Octavian Postolache

Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon | ISCTE · Department of Information Science and Technology

O livro Saúde Societal: Percursos de Investigação do Iscte reúne uma parte do vasto conjunto de estudos desenvolvidos no Iscte no âmbito da saúde societal, originalmente publicados em revistas científicas e, logo, de circulação muito restrita. Ao disponibilizar estes estudos em português, este volume procura aproximar-se de todos aqueles para quem...

Recent findings have shown that exergames can facilitate physiotherapy. Environmental conditions, such as the inclusion of positive distractions, also seem to play a role in health recovery, but prior studies have never analysed their role in virtual environments. In this study we developed an exergame for the exercise of upper limbs by designing v...

Remote sensing and Virtual Reality (VR) are technologies that create new development opportunities in the field of serious games with application in physiotherapy. Thus, during a physiotherapy training session expressed by a game round the remote sensing of user body motion provides measurements that can be used for objective evaluation of physical...

Considering the importance of strength training in sports injury prevention and rehabilitation, an e-textile system that assists the athlete’s training and rehabilitation was designed. This paper reports the construction of a prototype of a T-shirt with embedded textile electrodes to monitor cardiac and muscle activity. Signal tests were conducted...

This paper presents a performance analysis of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms in arrhythmia identification task based on ECG signals. Six features are used for both algorithms: short signal 1-D wavelet energy (SS-WVE), short signal continuous wavelet transform mean (SS-CWTM), heart rate (HR), R-peaks root...

The provision of healthcare is globally changing to cope with an increasingly demanding population. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in health care led to the appearance of electronic health (e-Health) and mobile health (m-Health). In smart cities and context-aware environments, the concept of smart health (s-Health) has...

Several anti-smoking campaigns have been used for decades to reduce smoking consumption. However, so far, there is no consensus regarding the effectiveness of inducing distinct emotions in reducing smoke consumption. This study tested the effects of two types of anti-smoking ads, inducing fear or humor, on emotions, perceived effectiveness, support...

With advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), changes have been produced in physiotherapy provision. However, low adoption of the new technologies calls attention for better theoretical model and methods for ICT design, which may fulfil the needs of health professionals and their patients. In this work we discuss the framework...

Smart clothes have the potential to improve rehabilitation processes by allowing clinicians to gather measures on patients’ functional capacity, activity level, exercise compliance, the effectiveness of treatment, and the ability of patients to perform efficiently specific motor tasks at rehabilitation centers, at home or in community settings. The...

With advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), dramatic changes have been produced in physiotherapy provision. However, low adoption of the developed technologies calls attention for better theoretical model and methods for ICT design, which may fulfill the needs of physiotherapists and their patients. In this work we discuss th...

In the last decade, rehabilitation process has shifted from medical management to issues that enhance quality of life, community participation, treatment and cost effectiveness. In this context physiotherapists design and implement new and/or tailored interventions that enhance physical and functional abilities, restore, maintain, and promote optim...

In the last decade, rehabilitation process has shifted from medical management to issues that enhance quality of life, community participation, treatment and cost effectiveness. In this context physiotherapists design and implement new and/or tailored interventions that enhance physical and functional abilities, restore, maintain, and promote optim...

Heart motion and blood ejection during the cardiac cycle originates a set of body vibrations that are sensed through the usage of different sensing systems that provide the information on cardiac mechanics and cardiac output. Ballistocardiogram (BCG) and seismocardiogram (SCG) are the recording of body vibration induced by heart bit. The sensing of...

The mountain bike is one of the most used equipment's in outdoor sports activities. The present work presents a distributed sensing system expressed by a WSN for cycling assessment to increase performance of athletes involved in this probes. The implemented system performs acquisition, processing and data communication based on ZigBee protocol that...

The paper presents a simulation tool that emulates the development environment of Foundation Fieldbus (FF) applications. The idea is to use the resources provided by LabVIEW®-in particular its dataflow programming paradigm-to design, execute, and debug FF control applications. Function blocks are implemented as virtual instruments, data links are r...

Connected healthcare devices, including medical equipments as well as personal health devices based on emerging mobile technologies used by healthcare providers and consumers, are expanding traditional means of practicing healthcare particularly physiotherapy services. We describe a system based on physiotherapy smart connected devices, as smart wa...

The physical rehabilitation community has been demonstrating serious interest for therapeutic serious games (theragames). The paper presents a framework for theragames enriched by a natural user interface (NUI) and materialized by Kinect. A set of 3D virtual reality (VR) scenarios motivate patients to perform upper limb rehabilitation and provide a...

A multi-sensory system, entitled FLOWSENSE, was developed to monitor emotional responses in real time using both subjective (self-report) and objective (physiological) measures. To evaluate the program’s reliability, an experiment was conducted using antismoking campaigns. Participants (N=92) were exposed to three advertisements of humor or of fear...

The aim of the article was to present a Java Platform for Football Analysis, designed and implemented for football game analysis. The framework presents capability on game analysis based on players coordinates inputs and helping coaches and players to extract information from processed games. The analysis tools to achieve this aim used collective m...

The access to patient-related information during decision-making and the information provided by training equipment, in the present, are still limited that made the objective evaluation of physical rehabilitation effectiveness a difficult task. The paper focuses on smart training equipment, expressed by smart walkers and crutches, for physical ther...

In the last decade, the clinical reasoning in physical therapy has been to develop systems for physiotherapists to make clinical decisions rapidly, effectively and efficiently, in response to the increasingly complex needs of health and rehabilitation units [1]-[3]. Some studies show the importance of walking aids during rehabilitation from some di...

In the last decade researches on laterality of brain functions have been reinvigorated. New models of lateralization of brain functions were proposed and new methods for understanding mechanisms of asymmetry between right and left brain functions were described. We design a system to study laterality of motor and autonomic nervous system based on w...

A survey of wireless sensor net\vork solutions for gait assessment is presenled inciuding own developed solution gait assessment based on smarí insoíes nodes ZigBee compaiible characterized by multichannel force measitremení and MEMS inerlial measurement IML/. The system was developed to measure ground reaction force, acceleration and dtrection off...

Thís paper presents a distributed control and measurement system based on the Foundation FieldBus protocol. A system 's prototype is described together with some implementation details and experimental results. The system also includes interfaces for conventional measurement and control devices that are connected through 4-20 mA current loops. The...

The paper describes a set of frameworks developed to materialize physiotherapy assessment. Using data provided by the Microsoft Kinect sensor associated with upper limb joint position and Artificial Neural Network classification algorithms an evaluation and correction of the patients' exercises can be done, helping therapists to improve the effecti...

The paper presents a smart sensing system for health monitoring based on the IEEE 1451 standard. The system makes use of smart transducer interfaces, namely the 1451.1 information model and 1451.4 transducer data sheets. Attention is given to the implementation of the 1451.1 information model using the .NET Framework, including the customization ef...

The scope of this Special Issue is to present and highlight the advances and the latest novel and emergent technologies, implementations and applications in the field of smart transducers and sensors according to the guidelines of the family of standards. Therefore, it provides an overview of the current standards features and the related state of...

Human gait is a complex motion that implies the movement of different parts of the body such as arms, legs and feet, being the functional human movements’ analysis indispensable for bio-mechanical diagnostic and treatment tool for clinics and rehabilitation services. During the rehabilitation process, walkers are frequently prescribed to improve th...

This paper presents a low cost measurement system that can be used to extract kinematic parameters from walker devices. The proposed measurement system can be easily integrated in any commercial non-smart walker device and includes mainly a set of six force sensing resistors and one 3D accelerometer, with the associated signal conditioning circuits...

In a population with 19% of people being 65 years old or over, and only 13,4 physical therapists per 100.000 residents, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) in physical therapy may assist related human resource issues and can help to improve the quality of care services. The patients’ perspectives regarding information and communi...

The availability of relatively capable and inexpensive hardware components has made it feasible to consider large-scale systems of autonomous aquatic drones for maritime tasks. In this paper, we present the CORATAM and HANCAD projects, which focus on the fundamental challenges related to communication and control in swarms of aquatic drones. We arg...

Multiple influence quantities affect environmental sensing and measurement (ESM) systems. Accounting for their variations over time promotes metrological comparability and traceability of measurement results. Using suitable data processing techniques allows identification of the main influence quantities that affect the measurement result of a give...

Serious games based therapy is currently gaining a lot of interest by the healthcare community. Moreover, the use of Virtual Reality technology in rehabilitation has attracted significant interest in the physical therapy area. This paper presents PhysioMate, which is a project with the aim of developing software based on the concept of serious game...

The challenges of climate change, population growth, demographic change, urbanization and resource depletion mean that the world's great cities need to adapt to survive and thrive over the coming decades. Slashing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, while maintaining or increasing quality of life, can be a costly and di...

The paper presents a new approach to store and read Transducer Electronic Data Sheets (TEDS) compliant with the IEEE 1451.4 standard. The idea is to take the bit stream of the TEDS structure and store it on a non-volatile, easy-to-read, cheap support as is the case of 2D bar codes. The TEDS structure can thus be stuck to the transducer case or prin...

Serious games fall under a set of applications capable of improving recovery times by increasing the player's engagement. In this paper we focus on the possibility of joining that capacity to Microsoft Kinect sensors ability to collect data without the need of additional sensorsand present an application capable of giving proper feedback about the...

The new era of mobile health ushered in by the wide adoption of ubiquitous computing and mobile communications has brought opportunities for governments and companies to rethink their concept of healthcare. Simultaneously, the worldwide urbanization process represents a formidable challenge and attracts attention toward cities that are expected to...

Abstract - The work presents a smart wheelchair characterized by embedded sensors and an acquisition, processing and communication platform based on multifunction I/O module and an embedded PC for monitoring of physiological stress parameters and motion activity of the wheelchair user in unobtrusive way. The embedded sensors include E-textile elect...

In the years, the role of measurement in medicine and healthcare is becoming increasingly relevant, thanks to the always-wider diffusion of electronics in everyday life. In particular, measurement and sensors represent one of the key aspects of what is called pervasive healthcare. Pervasive healthcare may be defined as the application of pervasive...

Several studies have demonstrated that the limited access to patient-related information during decision-making and the ineffective communication among patient and care team members, besides reducing efficacy and quality of health care, are important causes of medical errors. In this paper we describe our work on defining a framework for the electr...

This paper describes the development of a health monitoring platform for physiotherapy patients, particularly focused on the ones suffering from stroke disease. Using the Kinect sensor, the presented system intends to provide technical data about the patients that could help therapists during physiotherapy assessments. For helping quantifying the p...

This paper presents a web information system and a wireless sensor network for indoor or outdoor air quality monitoring with application in asthma trigger factors assessment. As the main target is mentioned the development of a flexible system characterized by a low-cost sensing nodes that assures robust and continuous monitoring of air conditions...

The article presents a prototype of a distributed system for wheelchair users assessment characterized by multi-sensing, embedded processing compatible IEEE 1451.4 standard for smart sensors and wireless communication based on IEEE 802.15.4. A set of smart sensing channels are connected in a 1-Wire network supported by an embedded platform that ass...

Microsoft Kinect camera has been used in serious games applications, like for rehabilitation purposes, almost since it became available in the market. This article presents a clinical view regarding home-based physiotherapy for patients that suffered a stroke and details on the development of the rehabilitation system - Kinect-RehabPlay. This syste...

The usage of eddy current probes (ECP) with a single magnetic field sensor represents a common solution for defect detection in conductive specimens but it is a time consuming procedure that requires huge amount of scanning steps when large surface specimens are to be inspected. In order to speed-up the nondestructive testing procedure, eddy curren...

The latest developments in the field of sensing, smart sensors, communication protocols and human machine interface, and also the aim of decreasing the health services cost and increasing the quality of the provided services create the premises for new types of interactions among health providers and people, among patients, among patients and resea...

This paper presents a low-cost and smart measurement system to acquire and analyze mechanical motion parameters. The measurement system integrates several measuring nodes that include one or more triaxial accelerometers, a temperature sensor, a data acquisition unit and a wireless communication unit. Particular attention was dedicated to measuremen...

In this paper we describe and compared method of heart rate estimation from cardiac signal acquired with EMFIT, FMCW Doppler radar and Finapres based technology, in the same context, and briefly investigated their similarities and differences. Study of processing of acquired cardiac signal for accurate peak detection using Wavelet Transform is also...

Ballistocardiogram, capacitive electrocardiogram, and photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensors were embedded in a wheelchair together with a digital signal processor (DSP) with Wi-Fi capabilities. This setup allows monitoring of some homeostasis parameters of the wheelchair user, namely heart rate (HR), pulse arrival and transit times, and oxygen saturatio...

This paper presents a wheelchair platform with sensing hardware for monitoring the cardiac activity of its user. A set of unobtrusive sensors was placed on the wheelchair, namely for acceleration, ballistocardiogram, contactless electrocardiogram, contactless impedance cardiogram, reflection photoplethysmogram, and seat temperature acquisition. The...

In this paper, the authors look at the domain of tactile sensing in the context of Robotics. After a short introduction to support the interest of providing robots with touch, the basic aspects related with tactile sensors, including transduction techniques are revisited. The brief analysis of the state-of-the-art of tactile sensing techniques that...

An increasingly significant characteristic that has emerged through the use of eHealth applications is the rise in consumer empowerment. The latest advances in sensor technology, sensors implementation, improved wireless telecommunications capabilities, open networks, continued increases in computing power, improved battery technology, and the emer...

Recent advances in pervasive sensing, mobile, and pervasive computing technologies have led to deployment of new smart sensors and smart sensor networks architectures that can be worn or integrated within the living environment without affecting a person’s daily activities. These sensors promise to change vital signs and motor activity monitoring f...

Dealing with microelectronic industry, the Electrostatic Discharge has a significant importance regarding the failures related to the solid state devices. The paper is focused on software applications concerning the effects of electrostatic discharges on MOSFET integrated circuitry, using a dedicated computational program. We considered in our appr...

The design and implementation of a microcontroller based platform compatible with IEEE 1451.4 standard for high performance unobtrusive accurate cardio-respiratory and motor activity estimation of wheelchair users are presented in this paper. The platform is a multi-sensor architecture that includes sensors with plug-and-play and auto-identificatio...

This work reports a electrocardiograph and skin conductivity hardware architecture, based on E-textile electrodes, attached to a wheelchair for affective and physiological computing. Appropriate conditioning circuits and a microcontroller platform that performs acquisition, primary processing, and communication using Bluetooth were designed and imp...

{textlessptextgreatertextless}br/textgreaterBiomedical signals are relentlessly superimposed with interferences. The nonlinear processes which generate the signals and the interferences regularly exclude or limit the usage of classical linear techniques, and even of wavelet transforms, to decompose the signal.textlessbr/textgreaterEmpirical Mode De...

Using A Segmented Voltage Sweep Mode and A Gaussian Curve Fitting Method to Improve Heavy Metal Measurement System Performance This paper presents a voltammetric segmented voltage sweep mode that can be used to identify and measure heavy metals' concentrations. The proposed sweep mode covers a set of voltage ranges that are centered around the redo...

Games elements are transcending the usual boundaries of their medium to enhance user experience and user engagement in non-game applications. Therapeutic serious gaming allows a patient to execute specific exercises while engaging with a game, trying to achieve its goals related to therapeutic activities. A ubiquitous therapeutic game corresponds t...

The article summarizes on-going research on vital signs and motor activity monitoring based on radar sensors embedded in wheelchairs, walkers and crutches for in home rehabilitation. Embedded sensors, conditioning circuits, real-time platforms that perform data acquisition, auto-identification, primary data processing and data communication contrib...

This paper presents a complete system that can be used to measure and to stimulate sucking abilities of premature babies. The system integrates measurement and stimulation capabilities that can be used separately or together. The sensing unit includes mainly a pressure sensor, a conditioning circuit and a microcontroller device. The stimulation uni...

Serious games-based therapies are currently gaining massive interest of both computer science and healthcare communities. This paper focuses on the design and use of personalized therapeutic serious games in a pervasive healthcare assistive environment that integrates smart objects such as wheelchairs. The smart objects have embedded sensors to mea...

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a valuable technique for the investigation of magnetically ordered materials. This paper presents a simulation based comparative study between the two most used broadband NMR probes: the delay-line probe, introduced by Lowe, Engelsberg and Whitson, and the high-pass, proposed by Panissod. A practical approach con...

This paper presents a smart conductivity sensor with capabilities to compensate measurement errors caused by temperature variations and, particularly, to compensate measurement errors caused by water tide levels variations in estuarine zones. A low-cost smart conductivity sensor (SCS) is presented and a mathematical model to compensate measurement...

In this paper the authors describe an extension of a distributed spectrum monitoring and management system that already works and that includes four main nodes corresponding to the different ANACOM's spectrum monitoring centers located at Portuguese islands and continental Portugal. Due to the necessity to perform special monitoring actions in regi...

In this paper Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Blood Pressure Variability (BPV) were analyzed before the onset of cardiac arrhythmia in order to derive markers for short-term forecasting. The (a) coherence between systolic blood pressure (SBP) and cardiac oscillations in low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) band; (b) fluctuations of phase; (c...

The paper describes the latest development in seismocardiography and ballistocardiography, including sensors with or without mechanical contact with the body, for cardiac functions monitoring in common daily activity. The authors discuss the information related with the seismocardiogramn (SCG) and ballistocardiogram (BCG) and the work on SCG and BC...

Health assessment requirements for aging population have accentuated the need of ubiquitous and pervasive e-Health environments. Recently, new implemented embedded vital signs sensors were joined to ubiquitous computation in order to materialize Ubi-Health systems with lower price and augmented interoperability in comparison with traditional clinic...

Many wheelchair users have augmented cardiac risks, namely diabetics, and stroke victims in recovery. This paper describes the developments taken to assess a wheelchair user's heart rate from inconspicuous cardiac measurements. Unremarkably acquired cardiac signals are greatly affected by artifacts, generated by wheelchair motion, and the subject's...

Assessing the cardiovascular status of subjects accompanied by physical therapists is a growing tendency. Merely assessing kinetic recovery is considered to be a short-range approach. So, techniques and devices providing extended support of physiotherapy sessions are necessary. The system developed provides to the physiotherapist new tools, by impl...

Concerning environmental measurement systems, particularly those that are used for water quality assessment, physical sensors are expensive to maintain and the usage of virtual sensors is an attractive solution. This paper presents a virtual conductivity sensor based on a water tide level and a dissolved oxygen sensors. A particular attention is de...

This paper introduces a heartbeat segmentation method for cardiovascular signals based on 4-parameter sine fitting. The goal of the method is to segment unobtrusively- acquired cardiovascular signals, without requiring an additional reference signal to synchronize the segmentation points and without strict assumptions about the subject's heartbeat...

Optimal cardiovascular, respiratory and motor activity assessment of wheelchair users using modern technologies of pervasive sensing and computing represents the main objective of the r