United States

In pandemic times, public facilities, such as gymnasiums and other sports facilities are closed. Hence, keeping oneself physically fit becomes particularly difficult as well as getting help from a fitness trainer or instructor is almost impossible. We propose an alternative solution, GymSoles++, a virtual trainer supporting the user with their exercise. This allows users to maintain the correct body posture to avoid injuries when performing exercises such as squats. We combine Google Glass with an unobtrusive sensing approach, an insole-based wearable system that provides feedback on the user&#39;s centre of pressure (CoP) via vibrotactile and visual aids. Previous research has shown that solely visualizing the CoP can significantly improve body posture and thus effectively assist users when performing squats and dead-lifts. In this research, we explored different feedback modalities and conclude that a vibrotactile insole is a practical and effective solution.

PETRA 2021

Combining Google Glass with Smart Insoles to Improve Body Posture when Performing Squats

visual \& vibrotactile feedback

squats

google glass

center of pressure

well-being

workout

improving body posture

smart insoles

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

A registration is required to access this event page. If you have not already done so, please use the below link to register for the event. 

[Register Here](http://www.smile.unina.it/ro-man2022/welcome-to-ieee-ro-man-2022/)

Registration Is Required

IEEE RO-MAN 2022

31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

In pandemic times, public facilities, such as gymnasiums and other sports facilities are closed. Hence, keeping oneself physically fit becomes particularly difficult as well as getting help from a fitness trainer or instructor is almost impossible. We propose an alternative solution, GymSoles++, a virtual trainer supporting the user with their exercise. This allows users to maintain the correct body posture to avoid injuries when performing exercises such as squats. We combine Google Glass with an unobtrusive sensing approach, an insole-based wearable system that provides feedback on the user's centre of pressure (CoP) via vibrotactile and visual aids. Previous research has shown that solely visualizing the CoP can significantly improve body posture and thus effectively assist users when performing squats and dead-lifts. In this research, we explored different feedback modalities and conclude that a vibrotactile insole is a practical and effective solution.

technical paper

**About**
 The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

 PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

 The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7

The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

Emotion recognition is a field of psychology that involves the process of identifying emotions and treating mental conditions like autism. The advancements in the field of machine learning and deep learning have paved the way for scientists to develop models for evaluating emotions by analyzing facial expressions, speech and text. However, the task of evaluating emotions could be best done by processing the bio-signals and neural imaging of the brain. In that sense, bio-signals such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) are less expensive to use and non-invasive, giving them an edge over traditional methods like Magnetic Resonant Imaging (MRI). However,
not many datasets are publicly available due to privacy issues and their availability is highly limited by the classification task. These constraints, along with the problem of data scarcity, motivates this work as an attempt to enhance the accuracy scores by generating synthetic features that are close to actual data distribution. In this research, we propose a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) based model that can help tackle this problem. The dataset that is investigated is DEAP, one of the benchmark datasets for evaluating emotion recognition algorithms. In the method proposed, nine descriptive features are extracted from the original data and baseline models are evaluated. 
Subsequently, a WGAN-GP is trained on these extracted features and is used to generate a new set of synthetic data features. The synthetic features are then analysed for quality and appended to the original data to expand this dataset. Experiments with different augmentation factors (x2, x3, x4) are investigated to evaluate the impact of the data augmentation procedure. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed method gives a considerable enhancement of the classification task’s performance.

GAN-Based Data Augmentation For Improving The Classification Of EEG Signals

A novel deep learning methodology for the assessment of ergonomic risks in any given work-related task with high accuracy and in real-time is presented. The proposed method takes as input a video sequence, extracts 3D skeletal features using VIBE algorithm and then processes these features to predict REBA risk scores for the entire body and individual body parts. Results on two well-known datasets and against other state-of-the-art methods verify the ability of the proposed method in predicting REBA ergonomic risk scores with high accuracy.

Towards Real-time Generalized Ergonomic Risk Assessment for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders

Physiological data are nowadays frequently used to recognize the
affective state of subjects while performing different tasks. Automatic
recognition of a stressful state as a consequence of a high level
of cognitive load is significant to prevent illnesses like depression,
anxiety and sleep disorders that are often due to excessive workload.
The spread of wearable sensors that are increasingly reliable and
comfortable makes them easy to use in day-life activities. However,
due to the nature of experiments that involve subjects, the cardinality
of the acquired data is often low, making difficult to train
deep learning methods from the scratch. In this paper we consider
the photopletismography (PPG) that measures the blood volume
registered just under the skin, which can be used to obtain the heart
rate of the subject. It is well known that PPG data are particularly
relevant to detect high level of arousal that is activated by stress.
We show that, converting monodimensional photopletismography
(PPG) data into bidimensional signals it is possible to apply a pretrained
CNN, obtaining deep features that outperform handcrafted
ones in classification tasks, especially introducing feature selections
strategies to avoid curse of dimensionality.

A Deep Learning Approach to Recognize Cognitive Load using PPG Signalshttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453892.3461625

As access to new technologies becomes increasingly less expensive and complex, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are also becoming interesting and relevant for applications outside consumer entertainment. Especially with VR for blind and visually impaired people, VR can overcome the limitations of real-world environments (e.g., hazardous locations and reliance on sighted companionship for training) by virtually exploring its digital model using consumer hardware. In this context, we conducted two within-subject user study with 11 and 5 participants that were asked to learn and re-walk an audio-landmark enriched path in a virtual environment. Our results showed, that the ability to learn and re-walk an audio landmark-enriched environment using an auditive only locomotion interface is possible, but yet difficult. To be able to re-walk even a simple corridor entails a relatively big training effort, but distinctive structures are recognizable again. The results also indicated that the intuitive use of controller based locomotion brings advantages over a keyboard and mouse based approach. Furthermore, we discovered different characteristics of auditive navigation (e.g., walking zigzag, in circles or collision-oriented with regard to the rooms' walls), encountered acoustic rendering problems in acute corners and were able to show a training effect when having trained a path within a virtual environment with respect to re-walking, both inside a virtual environment and outside to a physically re-walked path. This work underlines the feasibility, problems, but also chances of different locomotion implementations in VR and is intended to foster future work towards both technical and methodological optimization in this area.

Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments

Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies are nowadays increasingly adopted as core elements of modern applications for creating unique user experiences. 
Following the capabilities of hardware and its constantly reducing cost, their use is moving from scientific and research projects to everyday life applications such as social media, architectural design and of course games.
In this work, we present a state-of-the-art exergame implementation paradigm, which can facilitate the development of exergames exploiting advanced user interactivity, augmented reality and modern gamification techniques.
The platform has been used for the development of a set of prototype games for Android phones based on the popular AR Core framework. 
The overall approach has been evaluated in real-world scenarios with exceptional usability and performance results.

On the development of augmented reality based exergames for assessing human activity and cognition on mobile devices

Increasing digitization in healthcare promises easier exchange and more efficient use of medical information for patients, institutions and research. 
The number of sharing options for medical data increases, e.g., through personal health records, as well as the volume of data.
To use this data in medical research patients' consent is important.
As more and more data access is regulated by consent forms and their complexity also increases.
For the patient, it becomes less comprehensible which information could be gained from his or her disclosed data. 
This becomes more important when presumably anonymized data has the risk of potential re-identification of an individual.
In this paper we introduce a consent-privacy-impact-quantification (CPIQ) as a risk model of consent forms for the release of personal medical data for use within research projects.
CPIQ evaluates how reasonable a consent decision is for the patient. 
It takes relevant factors such as the patient’s preferences into account, the circumstances and benefits of the research project, and the potential risk to the patient.
The model can be parameterized so that different aspects such as the benefit of the research project, the risk of a data leak or the risk of a patient’s confidential data becoming known can be represented.
We present the feasibility of this model by including it in an existing consent management system.

CPIQ - A Privacy Impact Quantification for Digital Medical Consent

In a pandemic crisis such as the one that the world has been experiencing since January 2020, utilizing remote mobile health monitoring can help monitor the cardiac health of healthy individuals as well as chronically ill patients. Apple Watch is a fitness tracker that measures heart rate and can facilitate this need due to its availability worldwide and relative affordability. Hence, it has the potential of being useful in assessing and monitoring one’s cardiac health. This paper reports the preliminary results from an ongoing study aimed at assessing the accuracy of the Apple Watch in measuring heart rate variability. To achieve the goal of the study, concurrent measurements of electrocardiogram (ECG), as a gold standard, and instantaneous Apple Watch heartrate values were made in six (4 male) age 26.4±3.2 years old volunteer healthy subjects. Both time and frequency domain measures of heartrate variability (HRV) were obtained from the recorded ECG and estimated from the Apple Watch instantaneous heartrate values. The results indicate that it may be possible to obtain a reasonable estimate of HRV time-domain and frequency-domain metrics using Apple Watch in healthy subjects.

Estimation of Heart Rate Variability Measures Using Apple Watch and Evaluating Their Accuracy

Corporate health management is an important tool for preventing work-related absenteeism, increasing overall employee satisfaction and reducing the costs of absenteeism or presenteeism in the long term. Today, corporate health management is even more important because many employees work from home. Often, there is a lack of workspace or even a workplace that meets minimum occupational health and safety guidelines. Overwork, noise pollution, incorrect sitting posture and unstructured work breaks contribute negatively to the daily work routine, as does the general problem of separating work and leisure. Under these conditions, daily work is made even more difficult, which can lead to increased mental and physical stress. A concept for unobtrusive monitoring to increase long-term health, improve working conditions or at least to show the necessary adjustments to the new work situation can help to solve these problems. This paper presents a concept that shows how a simple webcam can be used to record essential vital signs during working hours, evaluate them using machine learning, and offer intervention recommendations based on these data to reduce psychological and physical stress. Work on continuous stress measurement and the challenges associated with it will be presented. This work serves as a starting point for the development of a camera-based tool for mental and physical stress measurement in the workplace. Our approach demonstrates that the required parameters can be captured using a simple webcam and that interventions can be used to achieve long-term reductions in work-related mental and physical stress, provided that the proposed interventions are followed. The prototypical implementation shows that such a solution can work well in the workplace, but that data protection and technical limitations must be considered in the future in order to establish camera-based methods in the toolbox of workplace health management.

CareCam: Concept of a new tool for Corporate Health Management

The analysis of large data sets for several purposes is a growing requirement for many professions. Tactile charts are suitable to enable people with visual impairment and blindness performing data analysis tasks. However, few approaches focus on the development of tactile charts for data analysis purposes. Concepts are needed to enable the representation of a sufficient amount of data with tactile charts and to address arising challenges, such as information overload. In this paper, we first discuss and analyse the scalability of data represented by tactile charts, using the example of tactile scatterplots. We further address the data size limitations and propose a workflow for identifying critical, tactile representation with limited readability respecting the analysis task. Moreover, we propose concepts to increase the represented amount of data in tactile scatterplots. Based on our analysis results, we introduce tactile heatmaps as an innovative and new concept to represent data
for the haptic sense. Therefore, we developed a design for tactile heatmaps by utilising different elevation levels. We evaluated the concept as well as the feasibility of different elevation levels with 11 blind and visually impaired people. Four design conditions for embossed tactile heatmaps were compared. We further evaluated
the suitability of 3D-printed heatmaps. The results show that tactile heatmaps are suitable for representing more data than previously known tactile representation methods. They support obtaining an overview of a high amount of data and can be applied for data analysis purposes.

Tactile Heatmaps: A Novel Visualisation Technique for Data Analysis with Tactile Charts

Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a disease affecting premature infants and may lead to childhood blindness. Due to lack of trained ophthalmologists, developing a fully automated ROP diagnostic system can significantly benefit the infants affected by ROP. Based on manually segmented features, previous work produces severity scores for ROP with excellent prediction accuracy. However, when automated segmentation employed, a significant accuracy drop is observed. In this paper, we show that U-Net segmentation, which is automated, comes at no accuracy loss.

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