensor data fusion techniques that can be applied to the sensors available in mobile devices aiming to identify activities of daily living (ADLs).

Recognition of Activities of Daily Living with Egocentric Vision: A Review.

Video-based recognition of activities of daily living (ADLs) is being used in ambient assisted living systems in order to support the independent living of older people. However, current systems based on cameras located in the environment present a number of problems, such as occlusions and a limited field of view. Recently, wearable cameras have begun to be exploited. This paper presents a review of the state of the art of egocentric vision systems for the recognition of ADLs following a hierarchical structure: motion, action and activity levels, where each level provides higher semantic information and involves a longer time frame. The current egocentric vision literature suggests that ADLs recognition is mainly driven by the objects present in the scene, especially those associated with specific tasks. However, although object-based approaches have proven popular, object recognition remains a challenge due to the intra-class variations found in unconstrained scenarios. As a consequence, the performance of current systems is far from satisfactory.

Marginalised Stacked Denoising Autoencoders for Robust Representation of Real-Time Multi-View Action Recognition.

Multi-view action recognition has gained a great interest in video surveillance, human computer interaction, and multimedia retrieval, where multiple cameras of different types are deployed to provide a complementary field of views. Fusion of multiple camera views evidently leads to more robust decisions on both tracking multiple targets and analysing complex human activities, especially where there are occlusions. In this paper, we incorporate the marginalised stacked denoising autoencoders (mSDA) algorithm to further improve the bag of words (BoWs) representation in terms of robustness and usefulness for multi-view action recognition. The resulting representations are fed into three simple fusion strategies as well as a multiple kernel learning algorithm at the classification stage. Based on the internal evaluation, the codebook size of BoWs and the number of layers of mSDA may not significantly affect recognition performance. According to results on three multi-view benchmark datasets, the proposed framework improves recognition performance across all three datasets and outputs record recognition performance, beating the state-of-art algorithms in the literature. It is also capable of performing real-time action recognition at a frame rate ranging from 33 to 45, which could be further improved by using more powerful machines in future applications.

Visual privacy by context: proposal and evaluation of a level-based visualisation scheme.

Privacy in image and video data has become an important subject since cameras are being installed in an increasing number of public and private spaces. Specifically, in assisted living, intelligent monitoring based on computer vision can allow one to provide risk detection and support services that increase people's autonomy at home. In the present work, a level-based visualisation scheme is proposed to provide visual privacy when human intervention is necessary, such as at telerehabilitation and safety assessment applications. Visualisation levels are dynamically selected based on the previously modelled context. In this way, different levels of protection can be provided, maintaining the necessary intelligibility required for the applications. Furthermore, a case study of a living room, where a top-view camera is installed, is presented. Finally, the performed survey-based evaluation indicates the degree of protection provided by the different visualisation models, as well as the personal privacy preferences and valuations of the users.

A vision-based system for intelligent monitoring: human behaviour analysis and privacy by context.

Due to progress and demographic change, society is facing a crucial challenge related to increased life expectancy and a higher number of people in situations of dependency. As a consequence, there exists a significant demand for support systems for personal autonomy. This article outlines the vision@home project, whose goal is to extend independent living at home for elderly and impaired people, providing care and safety services by means of vision-based monitoring. Different kinds of ambient-assisted living services are supported, from the detection of home accidents, to telecare services. In this contribution, the specification of the system is presented, and novel contributions are made regarding human behaviour analysis and privacy protection. By means of a multi-view setup of cameras, people's behaviour is recognised based on human action recognition. For this purpose, a weighted feature fusion scheme is proposed to learn from multiple views. In order to protect the right to privacy of the inhabitants when a remote connection occurs, a privacy-by-context method is proposed. The experimental results of the behaviour recognition method show an outstanding performance, as well as support for multi-view scenarios and real-time execution, which are required in order to provide the proposed services.