Tim Collins

• Ph.D.
• Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University

Anaphylaxis is an increasingly prevalent life-threatening allergic condition that requires people with anaphylaxis and their caregivers to be trained in the avoidance of allergen triggers and in the administration of adrenaline auto-injectors. The prompt and correct administration of auto-injectors in the event of an anaphylactic reaction is a sign...

Electronic Engineering undergraduates are increasingly interested in final-year individual projects that involve brain–computer interfacing. This paper outlines the challenges of resourcing these types of medical instrumentation projects and describes the adoption of the open source OpenEEG electroencephalography platform in final-year undergraduat...

Cuneiform is one of the earliest known systems of writing consisting of wedge-shaped strokes forming signs impressed on clay tablets. Excavated cuneiform tablets are typically fragmented and their reconstruction is, at best, tedious but more often intractable given that fragments can be distributed within and between different collections. Digital...

When rendering an ambisonic recording a uniform speaker array is often preferred with the number of speakers chosen to suit the ambisonic order. Using this arrangement, localization in the lateral regions can be poor but can be improved by increasing the number of speakers. However, in practice this can lead to undesirable spectral impairment. In t...

Range sidelobe suppression in pulse-compression radars and sonars is conventionally performed using amplitude windowing in either the time or frequency domains. Using peak power limited transmitters, this inevitably causes a degradation in the signal-to-noise ratio available at the receiver output owing to shading or mismatch losses. Nonlinear freq...

This study involved the extraction and analysis of version reporting information from completed and reported ClinicalTrials.gov entries for wrist-worn wearable intervention studies.

In recent years, wearable computers, in the form of wrist-worn trackers and smartwatches, have transitioned apace from the well-being market into the set of 'Internet of Medical Things' (IoMTs) used in clinical research and healthcare. Despite concerted efforts invested in improved clinical research practices and, more generally, in improved report...

Obsolete devices add to the rising levels of electronic waste, a major environmental concern, and a contributing factor to climate change. In recent years, device manufacturers have established environmental commitments and launched initiatives such as supporting the recycling of obsolete devices by making more ways available for consumers to safel...

In the Spotlight: The “Virtual Cuneiform Tablet Reconstruction Project” Published by Stefania Ermidoro on 22-10-2022 https://iaassyriology.com/in-the-spotlight-the-vctr-project Dear Mar Shiprim readers, we are very happy to introduce to you a project which, we believe, will be of great interest to many of us! The “Virtual Cuneiform Tablet Reconstr...

Wearable Photoplethysmography (PPG) has gained prominence as a low cost, unobtrusive and continuous method for physiological monitoring. The quality of the collected PPG signals is affected by several sources of interference, predominantly due to physical motion. Many methods for estimating heart rate (HR) from PPG signals have been proposed with D...

Wearable Photoplethysmography (PPG) has gained prominence as a low cost, unobtrusive and continuous method for physiological monitoring. The quality of the collected PPG signals is affected by several sources of interference, predominantly due to physical motion. Many methods for estimating heart rate (HR) from PPG signals have been proposed with D...

Wearable Photoplethysmography (PPG) has gained prominence as a low cost, unobtrusive and continuous method for physiological monitoring. The quality of the collected PPG signals is affected by several sources of interference, predominantly due to physical motion. Many methods for estimating heart rate (HR) from PPG signals have been proposed with D...

Wearable Photoplethysmography (PPG) has gained prominence as a low cost, unobtrusive and continuous method for physiological monitoring. The quality of the collected PPG signals is affected by several sources of interference, predominantly due to physical motion. Many methods for estimating heart rate (HR) from PPG signals have been proposed with D...

Virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies are escaping the “trough of disillusionment”—the lowest point of the Gartner Hype Curve that follows the “inflated peak of early expectations” (Muñoz-Saavedra, Miró-Amarante, & Domínguez-Morales, 2020). Now, at this exciting juncture, as we see stronger alignments among technology expectations, perf...

A growing sense of unfairness permeates our quasi-digital society. Despite drivers supporting and motivating ethical practice in the digital technology ecosystem, there are compounding barriers to fairness that, at every level, impact technology innovation, delivery and access. Amongst these are barriers and omissions at the earliest stages of tech...

Optical pulse detection photoplethysmography (PPG) provides a means of low cost and unobtrusive physiological monitoring that is popular in many wearable devices. However, the accuracy, robustness and generalizability of single-wavelength PPG sensing are sensitive to biological characteristics as well as sensor configuration and placement; this is...

In this paper we reflect on the interplay and the disconnects between real and virtual heritage experiences, and the fragmented nature of digital experiences. We consider the important engagement potential that virtual interactions bring to small less visible artefacts, like clay cuneiform tablets, and, with case study examples, we imagine museums...

Art undergraduates increasingly engage in the design and coding of digital media and generative art, for example, using the open-source Processing library and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) created for visual artists. An equivalent cross-over, of art and creativity into traditional computer science programmes, is not so evident despite a...

Wrist-worn photoplethysmography (PPG) heart rate monitoring devices are increasingly used in clinical applications despite the potential for data missingness and inaccuracy. This paper provides an analysis of the intermittency of experimental wearable data recordings. Devices recorded heart rate with gaps of 5 or more minutes 41.6% of the time and...

Extracting accurate heart rate estimations from wrist-worn photoplethysmography (PPG) devices is challenging due to the signal containing artifacts from several sources. Deep Learning approaches have shown very promising results outperforming classical methods with improvements of 21% and 31% on two state-of-the-art datasets. This paper provides an...

This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR) project for the curation of virtual museum ‘takeouts’ and DIY exhibitions. The project’s outputs include novel AR app technology demonstrators to support co-design with museum users and stakeholders - the goal being to create useful and easy-to-use AR apps for scholars, citizen scientists and the intere...

Wrist-worn photoplethysmography (PPG) heart rate monitoring devices are increasingly used in clinical applications despite the potential for data missingness and inaccuracy. This paper provides an analysis of the intermittency of experimental wearable data recordings. Devices recorded heart rate with gaps of 5 or more minutes 41.6% of the time and...

Wrist-worn devices afford convenient and unobtrusive heart rate sensing, however, motion artifacts can lead to unreliable data recordings. This paper evaluates heart rate estimates acquired during treadmill walking and 12 hours of everyday living from a medical-grade Empatica E4 data streaming wristband wearable compared to a Polar H10 chest strap...

This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR) project for the curation of virtual museum ‘takeouts’ and DIY exhibitions. The project’s outputs include novel AR app technology demonstrators to support co-design with museum users and stakeholders - the goal being to create useful and easy-to-use AR apps for scholars, citizen scientists and the intere...

Wearable health devices have the potential to incentivize individuals in health-promoting behaviors and to assist in the monitoring of health conditions. Wearable epilepsy seizure monitoring devices are now evolving that can support individuals and their caregivers via the automated sensing, reporting and logging of epileptic seizures. This work co...

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects 50 million people worldwide. It is characterised by seizures that can vary in presentation, from short absences to protracted convulsions. Wearable electronic devices that detect seizures have the potential to hail timely assistance for individuals, inform their treatment, and assist care and self-ma...

The photogrammetric acquisition of 3D object models can be achieved by Structure from Motion (SfM) computation of photographs taken from multiple viewpoints. All-around 3D models of small artefacts with complex geometry can be difficult to acquire photogrammetrically and the precision of the acquired models can be diminished by the generic applicat...

Background: Wearable fitness trackers are increasingly used in healthcare applications; however, the frequent updating of these devices is at odds with traditional medical device practices. Objective: Our objective was to explore the nature and frequency of wearable tracker updates recorded in device changelogs, to reveal the chronology of updates...

This paper addresses the significant need for improvements in device version reporting and practice across the academic and technical activity monitoring literature, and it recommends assessments for new and updated consumer sensing devices. Reproducibility and data veracity are central to good scholarship, and particularly significant in clinical...

The aim of this paper is to address the need for reliability assessments of new and updated consumer-grade activity and heart rate monitoring devices. This issue is central to the use of these sensor devices and it is particularly important in their medical and assisted living application. Using an example lightweight empirical approach, experiment...

Full Citation: Oniani, S., Woolley, S.I., Pires, I.M., Garcia, N.M., Collins, T., Ledger, S. and Pandyan, A. "Reliability Assessment of New and Updated Consumer-Grade Activity and Heart Rate Monitors." IARIA Conference on Sensor Device Technologies and Applications, Venice, SENSORDEVICES 2018

Wearable multi-modal monitoring systems, capable of robust real-world recording during the activities of daily life, have the potential to provide rich objective experiential and well-being accounts. Such sensing systems have wide clinical application in rehabilitation, in pre- and post-surgical assessment, in monitoring of the acute medical patien...

Monitoring systems have wide clinical application in health service provisions, for example, in rehabilitation, pre- and post-surgical assessment, monitoring of the acute medical patient and management of chronic conditions [1-3]. They also provide new opportunities for insights into the workplace activities, processes and stressors of clinical sta...

The epic of Atrahasis is one of the most significant pieces of ancient Babylonian literature. It describes a creation myth, a great flood and the building of an ark, that significantly pre-dates a similar account in the Bible. The epic has survived millennia on clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script. But the third tablet of one of the most co...

The epic of Atrahasis is one of the most significant pieces of ancient Mesopotamian literature. The account has survived millennia on sets of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script; a sophisticated early writing system comprising signs formed from wedge-shaped impressions. The third tablet belonging to one of the most complete copies of the A...

Mid-range resonant coupling-based high efficient wireless power transfer (WPT) techniques have gained substantial research interest due to the number of potential applications in many industries. This paper presents a novel design of a resonant two-loop WPT technique including the design, fabrication and preliminary results of this proposal. This n...

In binaural audio systems, for an optimal virtual acoustic space a set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) should be used that closely matches the listener’s ones. This study aims to select the most appropriated HRTF dataset from a large database for users without the need for extensive listening tests. Currently, there is no way to reliably...

This paper describes an Interaction that accompanies the 2017 BCS HCI Conference paper “A Collaborative Reconstruction Environment” by the same authors. The interaction provides users with an opportunity to manipulate and join 3D models of two cuneiform tablet fragments.

Presentation Slides for the Conference Paper ”A Collaborative Artefact Reconstruction Environment”.

Joining cuneiform tablet fragments are separated within and between collections worldwide. In previous work of the Virtual Cuneiform Tablet Reconstruction Project [VCTR, 2018], automated joins were achieved for virtual 3D Ur and Uruk fragments held within the same collections. By virtue of this fact, these physical fragments were in close proximity...

1. Introduction Patient monitoring systems capable of accurate recording in the real-world, during the activities of everyday living, can provide rich objective accounts of patient well-being that have broad application in clinical decision support. Combining physiological, environmental and actigraphy sensing together with a quantified subjective...

Unlike jigsaw puzzles of thousands of pieces, which computers can now solve, fragmented cuneiform tablets constitute much more complex free-form three-dimensional “puzzles” whose pieces can belong to an unknown number of complete or incomplete tablets. Computer-aided reconstruction of archaeological fragments has been an active area of research in...

This paper presents the findings of a technological adoption assessment of health monitoring devices for a dementia study. The work was motivated by the need to monitor physical activity interventions in a study cohort of dementia patients living with caregiver support in the community. The system requirements were for a discrete and unobtrusive so...

Student resources for OpenEEG project work

Ambisonics renders a sound field through different kinds of loudspeaker layouts, which leads to different listening perceptions. While some loudspeaker arrays reinforce timbral fidelity, some improve localization accuracy. A split-band decoding is proposed that aims to select and then mix the better reconstructed frequency components from different...

Cuneiform script is the earliest known system of writing consisting of wedge-shaped strokes forming signs impressed on clay tablets. Excavated cuneiform tablets are typically fragmented and their reconstruction is, at best, tedious but more often intractable. Whilst physical reconstruction of tablets may be impractical, the possibility of virtually...

The efficient reconstruction of ancient cuneiform tablets has been a challenging problem over many decades, which if an approach is found to speed up the rate of potential fragment joins, will lead to a discovery of rich historical records of knowledge inscribed 5,000 years ago. This paper describes The Leverhulme Trust funded development of a crow...

This paper compares the outcomes of thermal biofeedback based on a cellular phone with the outcomes of thermal biofeedback using a PC. Thermal biofeedback has been reported to be useful to decrease stress and anxiety and improve the condition of other disorders such as diabetes, pain, and hypertension. This technique of biofeedback is based on tryi...

This paper evaluates the effect of photic stimulation at frequencies of 10 and 20 Hz on lowering stress for therapeutic purposes. This study also measures the increase of the temperature in the extremities when the person is receiving this stimulation as it has been found that photic stimulation increases the temperature by means of a higher blood...

A procedure for designing digital Butterworth filters is proposed. The procedure determines the denominator and the numerator of the filter transfer function based on the positions of the poles in the s-plane and zeros in the z-plane, respectively, and calculates the gain factor using a maximum point normalization method. In contrast to some conven...

IntroductionFundamentals of Amplitude Phase ModulationImplementationTiming and SynchronizationMultidimensional Carrierless Amplitude Phase ModulationConclusion GlossaryCross ReferencesReferences

In this paper we propose a method for conventional headphones to reproduce 5.1 and 7.1-channel surround sounds that are increasingly used in music and movies. When converting multi-channel audio to stereo, we adopted shuffler filter structures and least-squares approximation of FIR (Finite Impulse Response) by IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter...

The diverse roles of deployable underwater assets have increased the need for ad hoc networking capability. This capability is defined as the ability to form acoustic communication links by deploying assets in a non-deterministic manner, without depending on a priori route and positioning information. Each asset represents a node in the network, an...

An active acoustic touch panel interface is described that aims to detect and localise touch interactions using a minimal amount of surface preparation and hardware. Using a single transmitter and only one or two receivers, the position of a touch can be estimated by analysing the resulting changes to the frequency response of the surface. An outli...

Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) techniques can yield high-resolution images with a small physical array. Their application in the underwater environment is usually confined to the deployment and synthesis of linear apertures. Incoherent SAS processing is a suboptimal approach compared with coherent SAS processing as the absence of phase information...

The majority of active sonar systems detect and classify a target based on the amplitude of the received echo strength or the induced Doppler shift. However, additional classification information is available from the phase shift introduced by some targets as a result of the acoustic boundary conditions. For example, reverberation returns from the...

In this paper, the problem of estimating the impulse response within a reverberant room is investigated. The target application is that of compensating a stereo or multichannel sound reproduction system for variations in room acoustics and the non-ideal placement of the loudspeakers. The prediction of the impulse responses at the locations of multi...

This work is aimed at the problem of continuously measuring and predicting the impulse response within a reverberant room using sources-of-opportunity. The target application is that of compensating a sound reproduction system for variations in room acoustics and the non-ideal placement of the loudspeakers. The prediction of the impulse responses c...

This paper introduces a novel waveform -the wideband Cox comb waveform for the target tracking in air. It can provide an alternative estimation of the range and Doppler of the target as a new means for human computer interaction. The ambiguity function and matched filter are employed for the active signal analysis and processing. The simulation sho...

Acoustic source localization is important to the design and implementation of intelligent environments such as computer-human interaction systems. Different methods for multiple source localization are discussed and compared in this paper. The mathematical model of the method based on SRP-PHAT is presented for multiple sources localization under re...

This paper introduces the 3D Doppler tracking algorithm for in air application. The tracking in air is import for the roomware application: next generation of Human Computer Interaction. It also introduces an alternative Castella model of the Kalman filter to estimate the velocity state, which is further enhanced in terms of the accuracy estimate....

Acoustic source localization is important to the design and implementation of tangible acoustic interfaces for human computer interaction. In the paper, characteristics of acoustic sources for human computer interaction are studied. A time delay estimation method based on phase transform and smoothed coherence transform was chosen for the applicati...

In-air passive acoustic source localization is important to the design and implementation of tangible acoustic interfaces for computer human interaction. The methods used for in-air passive acoustic source localization are discussed in this paper. A time delay estimation method based on general cross-correlation was chosen for the application. In a...

In this paper, the concept of an ad hoc underwater acoustic network (UAN) is presented. It seeks to meet two critical needs: to establish a long-range and decentralised communication link, and to maintain a reliable on-demand communication link with minimal human intervention. Despite having the same goal, the operating characteristics of an ad hoc...

A framework for the use of time-domain bi-static processing in single-transmitter, multiple-receiver, incoherent synthetic aperture sonar imaging, highlighting its circumstantial advantages, is proposed. Also presented are imaging results for such a scheme based on a recent unconstrained sea survey, giving a positive indication of its potential.

Synthetic aperture techniques have been of interest to the sonar imaging community, but suffer from the problems of maintaining phase coherence and a slow mapping rate. The need for rigorous and accurate platform trajectory monitoring often increases the design and implementation costs as well as the hardware complexity. The paper examines incohere...

A new, error-tolerant, still image compression algorithm is described. An error-resilient adaptation of an existing zerotree wavelet coder is used to compress the image. Then, a variable-rate, concatenated error correction code is applied to protect the data further. Variable-rate protection exploits the progressive coding ability of the compressor...

An underwater acoustic communications system designed to transmit 20 kbit/s over ranges from 100 m up to 5 km between a semi-autonomous underwater vehicle and a surface vessel moving with up to 20 knots relative velocity is presented. Under these conditions, attention must be given not only to the steady-state equalisation capability of the receive...

The dynamic range and processing gains achievable within a simple passive sonar will be reviewed. It will be demonstrated that the constraints of modern electronic hardware components do not necessarily limit the performance of a passive sonar system when compared with the physical constraints of the acoustic channel. By contrast it will be demonst...

A robust image compression algorithm has been developed for use in underwater video transmission. The hostile nature of the medium leads to high error rates, normally requiring a severe overhead in terms of forward error correction bits. The new algorithm reduces this requirement by means of error resilient organization of the compressed image data...

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The performance of active sonars operating in shallow water is often limited by the reverberation level (Waite, 1998). If a target is moving relative to the reverberating scatterers, it may be possible to isolate its Doppler-scaled echo from the zero-Doppler reverberation provided that the Doppler shift is greater than the bandwidth of the transmit...

Sonar systems can be divided into two broad categories - active and passive. During the last three decades, low-frequency military sonars have been dominated by passive techniques because of their inherent covert nature and long range capability. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the field of active sonar as passive syst...

Most techniques used to estimate the transfer function (or impulse response) of an acoustical space operate along similar principles. A known, broadband signal is transmitted at one point in the room whilst being simultaneously recorded at another. A matched-filter is then used to compress the energy in the transmission waveform in time, forming an...