Johannes Kropf

Salumentis OG

Retirement is a critical step in older adults’ lives, so it is important to motivate them to stay physically active, mentally healthy, and socially connected in the transition from work to retirement, including through digital health coaching programs. This study aims to: evaluate the impact of a digital coaching intervention to enhance three healt...

Background: Living Labs are user-centered, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user cocreation approach, which integrates research and innovation processes in real-life communities and settings. The Horizon 2020 Project VITALISE (Virtual Health and Wellbeing Living Lab Infrastructure) unites 19 partners across 11 countries. The projec...

BACKGROUND Living labs are user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings. The Horizon 2020 project “Virtual Health and Wellbeing Living Lab Infrastructure” (VITALISE) unites 19 partners across 11 countries. The project aims...

Background: Retirement is recognized as a factor influencing the ageing process. Today, virtual health coaching systems can play a pivotal role in supporting older adults' active and healthy ageing. This study wants to answer two research questions: (1) What are the user requirements of a virtual coach (VC) based on an Embodied Conversational Agen...

Based on the lessons learnt from the co-design, development and integration processes, the research findings and the outputs from the engagement with a network of stakeholders over the course of the EU funded initiatives, this chapter will aim to help sketching the future policies and research funding programmes for ageing well in Europe. The chapt...

Providing a suitable rehabilitation after an acute episode or a chronic disease helps people to live independently and enhance their quality of life. However, the continuity of care is often interrupted in the transition from hospital to home. Virtual coaches (VCs) could help these patients to engage in personalized home rehabilitation programs. Th...

BACKGROUND The ageing worldwide population involves an increase of multiple chronic diseases and the consequent demand for healthcare services by older people, thus challenging the healthcare systems’ sustainability and older people’s quality of life. In order to postpone older adults’ need for care, the promotion of healthy ageing is a key action...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/17809.].

UNSTRUCTURED The rapid increase of the aging population is pushing many national governments to reshape retirement legislation in order to extend older adults’ working life. Once retired, older adults can be invaluable resources for the community as family carers, as volunteers, or by returning to work. Healthy aging is one of the main conditions f...

Global aging and increasing multimorbidity are questioning the sustainability of healthcare systems. Healthy aging is at the top of the world political agenda, as a possible means for hindering the collapse of care systems. In the aging process, the transition to retirement can lead to an improvement or a deterioration of physical and psychological...

User experience and the user experience design process are essential and mandatory factors in product design. Moreover, the field of product design provides valuable approaches that target the long-standing engagement of the user and the offered product. This work builds upon this knowledge and investigates different concepts and methods from the p...

Conversational agents are gaining huge popularity in industrial applications such as digital assistants, chatbots, and particularly systems for natural language understanding (NLU). However, a major drawback is the unavailability of a common metric to evaluate the replies against human judgement for conversational agents. In this paper, we develop...

BACKGROUND The rapid increasing of the ageing population is pushing many national Governments to shape the retirement legislation in order to extend the older adults’ working life. Nevertheless, one of the main conditions to work longer is being healthy. Thus, carrying out health and well-being promotion and prevention interventions targeting older...

Background: The rapid increase of the aging population is pushing many national governments to reshape retirement legislation in order to extend older adults' working life. Once retired, older adults can be invaluable resources for the community as family carers, as volunteers, or by returning to work. Healthy aging is one of the main conditions f...

Smart home environment plays a prominent role in improving the quality of life of the residents by enabling home automation, health care and safety through various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, a large amount of data generated by sensors in a smart home environment heighten security and privacy concerns among potential users. Some of t...

The design process of interactive systems is a multifaceted process that can lead to various forms of manifestations. Designers can draw on different interaction design styles to realize the intended, to-be designed interactive system and the corresponding HCI artifacts. This work identifies and investigates different interaction design styles base...

We propose a new approach to natural language understanding in which we consider the input text as an image and apply 2D Convolutional Neural Networks to learn the local and global semantics of the sentences from the variations ofthe visual patterns of words. Our approach demonstrates that it is possible to get semantically meaningful features from...

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies the potential for privacy invasion is becoming a major concern especially in regards to healthcare data and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments. Systems that offer AAL technologies make extensive use of personal data in order to provide services that are context-aware and personalized. This...

INTRODUCTION: Physical activity in older adults is an important protective factor for preventing morbidity and mortality and increases well-being and independent living. Therefore, the overall aim of the so-called “Train and Win”project* is to develop a training module at the user’s home using their own TV with a motivating avatar. Recently, two us...

The concept of smart home is a promising and efficient way of maintaining good health, providing comfort and safety thus helps in enhancing the quality of life. Acceptability of smart homes relies on the users' perceptions towards its benefits and their concerns related to monitoring and data sharing. Within this study, an online survey with 234 pa...

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies the potential for privacy invasion is becoming a major concern especially in regards to healthcare data and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments. Systems that offer AAL technologies make extensive use of personal data in order to provide services that are context-aware and personalized. This...

A probabilistic system in an ambient assisted living environment is automatically built to detect human behaviour. The focus lies on the early prediction of human activities based on domotic sensor data and on general activity assignment. First recurrent patterns are detected using the Temporal-Pattern (T-Pattern) algorithm and further a probabilis...

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very useful for fully automatic extraction of discriminative features from raw sensor data. This is an important problem in activity recognition, which is of enormous interest in ambient sensor environments due to its universality on various applications. Activity recognition in smart homes uses large amounts...

Human activity recognition using smart home sensors is one of the bases of ubiquitous computing in smart environments and a topic undergoing intense research in the field of ambient assisted living. The increasingly large amount of data sets calls for machine learning methods. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning model that learns to classif...

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Ambient Intelligence technologies are providing support to older people in living an independent and confident life by developing innovative ICT-based products, services, and systems. Despite significant advancement in AAL technologies and smart systems, they have still not found the way into the nursing home of th...

This work describes a standard conform Java based modular IoT framework for context-aware applications for AAL and home care. An extensive support of Bluetooth Low Energy personal health devices as well as various home sensor networks is provided.

Background: The older population of Europe is increasing and there has been a corresponding increase in long term care costs. This project sought to promote active ageing by delivering tasks via a tablet computer to participants aged 65-80 with mild cognitive impairment. Objectives: An age-appropriate gamified environment was developed and adher...

Since 2012 six AAL pilot regions were launched in Austria. The main goal of these pilot regions is to evaluate the impact of AAL technologies in daily use considering the entire value chain. Additionally, go-to market strategies for assistive technologies based on an involvement of all relevant stakeholders are developed. Within this paper an overv...

Case-based reasoning and data interpretation is an artificial intelligence approach that capitalizes on past experience to solve current problems and this can be used as a method for practical intelligent systems. Case-based data reasoning is able to provide decision support for experts and clinicians in health systems as well as lifestyle systems....

Since 2012 six AAL pilot regions were launched in Austria. The main goal of these pilot regions is to evaluate the impact of AAL technologies in daily use considering the entire value chain. Additionally, go-to market strategies for assistive technologies based on an involvement of all relevant stakeholders are developed. Within this paper an overv...

Health trends of elderly in Europe motivate the need for technological solutions aimed at preventing the main causes of morbidity and premature mortality. In this framework, the DOREMI project addresses three important causes of morbidity and mortality in the elderly by devising an ICT-based home care services for aging people to contrast cognitive...

The number of people in need of care increases constantly, and in the coming few years many seniors will depend on their close relatives for their care needs. These relatives very often need support to fulfill their role as informal caregivers. The YouDo prototype presented in this paper aims to provide special training programs for informal caregi...

Background To cope with the upcoming demographic change, economic efforts in the European Union are undertaken to promote activities in research and development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions. As a result, a large variety of AAL products will be available in the next years. Only very few of these products are comprehensively evaluated r...

Within the concept of pulse wave analysis, arterial pressure and flow curves over a whole cardiac cycle are analysed. Characteristic impedance is obtained as ratio of pressure to flow when waves are not influenced by reflections. The aim of this work is to evaluate the effects of different blood flow models on the determination of the characteristi...

Objectives: Recently, a novel method to estimate aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV) noninvasively from an oscillometric single brachial cuff waveform reading has been introduced. We investigated whether this new approach provides acceptable estimates of aPWV compared with intra-aortic catheter measurements. Methods: Estimated values of aPWV obtai...

Den Herausforderungen des demographischen Wandels stellt sich Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mittels ICT-basierter Technologien, die das Leben älterer Menschen situationsabhängig und unaufdringlich unterstützen sollen. Diese Arbeit behandelt Einsatzbeispiele von M2M-Technologien im Bereich AAL. Die anwendungsorientieren Forschungsprojekte Gesundheit...

Within the last decade the quantification of pulse wave reflections mainly focused on measures of central aortic systolic pressure and its augmentation through reflections based on pulse wave analysis (PWA). A complementary approach is the wave separation analysis (WSA), which quantifies the total amount of arterial wave reflection considering both...

This work describes a modular open source AAL framework for event recognition and smart home control. Various integrated tools simplify the configuration task, the personalization as well as the learning of activity models by a novel approach. Flexibility, standard compliant interfaces as well as the ability to transfer the system into new environm...

The analysis of aortic blood pressure and flow represent an important tool to predict cardiovascular risk. A Windkessel model relating pressure and flow, together with an optimal performance criterion of left-ventricular work, is used to generate the aortic flow pattern for a given central pressure curve. For the corresponding optimization problem,...

Aortic pulse wave velocity is an independent predictive indicator for all cause mortality and cardiovascular morbidity. Unfortunately it is only invasively accessible and thus the A. carotis–A. femoralis pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) is recommended as a non-invasive substitute. This work presents a model based analysis method for the beat-to-beat onl...

The prognostic value of central systolic blood pressure has been established recently. At present, its noninvasive assessment is limited by the need of dedicated equipment and trained operators. Moreover, ambulatory and home blood pressure monitoring of central pressures are not feasible. An algorithm enabling conventional automated oscillometric b...

Background: Aortic augmentation Index (AIx) is a measurement of pulse wave reflections and an indirect measure of arterial stiffness. AIx predicts all-cause mortality and CV-mortality in selected patient group with end-stage renal failure and in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The objective of this study was to analyse...

Ambient Assisted Living technologies try to integrate intelligent assistance-systems in elder people's homes to maintain a high degree of independence, autonomy and dignity. To speed up the development process and to make the applications more adaptive and flexible to special user needs as well as to ensure compatibility throughout systems a common...

In the European Society of Cardiology-European Society of Hypertension guidelines of the year 2007, the consequences of arterial stiffness and wave reflection on cardiovascular mortality have a major role. But the investigators claimed the poor availability of devices/methods providing easy and widely suitable measuring of arterial wall stiffness o...