José Bravo

University of Castilla-La Mancha · Department of Information Technologies and Systems

The first instrument played by primary school students was their own bodies, utilizing techniques such as hitting, clapping, and rubbing. By employing gesture recognition techniques, body percussion can be controlled by capturing the specific movements required for each percussion exercise. In this paper, an ICT supplement for the study of body per...

Identification is an important process when we are in collectivity. Thus, we have to adapt technologies to facilitate many functionalities that can be addressed only by means of a simple identification infrastructure. IoT, should covering up this process by means of the traditional accreditation but empowering it with computational and wireless com...

Interaction with mobile devices serves as a link to the cyber world and allows us to characterise user behaviours. The deep analysis of the interactions with the smartphone, aligned with the principles of the Internet of People, allow us to distinguish between normal and abnormal use. One of the multiple applications of this type of analysis will c...

Cognitive training can improve mental abilities, and a novel method to apply it is trough video games. There is controversy about the effectiveness of commercial video games for brain training, therefore it is necessary to assess the utility of these kinds of games. One quantitative method to assess it is electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasiv...

The study of cognitive responses and processes while using applications is a critical field in human–computer interaction. This paper aims to determine the mental effort required for different typical tasks with smartphones. Mental effort is typically associated with the concept of cognitive load, and has been studied by analyzing electroencephalog...

Self-management of diabetes through the use of mobile and software systems is a reality today. Among other aspects, usability of these systems determines their continued use by patients, closely related to the concepts of engagement, empowerment and treatment adherence. In this work, we present a detailed usability study of a mHealth system for dia...

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of aging process in gait variability. Stride interval variability is estimated by using two approaches: (1) a non-linear fractal analysis (detrended fluctuation analysis) which evaluates the presence of long-range correlations in stride interval time series; and (2) a statistical dispersion measure (coe...

Affective Computing aims at developing systems to recognize, process and interpret emotions. This paper presents a sensorized toy with affective functionalities through cognitive services based on IBM Watson technology. The purpose of this research is to improve the quality of life through the assistance oftherapies with children and preadolescents...

Video games and electroencephalography (EEG) can be used together in more than one way: cognitive analysis, mood analysis or Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), for instance. Nowadays, these two fields are gaining popularity when working together. We have consider that it is important to know what approaches are the most used when using video games an...

This paper presents a cross-sectional study to analyze the impact on cognitive decline of a set of characteristics used for frailty assessment in elderly people. Considered characteristics come from several dimensions, including anthropometric, biological, nutritional, functional and mobility. Cognitive functioning is estimated by the Mini-Mental S...

m-Health is an emerging area that is transforming how people take part in the control of their wellness condition. This vision is changing traditional health processes by discharging hospitals from the care of people. Important advantages of continuous monitoring can be reached but, in order to transform this vision into a reality, some factors nee...

Obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century and it is a threat to the life of people according to World Health Organization. In this scenario, family environment is important to establish healthy habits which help to reduce levels of obesity and control overweight in children. However, little efforts have been fo...

In current times, virtual agents, also known as avatars, are being used for many different tasks, from helping guide a user experience, to aiding in the diagnosis and treatment of different health issues, both physical and mental. In past work, we have explored the use of an affective avatar that responds to tactile interaction with a pc–tablet, th...

Millions of people are suffering from Diabetes Mellitus today. This amount is expected to increase over the next few years due to multiple factors, not only genetic ones, but also because of our sedentary lifestyle according to the World Health Organization. This work presents a cloud-based system which consists of a web platform, a mobile applicat...

Machine learning methods have been proven to be a useful and powerful mechanism in classification problems and pattern recognition. It is possible to classify into different categories on the basis of a training set of data through a discrete number of characteristics and without knowing the whole intrinsic information. For that, those methods are...

In recent times, diagnosing and treating different health issues have improved greatly with the help of technology, with an example being cognitive health issues. Despite this, there is still a difference between how the technology is working towards it and the actual potential that can be achieved. In this paper, we propose a mobile application wi...

In the last few years, gamification has been proven as an effective strategy to improve people's motivation and performance. Many authors have reported success examples of gamification in areas such as education, entertainment, health and business. This paper is focused on the use of gamification for health, specifically for the promotion of behavi...

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence, UCAmI 2017, held in Philadelphia, PA, USA in November 2017. The 60 revised full papers and 22 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. The papers are presented in s...

In this paper, it has been analysed the responses, in terms of cognitive activation through EEG, to specific external stimuli. It has been developed a videogame, as a particular kind of serious games from health, which promotes the exercise of cognitive abilities. The participants were ten healthy children between 7 to 12 years old, selected becaus...

Assistive technologies have been used to improve the quality of life of people who have been diagnosed with health issues. In this case, we aim to use an assistive technology in the shape of an affective avatar to help people who have been diagnosed with different forms of Social Communications Disorders (SCD). The designed avatar presents a humano...

Analyzing activities (either static postures or movements) made by a user is a complex process that can be done through a wide range of approaches. One part of these existing approaches support doing the recognition focusing their analysis on specific body parts. In fact, in previous publications a method was introduced for activity recognition (Bo...

Clinical gait analysis provides an evaluation tool that allows clinicians to characterize person’s locomotion at a particular time. There are currently specialized systems to detect gait events and compute spatio-temporal parameters of human gait, which are accurate and redundant. These systems are expensive and are limited to controlled settings w...

The Internet of Things (IoT) imposes several challenges and opportunities. Most of the existing and ongoing network solutions are limited in scope and technology, ignoring important IoT aspects and using traditional protocols and technologies that are not necessarily suitable for things. The proposal is named the Advanced Network of Things (ANT) wh...

The purpose of this paper is to develop an accelerometry system capable of performing gait event demarcation and calculation of temporal parameters using a single waist-mounted device. Particularly, a mobile phone positioned over the L2 vertebra is used to acquire trunk accelerations during walking. Signals from the acceleration magnitude and the v...

A systematic review allows us to identify, assess, and interpret all possible relevant work associated with a question in particular or the subject of an area. Different authors can use several methodologies to learn about research related to their own research in different fields. The main objective of this review is to identify work, research and...

Clinical gait analysis provides an evaluation tool that allows clinicians to assess the abnormality of gait in patients. There are currently specialized systems to detect gait events and calculate spatio-temporal parameters of human gait, which are accurate and redundant. These systems are expensive and are limited to very controlled settings. As a...

Nowadays, we are living a different use and understanding of videogames. Particularly, Serious Games aim to develop specific objectives beyond entertainment, mainly, educational and training objectives. There is a novel perspective that uses serious games as an innovative tool in the field of health (health games). This paper belongs to that perspe...

This paper presents simulation results of a model aimed to obtain uniform functionality and performance of the services provided within a healthy smart city. Simulation results were useful to demonstrate the model usefulness and the possibility to enhance the quality of the services. However, this enhancement was observed in a generalized manner, a...

Growth of mobile technologies and smart devices in Healthcare domains leads to patient self-control of chronic and non-chronic diseases, facilitating the real time communication with the physician. This work describes the basis of a health aspect-based framework to monitor multiple diseases by using the smartphone and the interaction with smart dev...

Current assistive technologies can improve the quality of life of people who have been diagnosed with different forms of Social Communications Disorders (SCD). In this paper we describe the way in which we have approached an assistive system for improving SCD, based on human-avatar interaction. Since the final development is in progress, this paper...

Activity Recognition in a scientific setting is a field that is extremely popular, in which numerous and diverse proposals exist that tackle the creation of systems capable of recognising activities through different types of sensors. Given the relative maturity of Activity Recognition in comparison to Behaviour Recognition, most of the existing pr...

This paper proposes two approaches to characterize gait taking into account only quantitative measurements of dynamic nature. A pair of wireless sensorized insoles are used to obtain gait phases based on the involved forces, and a computer vision system externally estimates measurements through movement analysis. The wearable approach is composed o...

The systematic review allows us to identify, assess, and interpret all possible relevant work associated with a question in particular or subject of an area. In this paper we will use the Kitchenham protocol, which allow for the proper selection of primary and secondary research related to mobile monitoring solution. The main objective of this revi...

One of the main challenges on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is to reach an appropriate acceptance level of the assistive systems, as well as to analyze and monitor end user tasks in a feasible and efficient way. The development and evaluation of AAL solutions based on user-centered perspective help to achive these goals. In this work, we have desig...

Diabetes is considered a chronic disease that incurs various types of cost to the world. One major challenge in the control of Diabetes is the real time determination of the proper insulin dose. In this paper, we develop a prototype for real time blood sugar control, integrated with the cloud. Our system controls blood sugar by observing the blood...

The development of personalized mobile monitoring applications is a complex work. Currently, the most of applications for patients monitoring through mobile devices, is not developed considering the particular characteristics of each patient, but these applications have been developed taking into account a general behavior depending on the diseases...

Childhood Obesity is associated with a wide range of serious health complications and constitutes an increased risk of premature syndromes, including diabetes or heart diseases. Its treatment seems to be complicated. So, in order to help parents we have developed a system that will try to make easier the process of choosing foodstuff for overweight...

A new gait phase detection system for continuous monitoring based on wireless sensorized insoles is presented. The system can be used in gait analysis mobile applications, and it is designed for real-time demarcation of gait phases. The system employs pressure sensors to assess the force exerted by each foot during walking. A fuzzy rule-based infer...

Teaching children with intellectual disabilities is a big challenge for most parents and educators. Special education teachers use learning strategies to develop and enhance motivation for complex learning tasks. Literacy acquisition is an essential and life-long skill for a child with intellectual disabilities. In this context, technology can supp...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Work-Conference on Ambient Assisted Living, IWAAL 2015, held in Puerto Varas, Chile, in December 2015. The 20 full papers presented with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The focus of the papers is on following topics: ambient assisted li...

We develop a prototype for real-time blood sugar control based on the hypothesis that there is a medical challenge in determining the exact, real-time insulin dose. Our system controls blood sugar by observing the blood sugar level and automatically determining the appropriate insulin dose based on patient’s historical data, all in real time. At th...

A noise-robust algorithm for segmentation of breath events during continuous speech is presented. The built-in microphone of a smartphone is used to capture the speech signal (voiced and breath frames) under conditions of a relatively noisy background. A template matching approach, using mel-cepstrograms, is adopted for constructing several similar...

It is well-known that physical activities contribute to keep the people healthy. However, the modern life style impacts negatively on the amount of physical activity that we do during the day. Many times the people do not perform enough exercise because they are not aware of the amount of physical activity that they have done. In order to make the...

This short paper presents a high-level model aimed to obtain uniform functionality and performance of the services provided within a healthy smart city. The model is based on a three-layer architecture and uses an overlay network to provide enhanced network and semantic functionality. This is a novel approach that incorporates the use of health-rel...

One of the main challenges on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is to reach the massive use and acceptance of the promising assistive systems that are being developed. This challenge entails the appropriate evaluation of these systems following a user-centered perspective. We propose a framework to deal with this issue that consists of a methodology an...

Nowadays, Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is one of the most catastrophic and life threatening common health issues. Early detection of CVD is one of the most important solutions to reduce its devastating effects on health. In this paper, an efficient detection algorithm is identified. The algorithm uses patient demographic data as inputs, along with...

The deployment of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm requires designing and integrating user-centered smart environments to assist people in their daily life activities. This research paper details an integration and validation of multiple heterogeneous sensors with hybrid reasoners that support decision making in order to monitor personal and...

The processes to design, develop, and evaluate augmented objects are complex and should adhere to a Software Engineering methodology with a user-centered approach. This article presents a framework for creating augmented objects focused on the interaction of the final users with these objects. The article applies the framework in three cases of stu...

Typically mobile and ubiquitous software applications provide services to mobile workers to help them increase their performance, effectiveness and eventually the satisfaction while doing their jobs. These services are directly related to the characterization of the activities to be supported. Based on such a characterization the designers of these...

This manuscript presents a mobile monitoring application to allow a patient to monitor a chronic disease using mobile devices. This application is developed according to three components that enable the semi-automatic development of software, independent of the target disease and adaptable to the particular user needs. First, we present ontologies...

This paper presents a system for supplying spatial orientation and support to cognitively impaired people in their daily activities. The system is a technological solution based on external aid at a practical level (substitution-based rehabilitation). In particular, we propose a model focused on points of interest or well-known places, in which use...

The early detection and diagnosis of frailty is important in improving the quality of elderly life. Physicians must take many factors into account to achieve an objective and standardised method of frailty assessment. In this work, we present a novel mobile service infrastructure to improve the accuracy of frailty diagnosis in a population of elder...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence, UCAmI 2014, held in Belfast, UK, in December 2014. The 57 papers presented together with 7 papers of the workshop AmIUA 2014, 8 papers of the workshop IoT 2014, 7 papers of the workshop EUSPAI 2014, and 6 papers of th...

A comprehensive solution is proposed to enhance adherence for the mild and moderate Alzheimer patients, involving not only the patient but also other participants, such as the nurse and/or relative, the drugstore, the physician and the hospital. The solution includes the development of an automatic medication dispenser and the corresponding softwar...

A comprehensive solution is proposed to enhance adherence for the mild and moderate Alzheimer patients, involving not only the patient but also other participants, such as the nurse and/or relative, the drugstore, the physician and the hospital. The solution includes the development of an automatic medication dispenser and the corresponding softwar...

We develop a prototype for real-time blood sugar control based upon the hypothesis that there is a medical challenge in determining the exact, real-time insulin dose. Our system controls blood sugar by observing the blood sugar level and automatically determining the appropriate insulin dose based on patient's historical data all in real time. At t...

Information and Communication Technologies can support Active Aging strategies in a scenario like the Smart Home. This paper details a person centered distributed framework, called TALISMAN+, whose aim is to promote personal autonomy by taking advantage of knowledge based technologies, sensors networks, mobile devices and internet. The proposed sol...

Frailty is a health condition related to aging and dependence. A reduction in or delay of the frailty state can improve the quality of life of the elderly. However, providing frailty assessments can be difficult because many factors must be taken into account. Usually, measurement of these factors is performed in a noncentralized manner. Additional...

Patients constant monitoring is considered one of the most relevant aspects in healthcare. The development of a solution to communicate information between mobile and biometric devices allowing constant monitoring of the patient is viewed as a solution to healthcare issues. In this paper, we define an important element in framework design like that...

The early detection and diagnosis of frailty is important in improving the quality of elderly life. Physicians must take many factors into account to achieve an objective and standardised method of frailty assessment. In this work, we present a novel mobile service infrastructure to improve the accuracy of frailty diagnosis in a population of elder...

With the recent technological advances, it is possible to monitor vital signs using Bluetooth-enabled biometric mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets or electric wristbands. In this manuscript, we present a system to estimate the risk of cardiovascular diseases in Ambient Assisted Living environments. Cardiovascular disease risk is obtained f...

This paper presents a proposal for supporting daily user needs by simple interactions with the environment through an augmented-reality perspective that applies proactive adaptation through knowledge representation using ontologies. The proposed architecture (i- ARA) uses principles of the Semantic Web that endow context-awareness and user personal...