Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a leading cause of death worldwide, and hypertension is a major risk factor for acquiring CVDs. Early detection and treatment of hypertension can significantly reduce the risk of developing CVDs and related complications. In this study, a linear SVM machine learning model was used to classify subjects as normal or at different stages of hypertension. The features combined statistical parameters derived from the acceleration plethysmography waveforms and clinical parameters extracted from a publicly available dataset. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 87.50% on the validation dataset and 95.35% on the test dataset. The model's true positive rate and positive predictivity was high in all classes, indicating a high accuracy, and precision. This study represents the first attempt to classify cardiovascular conditions using a combination of acceleration photoplethysmogram (APG) features and clinical parameters The study demonstrates the potential of APG analysis as a valuable tool for early detection of hypertension.

Accurate bladder monitoring is critical in the management of conditions such as urinary incontinence, voiding dysfunction, and spinal cord injuries. Electrical bioimpedance (EBI) has emerged as a cost-effective and non-invasive approach to monitoring bladder activity in daily life, with particular relevance to patient groups who require measurement of bladder urine volume (BUV) to prevent urinary leakage. However, the impact of activities in daily living (ADLs) on EBI measurements remains incompletely characterized. In this study, we investigated the impact of normal ADLs such as sitting, standing, and walking on EBI measurements using the MAX30009evkit system with four electrodes placed on the lower abdominal area. We developed an algorithm to identify artifacts caused by the different activities from the EBI signals. Our findings demonstrate that various physical activities clearly affected the EBI measurements, indicating the necessity of considering them during bladder monitoring with EBI technology performed during physical activity (or normal ADLs). We also observed that several specific activities could be distinguished based on their impedance values and waveform shapes. Thus, our results provide a better understanding of the impact of physical activity on EBI measurements and highlight the importance of considering such physical activities during EBI measurements in order to enhance the reliability and effectiveness of EBI technology for bladder monitoring.

Safety in human-robot interaction can be divided into physical safety and perceived safety, where the latter is still under-addressed in the literature. Investigating perceived safety in human-robot interaction requires a multidisciplinary perspective. Indeed, perceived safety is often considered as being associated with several common factors studied in other disciplines, i.e., comfort, predictability, sense of control, and trust. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between these factors and perceived safety in human-robot interaction using subjective and objective measures. We conducted a two-by-five mixed-subjects design experiment. There were two between-subjects conditions: the faulty robot was experienced at the beginning or the end of the interaction. The five within-subjects conditions correspond to (1) baseline, and the manipulations of robot behaviors to stimulate: (2) discomfort, (3) decreased perceived safety, (4) decreased sense of control and (5) distrust. The idea of triggering a deprivation of these factors was motivated by the definition of safety in the literature where safety is often defined by the absence of it. Twenty-seven young adult participants took part in the experiments. Participants were asked to answer questionnaires that measure the manipulated factors after within-subjects conditions. Besides questionnaire data, we collected objective measures such as videos and physiological data. The questionnaire results show a correlation between comfort, sense of control, trust, and perceived safety. Since these factors are the main factors that influence perceived safety, they should be considered in human-robot interaction design decisions. We also discuss the effect of individual human characteristics (such as personality and gender) that they could be predictors of perceived safety. We used the physiological signal data and facial affect from videos for estimating perceived safety where participants’ subjective ratings were utilized as labels. The data from objective measures revealed that the prediction rate was higher from physiological signal data. This paper can play an important role in the goal of better understanding perceived safety in human-robot interaction.

In this paper, we present a model to propose an optimal placement for a robot in a social group interaction. Our model estimates the O-space according to the F-formation theory. The method automatically calculates a suitable placement for the robot. An evaluation of the method has been performed by conducting an experiment where participants stand in different formations and a robot is teleoperated to join the group. In one condition, the operator positions the robot according to the specified location given by our algorithm. In another condition, operators have the freedom to position the robot according to their personal choice. Follow-up questionnaires were performed to determine which of the placements were preferred by the participants. The results indicate that the proposed method for automatic placement of the robot is supported from the participants. The contribution of this work resides in a novel method to automatically estimate the best placement of the robot, as well as the results from user experiments to verify the quality of this method. These results suggest that teleoperated robots such as mobile robot telepresence systems could benefit from tools that assist operators in placing the robot in groups in a socially accepted manner.

One goal of mobile robotic telepresence for social interaction is to design robotic units that are easy to operate for novice users and promote good interaction between people. This paper presents an exploratory study on the effect of camera orientation and field of view on the interaction between a remote and local user. Our findings suggest that limiting the width of the field of view can lead to better interaction quality as it encourages remote users to orient the robot towards local users.

Mobile robotic telepresence (MRP) has been introduced to allow communication from remote locations. Modern MRP systems offer rich capabilities for human-human interactions. However, simply driving a telepresence robot can become a burden especially for novice users, leaving no room for interaction at all. In this video we introduce a project which aims to incorporate advanced robotic algorithms into manned telepresence robots in a natural way to allow human-robot cooperation for safe driving. It also shows a very first implementation of cooperative driving based on extracting a safe drivable area in real time using the image stream received from the robot.

Robotic telepresence, also known as telerobotics is a subfield of telepresence whose aim is to increase presence via embodiment in a robotic platform. In particular, robotic telepresence can be an effective tool to enhance social interaction suited to certain groups of users such as the elderly. The aim of this workshop is to address various aspects important for social robotic telepresence which include but are not limited to, (1) the mechanical design, (2) the user interface design, (3) the interaction between the remotely embodied person and the locally embodied person and (4) the perception of social robotic telepresence systems. Furthermore, we are interested in discovering the added value of spatial presence in the context of social telepresence and comparisons between robotic and non-robotic systems are of interest. We welcome contributions concerning results reached from the above mentioned areas of interest, user evaluation and methodologies, as well as reports from the deployment of social robotic solutions into real world contexts.