Understanding Emotions in Children with Developmental Disabilities during Robot Therapy Using EDA.

Recent technological advancements have led to the emergence of supportive robotics to help children with developmental disabilities become independent. In conventional research, in robot therapy, experiments are often conducted by operating the robot out of the subject's sight. In this paper, robot therapy using a system that can autonomously recognize the emotions of a child with developmental disabilities and provide feedback was developed.

Habit Representation Based on Activity Recognition.

With the increasing elderly population, attention has been drawn to the development of applications for habit assessment using activity data from smart environments that can be implemented in care facilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel habit assessment method based on information of human activities. First, a recognition system tracks the user's activities of daily living by collecting data from multiple object sensors and ambient sensors that are distributed within the environment.

Finding Characteristics of Users in Sensory Information: From Activities to Personality Traits.

The main objective of this work was to use information provided by a sensor-based activity recognition system to create a profile comprising user habits and link this information to the personality traits of users. User habits are represented by the sequence and duration of often observed daily life activities. Based on this information, we represented the user trials (sequence of activities) following a numerical method using Fourier series.

Personalized machine learning for robot perception of affect and engagement in autism therapy.

Robots have the potential to facilitate future therapies for children on the autism spectrum. However, existing robots are limited in their ability to automatically perceive and respond to human affect, which is necessary for establishing and maintaining engaging interactions. Their inference challenge is made even harder by the fact that many individuals with autism have atypical and unusually diverse styles of expressing their affective-cognitive states.

Gait generation for powered Hip-Ankle-Linkage-Orthosis.

A hip-knee-ankle-foot orthotic system called `HALO'(Hip and Ankle Linked Orthosis) for paraplegic walking has been developed in our previous study. Each ankle joint of the HALO system is linked with a medial single joint via a wire which allows both feet of the orthosis to stay always parallel to the floor during walking and assists swinging the leg. The tests of the HALO system demonstrated that it allows smoother walking and easy don/doff.

Quantitative pattern analysis of the N-terminally processed isoforms of platelet factor-4 in serum.

Rationale: Platelet factor 4 (PF4) is a small cytokine belonging to the CXC chemokine family which has been shown to play a role in inflammation and in the regulation of angiogenesis. In general, chemokines are susceptible to proteolytic cleavage in amino and carboxy terminal regions, which usually results in dramatic changes to the chemokine bioactivity. The purpose of this study was to identify various platelet factor-4 (PF4) isoforms caused by proteolytic processing and to quantify their levels in normal serum.