B. J.A. Krose

Amsterdam University of Applied Science

Physical activity can prolong the ability of older adults to live independently at home. A blended intervention was developed to sustain healthy aging. During a clinical trial 133 participants, with an average age of 71 years old, received a tablet and coaching to support them in performing home-based exercises for 6 months. To investigate how the...

Om kinderen met astma meer te laten bewegen, is de digitale tool Foxfit ontwikkeld. De tool bevat interactieve modulen met persoonlijke doelstellingen, educatie, agendavoering en een visuele terugkoppeling van het beweeggedrag. Bewegen is belangrijk voor ieders gezondheid. De impact van te weinig bewegen is extra groot voor kinderen met een chronis...

Objective to gain insight into what older adults after hip fracture perceive as most beneficial to their recovery to everyday life. Design qualitative research approach. Setting six skilled nursing facilities. Participants 19 older community dwelling older adults (aged 65–94), who had recently received geriatric rehabilitation after hip fracture...

Background: For older adults, physical activity is vital for maintaining their health and ability to live independently. Home-based programs can help them achieve the recommended exercise frequency. An application for a tablet computer was developed to support older adults in following a personal training program. It featured goal setting, tailorin...

Background: Increased physical activity and dietary protein intake are promising interventions to prevent or treat the age-related decline in physical performance in older adults. There are well-controlled exercise as well as dietary intervention studies that show beneficial effects on physical performance in older adults. In practice, however, we...

We analyzed a large data set from a mobile exercise application to find the preferred running situations of a large number of users. We categorized the users according to their running behaviors (i.e. regularly active, or rarely active over the year), then studied the influence of 15 features, including temporal, geographical and weather-based feat...

Digitally supported dietary counseling increases protein intake in community dwelling older adults: preliminary results of the VITAMIN RCT. Jantine van den Helder1, Carliene van Dronkelaar1, Michael Tieland1, Sumit Mehra, Bart Visser, Ben Krose, Raoul Engelbert, Peter J.M. Weijs1,2, 1Faculty of Sports and Nutrition, Amsterdam University of Applie...

BACKGROUND For older adults, physical activity is vital for maintaining their health and ability to live independently. Home-based programs can help them achieve the recommended exercise frequency. An application for a tablet computer was developed to support older adults in following a personal training program. It featured goal setting, tailoring...

Early detection of high fall risk is an essential component of fall prevention in older adults. Wearable sensors can provide valuable insight into daily-life activities; biomechanical features extracted from such inertial data have been shown to be of added value for the assessment of fall risk. Body-worn sensors such as accelerometers can provide...

Background: Physical activity can prevent or delay age-related impairments and prolong the ability of older adults to live independently. Community-based programs typically offer classes where older adults can exercise only once a week under the guidance of an instructor. The health benefits of such programs vary. Exercise frequency and the durati...

Smart tangible toys, designed for hand manipulation, can transform fine motor skills assessment into enjoyable activities which are engaging for children to play (partially) unsupervised. Such toys can support school teachers and parents for early detection of deficiencies in motor skills development of children, as well as objectively monitor the...

Although there exist various product and services to support people with dementia in their everyday activities and challenges, people with dementia and their informal caregivers experience many unmet needs. In this paper, we present the ongoing development process of a decision aid that aims to reveal these unmet needs and match them with relevant...

This chapter focuses on the analysis of data that is collected from sensors in the home environment. First we discuss the need for a good model that relates sensor data (or features derived from the data) to indicators of health and well-being. Then we present several methods for model building. We distinguish between supervised methods that need d...

Visually impaired people (VIP) can experience difficulties in navigating urban environments. They mostly depend on the environment’s infrastructure or technical solutions like smartphone apps for navigation. However apps typically use visual and audio feedback, which can be ineffective, distracting and dangerous. Haptic feedback in the form of vibr...

This paper describes experiments with a game device that was used for early detection of delays in motor skill development in primary school children. Children play a game by bi-manual manipulation of the device which continuously collects accelerometer data and game state data. Features of the data are used to discriminate between normal children...

Design-based inquiries into the networked products of the Internet of Things (IoT) lack a coherent understanding of the effect of such products on society. This paper proposes a new taxonomy for networked products, which would allow articulation on their current state and future, and provide insights to designers for creating meaningful and aesthet...

For creating sports innovations we need tools to collect data on physical activity behaviour. Collecting data is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, sharing data and using it to answer multiple research questions is desirable. Especially in larger multidisciplinary research projects, it is beneficial if a diverse data set can be collected effo...

This abstract is an adaptation of the demo paper “Guiding the Visually Impaired through the Environment with Beacons” DOI: 10.1145/2968219.2971387 This publication is made possible by the ZonMW program InZicht and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences grand Urban Vitality and Amsterdam Creative Industries Network.

We present a method for measuring gait velocity of older adults using data from existing ambient sensor networks. Gait velocity is an important predictor of fall risk and functional health. In contrast to other approaches that use specific sensors or sensor configurations, our method imposes no constraints on the elderly. We studied different proba...

Background The performance of activities of daily living (ADL) at home is important for the recovery of older individuals after hip fracture. However, 20–90% of these individuals lose ADL function and never fully recover. It is currently unknown to what extent occupational therapy (OT) with coaching based on cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) imp...

Ageing is associated with a decline in daily functioning and mobility. A physically active life and physical exercise can minimize the decline of daily functioning and improve the physical-, psychological- and social functioning of older adults. Despite several advantages of group-based exercise programs, older adults participating in such interven...

Human activity recognition system is of great importance in robot-care scenarios. Typically, training such a system requires activity labels to be both completely and accurately annotated. In this paper, we go beyond such restriction and propose a learning method that allow labels to be incomplete and uncertain. We introduce the idea of soft labels...

We demonstrate a method that allows two users to communicate remotely using their sense of touch by dynamically applying vibrotactile feedback to one user's forearm using two different input methods. User input on a standard mobile touch-screen device or a purpose-built touch-sensitive wearable is analyzed in real time, and used to control intensit...

De auteurs gaan in dit artikel in op de mogelijkheden van innovatieve technologie in het stimuleren van sport en bewegen en het op maat aanpassen van beweegvriendelijke omgevingen in een stedelijke context. Ze concluderen dat laagdrempelige technologie zoals smartphone applicaties (apps) en wearables veelvuldig worden gebruikt door minder actieve l...

Background: ICT based solutions are increasingly introduced for active and healthy ageing. In this context continuous monitoring of older adults with domestic sensor systems has been suggested to provide important information about their functional health. However, there is not yet a solid model for the interpretation of the sensor data. Objectiv...

Assistive technologies for elderly often use ambient sensor systems to infer activities of daily living (ADL). In general such systems assume that only a single person (the resident) is present in the home. However, in real world environments, it is common to have visits and it is crucial to know when the resident is alone or not. We deal with this...

Participatory data collection relies on the commitment of the participants to report data continuously, which makes providing incentives to people crucial. In this case study, we describe how we designed a web app by using different incentive mechanisms to collect participatory data for monitoring community health. The insights we gathered through...

Background: Meer Bewegen voor Ouderen is a Dutch umbrella organization that aims to improve the physical, social and psychological wellbeing of senior citizens. Weekly 300,000 older adults participate nationwide in community based ‘gym classes’. In order to achieve the recommended amount of physical activity, the participants are stimulated to repe...

Sensor systems can be deployed in the homes of older adults living alone for functional health assessments. Their information is very useful for health care specialists. The problem lies in developing person independent models while facing a large variability in behavior. We address this problem by, first, proposing a new feature extraction method...

This paper explores a method for deducing the affective state of runners using his/her movements. The movements are measured on the arm using a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer. Multiple features are derived from the measured data. We studied which features are most predictive for the affective state by looking at the correlations between the fe...

We present a method for measuring gait velocity using data from an existing ambient sensor network. Gait velocity is an important predictor of fall risk and functional health. In contrast to other approaches that use specific sensors or sensor configurations our method imposes no constraints on the elderly. We studied different probabilistic models...

We present a novel hierarchical model for human activity recognition. In contrast to approaches that successively recognize actions and activities, our approach jointly models actions and activities in a unified framework, and their labels are simultaneously predicted. The model is embedded with a latent layer that is able to capture a richer class...

In this paper, we address the problem of people detection and tracking in crowded scenes using range cameras. We propose a new method for people detection and localisation based on the combination of background modelling and template matching. The method uses an adaptive background model in the range domain to characterise the scene without people....

Technology designed to sense behavior, often neglects to directly incorporate subjective input from (elderly) users. This paper presents experiences in deploying technology that considers the elderly user and their subjective input as a way to enrich sensor data systems and empower the user. For this purpose, the paper draws on: (1) Observations of...

Ubiquitous computing, new sensor technologies, and increasingly available and accessible algorithms for pattern recognition and machine learning enable automatic analysis and modeling of human behavior in many novel ways. In this introductory paper of the 6th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU’15), we seek to critically ass...

Purpose: The early detection of a decline in daily functioning of independently living older people can aid health care professionals in providing preventive interventions. To monitor daily activity patterns and, thereby detect a decline in daily functioning, new technologies, such as sensors can be placed in the home environment. The purpose of th...

Ambient monitoring systems offer great possibilities for health trend analysis in addition to anomaly detection. Health trend analysis helps care professionals to evaluate someones functional health and direct or evaluate the choice of interventions. This paper presents one case study of a person that was followed with an ambient monitoring system...

Many algorithms on health monitoring from ambient sensor networks assume that only a single person is present in the home. We present an unsupervised method that models visit behaviour. A Markov modulated multidimensional non-homogeneous Poisson process (M3P2) is described that allows us to model weekly and daily variations and to combine multiple...

Automated human activity recognition is an essential task for Human Robot Interaction (HRI). A successful activity recognition system enables an assistant robot to provide precise services. In this paper, we present a two-layered approach that can recognize sub-level activities and high-level activities successively. In the first layer, the low-lev...

Activity recognition in a home setting is being widely explored as a means to support elderly people living alone. Probabilistic models using classical, maximum-likelihood estimation methods are known to work well in this domain, but they are prone to overfitting and require labeled activity data for every new site. This limitation has important pr...

This paper describes two new topic models for the analysis of human behavior in homes that are equipped with sensor networks. The models are based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models and can detect patterns in sensor data in an unsupervised manner. LDA-Gaussian, the first variation of the model, is a combination of a Gaussian Mixture...

We present a novel latent discriminative model for human activity recognition. Unlike the approaches that require conditional independence assumptions, our model is very flexible in encoding the full connectivity among observations, latent states, and activity states. The model is able to capture richer class of contextual information in both state...

We describe a novel framework that combines an overhead camera and a robot RGB-D sensor for real-time people finding. Finding people is one of the most fundamental tasks in robot home care scenarios and it consists of many components, e.g. people detection, people tracking, face recognition, robot navigation. Researchers have extensively worked on...

This chapter focuses on the analysis of data that is collected from sensors in the home environment. First we discuss the need for a good model that relates sensor data (or features derived from the data) to indicators of health and well-being. Then we present several methods for model building. We distinguish between supervised methods that need d...

Datasets recorded in three different houses in which the same set of activities is annotated. These datasets were used to demonstrate that the knowledge contained in activity recognition models can be transferred from one house to another.

A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to...

To study sensor monitoring (use of a sensor network placed in the home environment to observe individuals' daily functioning (activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living)) as a method to measure and support daily functioning for older people living independently at home. Systematic review. Participants' homes. Community-d...

We describe a system that recognizes human postures with heavy self-occlusion. In particular, we address posture recognition in a robot assisted-living scenario, where the environment is equipped with a top-view camera for monitoring human activities. This setup is very useful because top-view cameras lead to accurate localization and limited inter...

We address the problem of person re-identification in colour-depth camera using the height temporal information of peo-ple. Our proposed gait-based feature corresponds to the frequency response of the height temporal information. We demonstrate that the discriminative periodic motion associ-ated with human gait is encoded within the height temporal...

Existing research on the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from simple sensor networks assumes that only a single person is present in the home. In reality, the resident receives visits from family members or professional health care givers. In such cases activity recognition must take into account the presence of multiple persons. He...

With changes in life expectancy across the world, technologies enhancing well-being of individuals, specifically for older people, are subject to a new stream of research and development. In this paper we present the ACCOMPANY project, a pan-European project which focuses on home companion technologies. The projects aims to progress beyond the stat...

In this paper we outline the design process of the TaSST (Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch), a touch-sensitive vibrotactile arm sleeve. The TaSST was designed to enable two people to communicate different types of touch over a distance. The touch-sensitive surface of the sleeve consists of a grid of 4×3 sensor compartments filled with conductive woo...

Wireless sensor networks are becoming popular in the field of ambient assisted living. In this paper we report our study on the relationship between a functional health metric and features derived from the sensor data. Sensor systems are installed in the houses of nine people who are also quarterly visited by an occupational therapist for functiona...

Sensor technology is increasingly applied for the purpose of monitoring elderly's Activities of Daily Living (ADL), a set of activities used by physicians to benchmark physical and cognitive decline. Visualizing deviations in ADL can help medical specialists and nurses to recognize disease symptoms at an early stage. This paper presents possible vi...

This paper describes the approach used to identify elderly people's needs and attitudes towards applying ambient sensor systems for monitoring daily activities in the home. As elderly are typically unfamiliar with such ambient technology, interactive tools for explicating sensor monitoring -an interactive dollhouse and iPad applications for display...

The availability of cheap imaging sensors makes it possible to increase the robustness of vision-based alarm systems. This paper explores the benefit of data fusion in the application of fall detection. Falls are a common source of injury for elderly people and automatic fall detection is, therefore, an important development in automated home care....

The way that innovation is currently done requires a new research methodology that enables co-creation and frequent, iterative evaluation in real-world settings. This paper describes the employment of the living lab methodology that corresponds to this need. Particularly, this paper presents the way that the Amsterdam University of Applies Sciences...

People suffering from dementia often have problems with way finding and feel restless. In this paper we present an interactive wall developed for decreasing the amount of wandering behaviour of people suffering from dementia. The installation aims at making these people feel more at home in the nursing homes by guiding them with a motion triggered...

Robust people detection and localization is a prerequisite for many applications where service robots interact with humans. Future robots will not be stand-alone any more but will operate in smart environments that are equipped with sensor systems for context awareness and activity recognition. This paper describes a probabilistic framework for the...

In this article we present an automatic camera calibration algorithm using multiple trajectories in a multiple camera network with non-overlapping field-of-views (FOV). Visible trajectories within a camera FOV are assumed to be measured with respect to the camera local co-ordinate system. Calibration is performed by aligning each camera local co-or...

Existing research on the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from simple sensor networks assumes that only a single person is present in the home. In real life there will be situations where the inhabitant receives visits from family members or professional health care givers. In such cases activity recognition is unreliable. In this pa...

We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an audiovisual recording as multimodal entities that g...

People counting is a challenging task with many applications. We propose a method with a fixed stereo camera that is based on projecting a template onto the depth image. The method was tested on a challenging outdoor dataset with good results and runs in real time.