Alin Moldoveanu

Universitatea Națională de Știință și Tehnologie Politehnica București | UPB · Faculty of Automatic Control and System Engineering

Background: Stroke is the third leading cause of disability. Virtual reality (VR) has shown promising results in post-stroke rehabilitation. The VR TRAVEE system was designed for the neuromotor rehabilitation of the upper limb after a stroke and offers the ability to track limb movements by providing auditory feedback and visual augmentation. The W...

The Rashômon Effect, applied in Explainable Machine Learning, refers to the disagreement between the explanations provided by various attribution explainers and to the dissimilarity across multiple explanations generated by a particular explainer for a single instance from the dataset (differences between feature importances and their associated si...

Background: Stroke is the third leading cause of disability, primarily due to motor, sensory, and cognitive impairments. Virtual reality (VR) has shown promising results in post-stroke rehabilita-tion, particularly for upper limb recovery. The World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0), aligned with the International...

A sustainable smart tourism ecosystem relies on building digital networks that link tourists to destinations. This study explores the potential of web and immersive technologies, specifically the Virtual Romania (VRRO) platform, in enhancing sustainable tourism by redirecting tourist traffic to lesser-known destinations and boosting user engagement...

This paper examines the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) in training public speaking skills. The fear of public speaking (FPS) is a common problem that can have a significant impact on an individual’s professional and personal life. Traditional therapies for public speaking anxiety have been shown to be effective, but there is growing interest...

Introduction: Globally, cancer is the leading cause of mortality, with colorectal neoplasia ranking third in terms of incidence and mortality worldwide. Patients face disease- and treatment-specific impacts, which can significantly influence their quality of life (QoL). Aim: This study aimed to propose a protocol to measure in-hospital and long-ter...

Purpose: Visually impaired people (VIP) find it challenging to understand and gain awareness of their surroundings. Most activities require the use of the auditory or tactile senses. As such, assistive systems which are capable of aiding visually impaired people to understand, navigate and form a mental representation of their environment are exte...

A sustainable smart tourism ecosystem relies on building digital networks that link tourists to destinations. This study explores how web and immersive technologies, such as the VRRO platform, can improve tourism by offering interactive experiences to augment traditional travel. The study underscores the role of VRRO's design in enhancing user inte...

Phobias are a type of anxiety disorder characterized by severe fear of objects and situations. In recent years, virtual reality exposure therapy has emerged as a safer and more convenient method of treating phobias, with the same rate of success as classical therapy, the in vivo exposure to stimuli. Following extensive research concerning the avail...

With the increase in the number of sensory substitution devices, the engineering community is confronted with a new challenge: ensuring user training in safe virtual environments before using these devices in real-life situations. We developed a game that uses an original sonification model, which, although not specific to a certain substitution de...

Almost all educational systems still rely on traditional teaching methods: children must absorb huge uncorrelated amounts of information from various disciplines, multidisciplinary aspects are not developed, the fun factor is missing in most of the classes. Many children sometimes do not fully understand the presented theoretical concepts and their...

Skin optical inspection is an imperative procedure for a suspicious dermal lesion since very early skin cancer detection can guarantee total recovery. Dermoscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy, optical coherence tomography, multispectral imaging, multiphoton laser imaging, and 3D topography are the most outstanding optical techniques implement...

Photorealism has become a growing requirement for real-time graphics applications. Among the components needed to obtain photorealism, one of the most important is the simulation of the light transport, the result of which is called global illumination. With the growing interest in the research in this field, the need to develop a learning approach...

Virtual and augmented reality technologies have known an impressive market evolution due to their potential to provide immersive experiences. However, they still have significant difficulties to enable fully fledged, consumer-ready applications that can handle complex tasks such as multi-user collaboration or time-persistent experiences. In this co...

The most important component of photorealism in Computer Graphics is given by a physically correct approximation of the light transport. Besides the direct illumination from light sources, there is an indirect illumination, produced by the reflections of the light rays on other surfaces of the scene. In Computer Graphics, the process of computing t...

Phobia is an anxiety disorder that affects 13% of the world’s population and it is manifested through an extreme and irrational fear toward objects or situations. A lot of research has been done on studying the contributing factors to the onset, development, and maintenance of phobias, underlying cognitive and behavioral processes, physical manifes...

This paper focuses on the binary classification of the emotion of fear, based on the physiological data and subjective responses stored in the DEAP dataset. We performed a mapping between the discrete and dimensional emotional information considering the participants' ratings and extracted a substantial set of 40 types of features from the physiolo...

As more and more people suffer from anxiety disorders, new means of clinical and therapeutical interventions are required. For instance, virtual agents or embodied conversational agents, enriched with human-like appearance and verbal and non-verbal behavior have emerged in recent years. They simulate the real-world therapist, communicate with the p...

In the last decade, technology has been rapidly evolving, making the humankind more dependent on digital devices than ever. We rely more and more on digitalization and we are excited to welcome emergent technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) into our everyday activities as they show great potential to enhance our standard of life. AR applications...

Public speaking is an essential tool in various domains, such as education, business or politics. Some people are born great speakers, while others learn to master this art, through training. At the other extreme are the people who suffer from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking. This paper provides an overview of solutions for treating the f...

Augmented reality is a fairly new technology and it has only recently started to be introduced on a large scale. We can find augmented reality applications in a variety of domains, such as entertainment, games, industry, science, tourism, culture, education. In the education system, the mobile phone, as a standalone tool that can be used at any sta...

We live in a time period when technology is advancing at an incredible speed. What seemed to be almost science fiction twenty years ago nowadays is becoming or has already become reality. As a result, our activities (especially the activities of young people) have started to shift more and more towards the digital world. If our parents used to read...

Public speaking started to gain much attention when it comes to phobias, which is anxiety for new presenters. In some cases, specialists consider that avoiding the phenomenon which causes the phobia is sufficient treatment; in others, the exact opposite, being gradually exposed to the object of fear may lead to a cure. We have to start looking for...

This paper proposes a protocol for the acquisition and processing of biophysical signals in virtual reality applications, particularly in phobia therapy experiments. This protocol aims to ensure that the measurement and processing phases are performed effectively, to obtain clean data that can be used to estimate the users’ anxiety levels. The prot...

As life expectancy is mostly increasing, the incidence of many neurological disorders is also constantly growing. For improving the physical functions affected by a neurological disorder, rehabilitation procedures are mandatory, and they must be performed regularly. Unfortunately, neurorehabilitation procedures have disadvantages in terms of costs,...

The Smith chart was primarily developed, extended, and refined by Phillip Hagar Smith [1] in a series of works published [2]-[4] between 1939 and 1969. Smith was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1905. He majored in electrical communications at Tufts University and joined the Radio Research Department of Bell Telephone Laboratories (now Bell Lab...

As life expectancy is mostly increasing, the incidence of many neurological disorders is also constantly growing. For improving the physical functions affected by a neurological disorder, rehabilitation procedures are mandatory, and they must be performed regularly. Unfortunately, neurorehabilitation procedures have disadvantages in terms of costs,...

Recently investigated rehabilitative practices involving Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) techniques provided long-lasting benefits after short-term recovering programs. The prevalence of this revolutionary approach received a boost from virtual reality and augmented reality, which contribute to the brain n...

This paper presented the assessment of cognitive load (as an effective real-time index of task difficulty) and the level of brain activation during an experiment in which eight visually impaired subjects performed two types of tasks while using the white cane and the Sound of Vision assistive device with three types of sensory input—audio, haptic,...

This paper presents the design, a pilot implementation and validation of eTher, an assistive virtual agent for acrophobia therapy in a Virtual Reality environment that depicts a mountain landscape and contains a ride by cable car. eTher acts as a virtual therapist, offering support and encouragement to the patient. It directly interacts with the us...

Hospital acquired infections are infections that occur in patients during hospitalization, which were not present at the time of admission. They are among the most common adverse events in healthcare around the world, leading to increased mortality and morbidity rates, prolonged hospitalization periods and considerable financial burden on both hosp...

This paper presents a human-centered methodology for designing and developing Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) systems. By following the steps proposed by the methodology – Users analysis, Domain Analysis, Task Analysis and Representational Analysis, we developed a system for acrophobia therapy composed of 9 functional, interrelated modules...

This paper presents the conceptual design, implementation and evaluation of a VR based system for treating phobias that simulates stress-provoking real-world situations, accompanied by physiological signals monitoring. The element of novelty is the holonic architecture we propose for the real-time adaptation of the virtual environment in response t...

As technology advances, we can see that companies come up with different solutions for different problems. Blind and visually impaired people are a category of people that require help from technology to complete daily tasks. Whether it is to read and navigate on a computer or walk around, technology plays a big role in these people’s lives. But su...

The article proves first that the constant quality factor (Q) contours for passive circuits, while represented on a 2D Smith chart, form circle arcs on a coaxal circle family. Furthermore, these circle arcs represent semi-circles families in the north hemisphere while represented on a 3D Smith chart. On the contrary we show that the constant Q cont...

Computer vision based indoor localization methods use either an infrastructure of static cameras to track mobile entities (e.g., people, robots) or cameras attached to the mobile entities. Methods in the first category employ object tracking, while the others map images from mobile cameras with images acquired during a configuration stage or extrac...

This paper is focused on a new way of learning, based on the concept of immersive education, close related to augmented and virtual reality technologies. These technologies allow young people to experiment, learn and understand many subjects, even in the absence of the supporting physical infrastructure. The concept of immersive education can be im...

As we roam further into the future, digitization becomes an essential tool in thinning the barrier between the physical and cyber worlds. We grow expectations of bringing more and more of the world at our fingertips, and eventually being able to access data or experiences by the means of easily operable electronic devices. Reviving the libraries us...

The ever increasing advancement of technology, the availability of information, and other internet-related activities such as online communication have shifted the interest of people, leaving cultural or social aspects such as reading a book or visiting a museum on a second plan. Gamification is a well-known method which makes education and culture...

In a highly technologized century, the process of learning must benefit from the advantages of technology. Gamification, artificial intelligence, virtual or augmented environments or adaptive learning are just some of the trends which have evolved in the past years in the field of e-Learning. Collaborative learning is also an efficient learning met...

In the past few years, technology breakthroughs have made Augmented Reality (AR) applications more user friendly and accessible than ever. New AR technologies show great promise and potential to influence and enhance the activities related to a wide range of areas, such as education, military industry, entertainment, sports or medicine and surgical...

The article firstly proves that the constant quality factor (Q) contours for passive circuits, while represented on a 2D Smith chart, form circle arcs on a coaxal circle family. Furthermore, these circle arcs represent semi-circles families in the north hemisphere while represented on a 3D Smith chart. On the contrary, it then shows that, the const...

Emotions constitute an indispensable component of our everyday life. They consist of conscious mental reactions towards objects or situations and are associated with various physiological, behavioral, and cognitive changes. In this paper, we propose a comparative analysis between different machine learning and deep learning techniques, with and wit...

Recently, the field of Metal-Insulator-Transition (MIT) materials has emerged as an unconventional solution for novel energy efficient electronic functions, such as steep slope subthermionic switches, neuromorphic hardware, reconfigurable radiofrequency functions, new types of sensors, terahertz and optoelectronic devices. Employing radiofrequency...

Globally, rehabilitation in healthcare systems requires major improvements so that affordable, high-quality services will become available to a larger scale. Rehabilitation benefits both individuals and the entire community from an economic and social point of view. There are different types of rehabilitation, for a wide range of medical conditions...

Recently, the field of Metal-Insulator-Transition (MIT) materials has emerged as an unconventional solution for novel energy efficient electronic functions, such as steep slope subthermionic switches, neuromorphic hardware, reconfigurable radiofrequency functions, new types of sensors, teraherz and optoelectronic devices. Designing radiofrequency (...

This paper introduces a real-time region growing segmentation algorithm, designed for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which labels only a fraction of the input elements. Instead of searching locally around each element for strong similarity, like state-of-the-art segmentation and pre-segmentation methods do, the proposed algorithm inexactly searc...

There has been steady progress in the field of affective computing over the last two decades that has integrated artificial intelligence techniques in the construction of computational models of emotion. Having, as a purpose, the development of a system for treating phobias that would automatically determine fear levels and adapt exposure intensity...

Virtual Reality is an emerging area and its core technologies advance rapidly. It is used mostly for training tools in many domains such as medicine, military, space, education and entertainment. The current paper is a state-of-the-art paper with the main goal of bringing people that are not visually impaired closer, from a social point of view, to...

Digital technology has already become a necessity of everyday life for any average person in developed countries. Starting from simple tasks like calculus or grammar, to more complex ones like navigation, simulations and appointments, nowadays we rely more and more on technology like smartphones, smartwatches and smart assistants. As this may seem...

The paper is generalizing and enhancing the modeling principles and concepts introduced by the authors in previous research in order to surpass known drawbacks affecting the performance of current 3D modeling software applications. The proposed modeling method presents increased flexibility in modifying and reusing existing models and is alleviatin...

As more and more people are left disabled by stroke each year, it is of vital importance to progress in the research of new ways to improve their condition, and to ensure that they maintain as much as possible their independence in everyday life. A step in this direction of research was taken with TRAVEE, a system dedicated to neuromotor rehabilita...

Our paper presents a series of modern ways used for augmenting reading and increasing people's interest in books. In today's society, reading has been replaced with other activities related to technology and the evolution of science. However, the advantages brought in by technology can also be applied to books in order to increase their attractiven...

This paper presents the design and development of a Virtual Reality game for treating acrophobia, as well as a comparative study between the players' performance in the game, under two different conditions - one in which the difficulty levels are adjusted according to the subjects' biophysical data and one in which they are not. The results showed...

This work describes the geometry behind the Smith chart, recent 3D Smith chart tool and previously reported conceptual Hyperbolic Smith chart. We present the geometrical properties of the transformations used in creating them by means of inversive geometry and basic non-Euclidean geometry. The beauty and simplicity of this perspective are complemen...

Hospital acquired infections are infections that occur in patients during hospitalization, which were not present at the time of admission. They are among the most common adverse events in healthcare around the world, leading to increased mortality and morbidity rates, prolonged hospitalization periods and considerable financial burden on both hosp...

[This corrects the article on p. 99 in vol. 9, PMID: 29487531.].