Experimental Study on Wound Area Measurement with Mobile Devices.

Healthcare treatments might benefit from advances in artificial intelligence and technological equipment such as smartphones and smartwatches. The presence of cameras in these devices with increasingly robust and precise pattern recognition techniques can facilitate the estimation of the wound area and other telemedicine measurements. Currently, telemedicine is vital to the maintenance of the quality of the treatments remotely. This study proposes a method for measuring the wound area with mobile devices. The proposed approach relies on a multi-step process consisting of image capture, conversion to grayscale, blurring, application of a threshold with segmentation, identification of the wound part, dilation and erosion of the detected wound section, identification of accurate data related to the image, and measurement of the wound area. The proposed method was implemented with the OpenCV framework. Thus, it is a solution for healthcare systems by which to investigate and treat people with skin-related diseases. The proof-of-concept was performed with a static dataset of camera images on a desktop computer. After we validated the approach's feasibility, we implemented the method in a mobile application that allows for communication between patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.

Sensors are Capable to Help in the Measurement of the Results of the Timed-Up and Go Test? A Systematic Review.

The analysis of movements used in physiotherapy areas related to the elderly is becoming increasingly important due to factors such as the increase in the average life expectancy and the rate of elderly people over the whole population. In this systematic review, we try to determine how the inertial sensors embedded in mobile devices are exploited for the measurement of the different parameters involved in the Timed-Up and Go test. The results show the mobile devices equipped with onboard motion sensors can be exploited for these types of studies: the most commonly used sensors are the magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope available in consumer off-the-shelf smartphones. Other features typically used to evaluate the Timed-Up and Go test are the time duration, the angular velocity and the number of steps, allowing for the recognition of some diseases as well as the measurement of the subject's performance during the test execution.

Data acquisition of timed-up and go test with older adults: accelerometer, magnetometer, electrocardiography and electroencephalography sensors' data.

We present a dataset related to the acquisition of different sensors data during the performance of the Timed-Up and Go test with the mobile device positioned in a waistband for the acquisition of accelerometer and magnetometer data, and a BITalino device positioned in a chest band for the acquisition of Electrocardiography and Electroencephalography for further processing. The data acquired from the BITalino device is acquired simultaneously by a Bluetooth connection with the same mobile application. The data was acquired in five institutions, including Centro Comunitário das Lameiras, Lar Nossa Senhora de Fátima, Centro Comunitário das Minas da Panasqueira, Lar da Misericórdia da Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Fundão, and Lar da Aldeia de Joanes da Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Fundão from Fundão and Covilhã municipalities (Portugal). This article describes the data acquired from a several subjects from the different institutions for the acquisition of accelerometer and magnetometer data, where each person performed the Timed-Up and Go test three times, where each output from the sensors was acquired with a sampling rate of 100 Hz. Related to the data acquired by the sensors connected to the BITalino device, 31 persons performed the different experiments related to the Timed-Up and Go Test. Following the data acquired from Electroencephalography and Electrocardiography sensors, only the data acquired from 14 individuals was considered valid. The data acquired by a BITalino device has a sampling rate of 100 Hz. These data can be reused for testing machine learning methods for the evaluation of the performance of the Timed-Up and Go test with older adults.

Mobile Computing Technologies for Health and Mobility Assessment: Research Design and Results of the Timed Up and Go Test in Older Adults.

Due to the increasing age of the European population, there is a growing interest in performing research that will aid in the timely and unobtrusive detection of emerging diseases. For such tasks, mobile devices have several sensors, facilitating the acquisition of diverse data. This study focuses on the analysis of the data collected from the mobile devices sensors and a pressure sensor connected to a Bitalino device for the measurement of the Timed-Up and Go test. The data acquisition was performed within different environments from multiple individuals with distinct types of diseases. Then this data was analyzed to estimate the various parameters of the Timed-Up and Go test. Firstly, the pressure sensor is used to extract the reaction and total test time. Secondly, the magnetometer sensors are used to identify the total test time and different parameters related to turning around. Finally, the accelerometer sensor is used to extract the reaction time, total test time, duration of turning around, going time, return time, and many other derived metrics. Our experiments showed that these parameters could be automatically and reliably detected with a mobile device. Moreover, we identified that the time to perform the Timed-Up and Go test increases with age and the presence of diseases related to locomotion.

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.