Wearable Technology Market

Elevation of creatine kinase (CK) in serum after exertion is a reliable marker of skeletal muscle injury. Limited data exist on CK levels in conditioned athletes after endurance training and competition. Serum CK was measured by a kinetic UV method (normal < 100 U/L) in 15 long distance runners before (pre-race), 24 hours after (post-race) and four weeks following (post-race) the 1979 Boston Marathon. CK levels were elevated throughout the study. Mean values for all runners and for those finishing before and after three hours and 30 minutes are as follows: Post-race CK was significantly elevated among the ten faster as compared to the five slower runners (p = 0.025). Elevations of creatine kinase drawn 24 hours post-marathon are inversely related to finishing times among the runners tested.

Cardiac troponin I (cTnI), a sensitive and specific marker for myocardial injury, has been utilized for the diagnosis of an acute myocardial infarction. However, a variety of clinical scenarios without evidence of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), such as pulmonary embolism, sepsis, renal failure or stress-induced cardiomyopathy may also cause the elevation of cTnI. We described a 55-year-old Hispanic male with abnormal elevations of cTnI without objective evidence of myocardial infarction damage. We hypothesized that his long-term chronic alcoholic intoxication is causing the myocardial injury, responsive for cTnI elevation. We proposed that alcohol-induced early myocardial damage, independent of alcoholic cardiomyopathy, might be related to alcohol-induced cTnI elevation in this patient. This is the first report suggesting that the abnormal elevations of cTnI can be seen in patients with chronic alcoholism without objective evidence of myocardial infarction.

Elevation of creatine kinase (CK) in serum after exertion is a reliable marker of skeletal muscle injury. Limited data exist on CK levels in conditioned athletes after endurance training and competition. Serum CK was measured by a kinetic UV method (normal < 100 U/L) in 15 long distance runners before (pre-race), 24 hours after (post-race) and four weeks following (post-race) the 1979 Boston Marathon. CK levels were elevated throughout the study. Mean values for all runners and for those finishing before and after three hours and 30 minutes are as follows: Post-race CK was significantly elevated among the ten faster as compared to the five slower runners (p = 0.025). Elevations of creatine kinase drawn 24 hours post-marathon are inversely related to finishing times among the runners tested.

Background Personal Health Records (PHRs) are designed to fulfill the goals of electronic health (eHealth) and empower the individual in the process of self-care. Integrated PHR can improve the quality of care, strengthen the patient-healthcare provider relationship, and reduce healthcare costs. Still, the process of PHR acceptance and use has been slow and mainly hindered by people’s concerns about the security of their personal health information. Thus, the present study aimed to identify the Integrated PHR security requirements and mechanisms. Methods In this applied study, PHR security requirements were identified with a literature review of (library sources, research articles, scientific documents, and reliable websites). The identified requirements were classified, and a questionnaire was developed accordingly. Thirty experts completed the questionnaire in a two-round Delphi technique, and the data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. Results The PHR security requirements ...

This paper presents a real-time detection and recognition approach to identify actions of interest involved in the smart TV application from continuous action streams via simultaneous utilization of a depth camera and a wearable inertial sensor. Continuous action streams mean when actions of interest are performed continuously and randomly among arbitrary actions of non-interest. The developed approach consists of a detection part and a recognition part. In the detection part, two support vector data descriptor classifiers corresponding to the two sensing modalities are used to separate actions of interest from actions of non-interest in continuous action streams. The actions detected as actions of interest by both of the sensing modalities are then passed to the recognition part. In this part, actions of interest are classified by fusing the decisions from two collaborative representation classifiers, one classifier using skeleton joint positions and the other classifier using inertial signals. The developed approach is applied to the hand gestures in the smart TV application. The experimental results obtained indicate the effectiveness of the developed approach to detect and recognize smart TV gestures in continuous action streams. INDEX TERMS Real-time detection and recognition of smart TV gestures, recognition in continuous action streams, simultaneous utilization of depth camera and inertial sensor.

Elderly population often is encouraged to practice sports in preventing cardiovascular diseases. However, evidences exist that intense physical efforts are related with a higher risk for acute myocardial infarction and sudden death. Biological markers for myocardial injury was analyzed in a group of 15 elderly athletes without a history of coronary artery disease, who participated in the 77th International Sao Silvestre race (15,000 m) in Sao Paulo City. A statistical difference was observed between total CPK activity levels before the run, immediately after the run, and some time later. Similar results were observed in the concentration of CK-MB mass. The cardiac troponin I (TnI-c) levels remained unchanged and within normal limits during the same time periods. The results of the present study showed no evidence of myocardial injury in elderly subjects without a history of coronary artery disease after participating in long-distance runs, as confirmed by the analysis of TnI-c levels. The increase in total CPK activity levels and the concentration of CK-MB mass do not represent myocardial injury in these subjects.

It is envisaged that technology must be made good use in order to make life convenient and comfortable in this 21 st century; more convenient when the gadgets are handy. One of the things is the wearable gadgets to take care of the emergency needs and health care. This article tried revamp the current developments.

Background: The clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with significant noncardiac and cardiac serum creatine phosphokinase (CPK) elevations are not well described. Methods: One hundred fifty-eight inpatients who had CPK elevation of Ͼ1000 IU/L were identified. One hundred thirty-seven patients whose CPK elevations could be attributed to either noncardiac or cardiac etiologies were included and analyzed for clinical characteristics, 30-day, 3-month, and 1-year all-cause mortality rates. Twenty-one patients were excluded, in whom noncardiac and cardiac CPK (CCPK) elevations coexisted, or etiologies were unclear. Results: Of the 137 patients, 43 (31%) patients had CCPK elevation and 94 (69%) patients had noncardiac CPK (NCCPK) elevation. One-year mortality rate was 26.6% (25 of 94 patients) in NCCPK elevation group. Decedents were older (P Ͻ 0.05), had higher blood urea nitrogen (P Ͻ 0.01) and creatinine (P Ͻ 0.05) levels, and had higher white blood cell counts (P Ͻ 0.05) compared with survivors. In CCPK elevation group, 37.2% (16 of 43 patients) died within 1 year after admission. Decedents were also older (P Ͻ 0.01) and had higher blood urea nitrogen (P Ͻ 0.01) and creatinine (P Ͻ 0.01) levels. Conclusion: The incidence of NCCPK elevation is greater than that of CCPK elevation in a veteran, mostly male, population. One-year mortality rate in patients with NCCPK elevation is comparable to that in patients with CCPK elevation (26.6% versus 37.2%, P ϭ 0.290). Age and renal insufficiency are 2 major predictors for increased mortality in both groups.

Cardiac troponin I (cTnI), a sensitive and specific marker for myocardial injury, has been utilized for the diagnosis of an acute myocardial infarction. However, a variety of clinical scenarios without evidence of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), such as pulmonary embolism, sepsis, renal failure or stress-induced cardiomyopathy may also cause the elevation of cTnI. We described a 55-year-old Hispanic male with abnormal elevations of cTnI without objective evidence of myocardial infarction damage. We hypothesized that his long-term chronic alcoholic intoxication is causing the myocardial injury, responsive for cTnI elevation. We proposed that alcohol-induced early myocardial damage, independent of alcoholic cardiomyopathy, might be related to alcohol-induced cTnI elevation in this patient. This is the first report suggesting that the abnormal elevations of cTnI can be seen in patients with chronic alcoholism without objective evidence of myocardial infarction.

Addressing the obesity problem worldwide is not only a focus of the pharmaceutical industry, but also the software and hardware technology industry. Nowadays, starting with simple pedometers, highly intelligent technology has been adopted [1]. The fitness-sensing market has been primarily dominated by body-worn sensors, which are often integrated or connected to discrete devices with global positioning system (GPS) receivers [1]. The activity-sensing market is expected to be worth circa $975 million by 2017 [1]. The use of wearable technologies, such as the Fitbit, is becoming increasingly common among the general public [1]. Seventeen

Addressing the obesity problem worldwide is not only a focus of the pharmaceutical industry, but also the software and hardware technology industry. Nowadays, starting with simple pedometers, highly intelligent technology has been adopted [1]. The fitness-sensing market has been primarily dominated by body-worn sensors, which are often integrated or connected to discrete devices with global positioning system (GPS) receivers [1]. The activity-sensing market is expected to be worth circa $975 million by 2017 [1]. The use of wearable technologies, such as the Fitbit, is becoming increasingly common among the general public [1]. Seventeen

Following the exciting first reactions, Google Glass has encountered seriously criticism, due to the perceived threats to security and privacy. Cyber security is one of the most serious threats, both to private users and business enterprises. At present, Google Glass makes it easy for cyber hackers to gain access to our personal data, banking and credit card details, passwords or personal identification numbers. After conducting literature review and simple questionnaire survey in which 35 Glass owners and 30 privacy managers from the US took part, we analyzed the collected data to point out the weakness of the device. The response rate visibly showed problem of user privacy in design of product (16.7% satisfaction on design to protect privacy). Based on these analyses, we proposed 6 essential improvements to Glass security and privacy by redesigning the features that currently pose a threat to privacy of Google Glass users and other party involved. We can thus view Google Glass as ...

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Cardiac disease is now the leading cause of death in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Clinical evaluations over time have demonstrated asymptomatic cardiac troponin elevations and acute elevations are associated with symptoms and cardiac dysfunction in DMD. Clinicians require a better understanding of the relationship of symptoms, troponin levels and progression of cardiac disease in DMD. As clinical trials begin to assess novel cardiac therapeutics in DMD, troponin levels in DMD are important for safety monitoring and outcome measures. The Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy convened an expert panel of cardiologists, scientists, and regulatory and industry specialists on 16 December 2019 in Silver Spring, Maryland and reviewed published and unpublished data from their institutions. The panel recommended retrospective troponin data analyses, prospective longitudinal troponin collection using high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I assays, inclusion of troponin in future clinical trial o...

Macro enzymes are high molecular mass complexes that consist of normal serum enzymes and proteinimmunoglobulins. Creatine kinase (CK) is a muscle enzyme that has three isoenzymes. Two types of macro CK have been described; Macro CK type 1 and macro CK type 2. We report a case where cardiac enzymes were persistently elevated in the absence of myocardial injury. The false elevation was secondary to the presence of macro CK type 1 yielding aberrantly increased CK-MB. Our patient lacked clinical as well as electrocardiographic (EKG) changes to validate myocardial ischemia. Apperception of diagnosing falsely elevated cardiac markers is imperative to avoid unnecessary procedures

Creatine kinase-MB (CK-MB) is a widely evaluated testing enzyme in diseases related to cardiac or injury. Here we relate a clinical scenario of a patient presenting with no chest pain or symptom related to the cardiac disease whose CK-MB levels were remained inordinately elevated despite normal total CK levels. Clinically and subsequent pathological examination showed no evidence of infarction, inflammation or cardiac ischemia. Further evaluation of the patient reveals the presence of the primary prostate carcinoma with the secondary metastatic lesions in the hepatic lobe.

We present a demonstration of a multi-modal 3D capturing platform coupled to a motion comparison system. This work is focused on the preservation of Traditional Sports and Games, namely the Gaelic sports from Ireland and Basque sports from France and Spain. Users can learn, compare and compete in the performance of sporting gestures and compare themselves to real athletes. Our online gesture database provides a way to preserve and display a wide range of sporting gestures. The capturing devices utilised are Kinect 2 sensors and wearable inertial sensors, where the number required varies based on the requested scenario. The fusion of these two capture modalities, coupled to our inverse kinematic algorithm, allow us to synthesize a fluid and reliable 3D model of the user gestures over time. Our novel comparison algorithms provide the user with a performance score and a set of comparison curves (i.e. joint angles and angular velocities), providing a precise and valuable feedback for coaches and players.

Background. Antimyocardium antibodies (AMA) have been observed in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). At present it is unknown if these AMA play a role in the pathogenesis of acute or chronic myocardial damage or if they are only produced as a result of tissue destruction, disappearing later without clinical manifestations. However, some studies have shown that patients with AMI and AMA have higher possibilities of presenting heart failure and death. The aim of the present study was to determine if there is an association (odds ratio, OR) between AMA and death in patients with AMI. Methods. The design was a cross-sectional study. One hundred patients with acute myocardial infarction were recruited consecutively at the Coronary Care Unit of the Hospital de Especialidades at La Raza National Medical Center, IMSS, Mexico City. IgG antimyocardium antibodies were identified using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technique (ELISA). Results. Of the 100 patients studied, 81 were males and 19 females, with an average age of 58 6 11 years. Of the population studied, 44% showed AMA. It was observed that patients with positive AMA had an OR for heart failure of 3.40 (CI 95% 0.97-12.5, p 5 0.06) and for death of 7.94 (CI 95%, 1.49-56.1, p 5 0.003). This variable was analyzed with other confounding variables using logistic regression, and an OR of 11.8 (CI 95% 1.63-86.3, p 5 0.001) was obtained. Conclusions. AMAs were an independent predictive factor for mortality in patients with AMI.

Background-Elevated plasma cardiac troponin T (cTnT) levels in patients with neuromuscular disorders may erroneously lead to the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction or myocardial injury. Methods and Results-In 122 patients with Pompe disease, the relationship between cTnT, cardiac troponin I, creatine kinase (CK), CK-myocardial band levels, and skeletal muscle damage was assessed. ECG and echocardiography were used to evaluate possible cardiac disease. Patients were divided into classic infantile, childhood-onset, and adult-onset patients. cTnT levels were elevated in 82% of patients (median 27 ng/L, normal values <14 ng/L). Cardiac troponin I levels were normal in all patients, whereas CK-myocardial band levels were increased in 59% of patients. cTnT levels correlated with CK levels in all 3 subgroups (P<0.001). None of the abnormal ECGs recorded in 21 patients were indicative of acute myocardial infarction, and there were no differences in cTnT levels between patients with and without (n=90) abnormalities on ECG (median 28 ng/L in both groups). The median left ventricular mass index measured with echocardiography was normal in all the 3 subgroups. cTnT mRNA expression in skeletal muscle was not detectable in controls but was strongly induced in patients with Pompe disease. cTnT protein was identified by mass spectrometry in patient-derived skeletal muscle tissue. Conclusions-Elevated plasma cTnT levels in patients with Pompe disease are associated with skeletal muscle damage, rather than acute myocardial injury. Increased cTnT levels in Pompe disease and likely other neuromuscular disorders should be interpreted with caution to avoid unnecessary cardiac interventions.

Whilst this paper presents a state-of-the-art report of the fast-emerging wearable technology industry, it narrows its focus to the future of smart wearables as a mass media communication platform and to the contribution smart wearables will make to the health and wellbeing sector. As such, we make three predictions: First, that wearables and smartphones will merge into what we call ‘smartwear’. Second, smartwear offers new forms of mass media communications. Third, when used as a mass media communication platform, smartwear will completely transform our lives, especially our health and wellbeing. Smartwear will allow users to download a multitude of apps that can connect to sensors on the body to monitor relevant aspects of our daily lives, such as vital health signs, current location, and geographic movements. These smart wearables can share our data in real time 24/7 amongst our communities or ‘tribes’ and with health and wellbeing service providers. We propose in this paper that...

Wireless sensor network enables remote connectivity of technological devices such as smart mobile with the internet. Due to its low cost as well as easy availability of data sharing and accessing devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially during the past few years. The availability of these devices plays a remarkable role in the new era of mHealth. In mHealth, the sensors generate enormous amounts of data and the context-aware computing has proven to collect and manage the data. The context aware computing is a new domain to be aware of context of involved devices. The context-aware computing is playing a very significant part in the development of smart mobile health applications to monitor the health of patients more efficiently. Security is one of the key challenges in IoT-based mHealth application development. The wireless nature of IoT devices motivates attackers to attack on application; these vulnerable attacks can be denial of service attack, sinkhole attack, and select forwarding attack. These attacks lead intruders to disrupt the applica-tion's functionality, data packet drops to malicious end and changes the route of data and forwards the data packet to other location. There is a need to timely detect and prevent these threats in mobile health applications. Existing work includes many security frameworks to secure the mobile health applications but all have some drawbacks. This paper presents existing frameworks, the impact of threats on applications, on information, and different security levels. From this line of research, we propose a security framework with two algorithms, ie, (i) patient priority autonomous call and (ii) location distance based switch, for mobile health applications and make a comparative analysis of the proposed framework with the existing ones.

We used Western-blot analysis to investigate the possible presence in the bloodstream of the contractile protein cu-actin in 70 patients diagnosed with acute myocardial infarction on the basis of clinical, electrocardiographic and laboratory (creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase) criteria. Circulating protein was identified with a monoclonal antibody specific for cardiac a-actin. Of the 70 control samples of blood, the immunoblot results were negative for a-actin in 98% of the cases. Of the 30 patients with skeletal muscle damage caused by surgery, 26 were negative for circulating a-actin. Of the 70 patients with acute myocardial infarction, circulating a-actin was found in 67 (95%) as a 43 kDa band in immunoblots; the highest circulating concentrations (0.0580 pg/pl) were found in those with anterior acute myocardial infarction. Circulating cY-actin was detected in samples taken between 1 and 180 h after the onset of pain, and showed a biphasic pattern of appearance. Our findings for serum cY-actin, together with the relationship between serum concentrations of this protein and sex (p = O.OOl), tobacco use (p = 0.007) and postepisode complications (p = 0.0021, should make it possible to gain a deeper understanding of acute myocardial infarction as a clinical entity.

We use computing devices at work, at home and on the go. We generate huge amount of data that is stored (either temporarily or permanent) on our machines or on remote servers. There is a lot of value in this information and many external parties already further exploit some of it. So, if others consider our information important why don't we take proper advantage of it? How can we use the information we generate to our own advantage? How can we use this information to improve our lives and support our wellbeing? And how can we create better environments that will be able to offer more personalized and engaging interfaces supporting such diversity of information? We offer here our answer to such questions by presenting the MyRoR system with its main goals of better supporting self-understanding and offer more natural interfaces for information visualizations, based on personalized and interactive stories.

Myocardial contusion is an injury often missed in the patient with severe multisystem trauma. Fifty patients with physical findings or mechanisms of injury that were suggestive of possible nonpenetrating injury to the heart were studied with serial creatine phosphokinase isoenzyme (CPK/MB), continuous arrhythmia monitoring, and ECGs for at least 72 hours. Two-dimensional echocardiograms were obtained on all patients within 48 hours of admission. Seventy-two percent (36 of 50) had detectable CPK/MB. Ten patients had echocardiograms suggestive of cardiac contusion. Of these ten, three had no detectable CPK/MB and six had CPK/MB of less than 5%. CPK/MB had a sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 27.5%. We conclude that in the patient with multisystem injury, CPK/MB determinations are not reliable. The decision to evaluate the patient with echocardiography should be made on the basis of physicaI findings and, more importantly, on mechanism of injury. [Lindenbaurn GA, Carroll SE Block EF, Kapusnick RA: Value of creatine phosphokinase isoenzyme determinations in the diagnosis of myocardial contusion. Ann Emerg Med September 1988;17:885-889.]

Background: Mobile phone applications (Apps) have become a vital assistant to medical personnel in today’s technologically advanced era. The utility of Apps with case logbook capabilities has not yet been explored.

Objectives: To assess and evaluate all currently available surgical and procedural case logbook Apps.

Methods: A comprehensive search was conducted in April 2015 on the Android Play Store, iTunes (Apple App Store, iOS), and BlackBerry World for surgical and/or procedural logbooks. The search terms‘surgical logbook’, ‘logbook’, ‘procedure logbook’ and ‘surgical log’ were used. Apps which could not be utilized as a surgical/procedural logbook were excluded. Each App was individually assessed and rated using preset criteria, by the unit consultant, registrars, and medical officer.

Results: In total, 2 740 Apps were assessed. After applying our exclusion criteria, only 16 Apps were relevant, and 11 suitable for critical review. Data sizes ranged from 510Kb to 12.2Mb. Costing of the Apps ranged from ZAR 0.00 to ZAR105.32. The overall study scores revealed the following top five rated Apps: Surgical Logbook by Surgilog; Surgeon Logbook Pro; Surgery Notebook, Surgical Logbook, and Universal Logbook.

Conclusion: The current mobile Apps available are efficient in replacing traditional case logbooks. The use of the ‘Smart Logbook’ may become common practice in the life of the modern-day surgeon.

Wearable technology refers to electronic devices that are worn on a user's body or linked up to their clothing. Wearable devices have far outmatched the expectations of the market, and become the fastest raising consumer technology device to date. Wearable devices will have " far-reaching " impacts by creating a new category and disrupting or even stimulating change within the industries outside of the technology. Wearable devices might motivate people to retreat further into themselves and also their machines, kind of leading to greater social isolation. In this paper, we have discussed about some of the available wearable devices followed by applications and future aspects of wearable devices.

We have graduallyrevisedour medicalprotocolsfor measuring creatine kinase MB isoenzyme (CK-MB) and lactate dehydrogenaseisoenzyme-1 (LD-1) because of identifiable problemsin the use of an interpretationof CK-MB isoenzyme associatedwith slowly evoMng or small myocardialinfarct, the use of thrombolytictherapy, or bum and trauma, each of which affects the rate of appearance and composition of isoenzymes present. Despite recent evidenceof the efficacy of LD-1 isoenzyme measurement in the first 12 to 24 h of myocardialinfarction,thistest is not widely used because of overstated assumptionsabout the value of CK-MB. Here we studiedthe adequacy of the current isoenzyme assays by determiningthe value of CK-MB and LD-1 at optimumserum samplingtimes and establishingthe contributionof individual and combined predictors to diagnosticefficiency.We concludethat the LD-1/total LD activityratioin serum is superior to measurementof CK-MB or LD-1, or both, in the diagnosis of acute myocardialinfarction.Moreover, this ratio is most valuable when interpretationof the result for CK-MB isoenzyme isequivocalin patientswithsmallor evoMng myocardial Infarcts.

Troponin I is the regulatory subunit of troponin complex associated with the actin thin filament within muscle cells. Cardiac troponin I (cTnI) is a good marker for diagnosis of myocardial damage. Several immunoassays are available for determination of cTnI in serum. The Stratus cTnI fluorometric enzyme immunoassay (Dade International) uses alkaline phosphatase (ALP) substrate. The microparticle enzyme immunoassay (MEIA) for cTnI (Abbott Laboratories) also uses ALP conjugate. On the other hand, the chemiluminescent assay (CLIA) for cTnI (Bayer Diagnostics) does not use ALP. ALP activity may frequently be el-evated in serum of patients being evaluated for suspected myocardial infarction. Therefore, we studied the potential interference of ALP in cTnI assays. Serum pools were prepared from patients, and various concentrations of ALP solution were added to different aliquots. The cTnI concentrations were measured by the Stratus, MEIA, and CLIA assays. We observed no interference of ALP in the MEIA and CLIA assay for cTnI. On the other hand, we observed significant positive interference of ALP when cTnI concentrations were measured using the Stratus.

Technology that is able to integrate the multitude of accounts into one safe, convenient, and wearable pass is an attractive modern setup. Such a technology would be required to have the ability to customize, and unify this information into a convenient and secure system. Since all of a user's accounts are stored in a single device, the act of carrying around copious amounts of smartcards becomes obsolete. The following prototype has three main elements: the wearable technology, a smart reader, and a web-based phone application. The wearable technology is the access point for the user, the readers retrieve the required information, while the application allows the user to modify the information they wish to store. NFC Wallet is ubiquitous; the software is web-enabled so that the user can control it using smart phones, tablets, laptops and other computing devices. The system provides a true pervasive computing experience. This paper presents the organization, architecture, hardware/software interface design, evaluation and analysis of the proposed system.

We used Western-blot analysis to investigate the possible presence in the bloodstream of the contractile protein cu-actin in 70 patients diagnosed with acute myocardial infarction on the basis of clinical, electrocardiographic and laboratory (creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase) criteria. Circulating protein was identified with a monoclonal antibody specific for cardiac a-actin. Of the 70 control samples of blood, the immunoblot results were negative for a-actin in 98% of the cases. Of the 30 patients with skeletal muscle damage caused by surgery, 26 were negative for circulating a-actin. Of the 70 patients with acute myocardial infarction, circulating a-actin was found in 67 (95%) as a 43 kDa band in immunoblots; the highest circulating concentrations (0.0580 pg/pl) were found in those with anterior acute myocardial infarction. Circulating cY-actin was detected in samples taken between 1 and 180 h after the onset of pain, and showed a biphasic pattern of appearance. Our findings for serum cY-actin, together with the relationship between serum concentrations of this protein and sex (p = O.OOl), tobacco use (p = 0.007) and postepisode complications (p = 0.0021, should make it possible to gain a deeper understanding of acute myocardial infarction as a clinical entity.

Continuous advances in sensors, semiconductors, wireless networks, mobile and cloud computing enable the development of integrated wearable computing systems for continuous health monitoring. These systems can be used as a part of diagnostic procedures, in the optimal maintenance of chronic conditions, in the monitoring of adherence to treatment guidelines, and for supervised recovery. In this paper, we describe a wearable system called Smart Button designed to assess mobility of elderly. The Smart Button is easily mounted on the chest of an individual and currently quantifies the Timed-Up-and-Go and 30-Second Chair Stand tests. These two tests are routinely used to assess mobility, balance, strength of the lower extremities, and fall risk of elderly and people with Parkinson’s disease. The paper describes the design of the Smart Button, parameters used to quantify the tests, signal processing used to extract the parameters, and integration of the Smart Button into a broader mHealth system.

We studied possible correlations between anatomopathological and clinical features and the values for total creatine kinase (CK; EC 2.7.3.2) and its isoenzymes, including the proportion of CK-MB, in a population displaying several neuromuscular pathologies. Although we observed no specific isoenzyme pattern associated with the different myopathies, we found isoenzyme analysis useful in studying the histopathological evolution of illness. We also considered whether the pathology was regenerative or nonregenerative, and what type of fiber (I or II) was involved. High CK-MB percentages (>6%) were associated with regenerative and type I fiber myopathies, with regenerative type tissues being the principal factor associated with an increasing proportion of CK-MB. Studying the changes in CK-MB percentage in serum appears to be useful in discriminating neuromuscular from myocardial pathologies.

The lifestyle management area has become increasingly important during the past years due to an individual and societal need for increasing self-awareness. Technologies are the core of this area as they can support humans in reflecting over what happened through capturing, interpreting, correlating and visualizing various aspects of their lives. For this, we created an interactive contextaware experience platform that can bring together lifestyle-related information. Given that close involvement of end users in such systems, information presentation plays a central role. We present here our story-inspired framework that we used to transform sensed information into abstract multimedia objects. This framework allows for dynamic and adaptive creation of concise information correlations, for personalisation and sharing. This paper presents the design framework and realization of the storyinspired paradigm and the user experiments performed in order to explore and advance various aspects of the framework.

We use computing devices at work, at home and on the go. We generate huge amount of data that is stored (either temporarily or permanent) on our machines or on remote servers. There is a lot of value in this information and some of it is already further exploited by many external parties. So, if others consider our information important why don’t we take proper advantage of it? How can we use the information we generate to our own advantage? How can we use this information to improve our lives and support our wellbeing? And how can we create better environments that will be able to offer more personalized and engaging interfaces supporting such diversity of information? We offer here our answer to such questions by presenting the MyRoR system with its main goals of better supporting self understanding and offer more natural interfaces for information visualizations, based on personalized and interactive stories.

Even though mental health is an important part of our well-being we believe that, so far, it has been overlooked in favour of physical health by most of the existing self-monitoring solutions. Our goal is to understand how we can better utilise technology to provide support for people with mental health problems and to gain a deeper insight to the challenges of designing solutions such as how user might effectively interact with such systems. This paper describes our system, the design challenges we have encountered, the decisions we have made and our ongoing work in terms of system design as well as usage experiments.

This paper presents the first attempt at fusing data from inertial and vision depth sensors within the framework of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for the application of hand gesture recognition. The data fusion approach introduced in this paper is general purpose in the sense that it can be used for recognition of various body movements. It is shown that the fusion of data from the vision depth and inertial sensors act in a complementary manner leading to a more robust recognition outcome compared to the situations when each sensor is used individually on its own. The obtained recognition rates for the single hand gestures in the Microsoft MSR dataset indicate that our fusion approach provides improved recognition in real-time and under realistic conditions.

Intelligent environments have the ability to assist people in their everyday life, with the aim of improving their wellbeing. One aspect of a humans’ wellbeing is their health. The ability to monitor, understand, and correct bodily processes in real time and in convenient way can help people to improve their state of health, foresee and prevent diseases, will promote wellbeing and a longer life. To achieve these goals, this paper proposes a conceptual model of a self-organizing system which allows for online tracking and tuning of bodily processes. The system includes a Biofeedback Module, a Biological Module, an Adjusting Module, and a Recommender Module. This research exploits an interdisciplinary approach. The Biofeedback Module deploys innovations in bio-sensing technology and uses concepts from biological and mathematical sciences; it is responsible for biological signal processing and is designed to form a Multi- Agent System (MAS). The Adjusting Module is inspired by findings in sport, nutrition, pharmacy, meditation, and other health related areas. Its computational model is implemented using Agent Technology and Game Theory. The Recommender Module provides interaction with a user, presenting computational results in a readable format. All elements can be integrated into a small handy device. The system is at a 'work in progress stage' and has a wide range of applications, including biology, health care, sport, entertainment, robotics, and military.

Almost all technology supported activities we perform today involve a device with computational power that can collect data that can give information about our activities as well as, with the appropriate sensors, about our physiological status. While recording user data is not particularly novel, in our work, we concern ourselves with methods that people can use to gather and analyze data about themselves as they go about everyday work and leisure activities in order to better support self-monitoring and self-understanding. Our aim is to enable people to detect causality relationships in their behaviours either for serving their curiosity or, as we hope, for really empowering them with a tool for self-changes. In this ‘work in progress’ paper we describe ongoing work towards these ends. We start out by a motivation and short description of our work, followed by an exemplar scenario on ‘preventive healthcare’ for the system we envision. Then we describe some of the most relevant and influential related work before describing the system design and the main challenges, followed by an overview of the current status and our future vision.

This paper describes research aimed at creating intelligent video recommendation engines for broadband media services in digital homes. The aim of our research is to harness physiological signals to characterise people’s video selection preferences which we plan to integrate into new generations of video recommendation engines. We describe an initial experiment aimed at determining whether videos produce useable variations in physiology and linking these with emotional changes elicited by video material. We discuss our results and consider the possibility of utilising physiological sensing methods to build profiles that can be treated as signatures. Finally, we conclude by describing the future directions of our work.

The development of systems capable of recognizing and categorising emotions is of interest to researchers in various scientific areas including artificial intelligence. The traditional notion that emotions and rationality are two separate realms has gradually been challenged. The work of neurologists has shown the strong relationship between emotional episodes and the way humans think and act. Furthermore, emotions not only regulate human decisions but could also contribute to a more satisfactory response to the environment, i.e., faster and more precise actions. In this paper an analysis of physiological signals employed in real-time emotion detection is presented in the context of Intelligent Inhabited Environments (IIE). Two studies were performed to investigate whether physical exertion has a significant effect on bodily signals stemming from emotional episodes with subjects having various degrees of affect intensity: 1) a statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon Test, and 2) a cluster analysis using the Davies- Bouldin Index. Preliminary results demonstrated that the heart rate and skin resistance consistently showed similar changes regardless of the physical stimuli while blood volume pressure did not show a significant change. It was also found that neither physical stress nor affect intensity played a role in the separation of neutral and non-neutral emotional states.

The utilisation of emotional information in computer systems that interact with humans has become more prevalent during the last few years. The various channels through which emotions are expressed provide valuable information about the way humans think and behave and have been successfully employed to assist the inference mechanism of interactive computer applications. In this paper a novel approach to detect changes in the emotional status of a subject is presented. It is argued that the proposed methodology will be able to detect emotional changes in real time utilising physiological measures and a combination of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and statistical mechanisms. Clustering analysis is used to show that the myogram signal was the most suitable attribute to distinguish between two emotional states. Results show that the suggested mechanism is able to accurately distinguish changes from neutral to non-neutral emotional states. Emotional information could be employed to improve user interaction in inhabited environments.

Computer scientists have been slow to become aware of the importance of emotion on human decisions and actions. Recently, however, a considerable amount of research has focused on the utilisation of affective information with the intention of improving both human-machine interaction and artificial human-like inference models. It has been argued that valuable information could be obtained by analysing the way affective states and environment interact and affect human behaviour. A method to improve pattern recognition among four bodily parameters employed for emotion recognition is presented. The utilisation of Autoassociative Neural Networks has proved to be a valuable mechanism to increase inter cluster separation related to emotional polarity (positive or negative). It is suggested that the proposed methodology could improve performance in pattern recognition tasks involving physiological signals. Also, by way of grounding the immediate aims of our research, and providing an insight into the direction of our work, we provide a brief overview of an intelligent-dormitory test bed in which affective computing methods will be applied and compared to non-affective agents.

This paper addresses an opportunity for the provision of novel location based services generated by the newly emerging application area of “Intelligent Inhabited Environments”, a form of pervasive / ubiquitous computing that uses agent based embedded computing devices to construct technologically driven living environments. Intelligent Inhabited Environments (IIEs) can be regarded as being similar to intelligent buildings or smart houses in that they harness collections of network enabled embedded-computing devices to control environments such as houses, or offices, but extends the concept by addressing vehicles, body worn devices and public spaces. Another distinguishing characteristic is the use of intelligent agents embedded into the computational artefacts making up the space. Typical services being controlled include lighting, heating, entertainment, information, access, etc. The role of the embedded agent is both to provide value added service and functionality in addition to providing a means to make the system work without incurring the user in cognitive effort to deal with the technology. Also, the embedded-agents controlling the artefacts or acting on behalf of the user/owner behave in a location aware manner providing access to services or control over the local environment, depending on location or context.

We studied possible correlations between anatomopathological and clinical features and the values for total creatine kinase (CK; EC 2.7.3.2) and its isoenzymes, including the proportion of CK-MB, in a population displaying several neuromuscular pathologies. Although we observed no specific isoenzyme pattern associated with the different myopathies, we found isoenzyme analysis useful in studying the histopathological evolution of illness. We also considered whether the pathology was regenerative or nonregenerative, and what type of fiber (I or II) was involved. High CK-MB percentages (>6%) were associated with regenerative and type I fiber myopathies, with regenerative type tissues being the principal factor associated with an increasing proportion of CK-MB. Studying the changes in CK-MB percentage in serum appears to be useful in discriminating neuromuscular from myocardial pathologies.