Information and communication technologies for promoting and sustaining quality of life, health and self-sufficiency in ageing societies--outcomes of the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing (GAL).

Many societies across the world are confronted with demographic changes, usually related to increased life expectancy and, often, relatively low birth rates. Information and communication technologies (ICT) may contribute to adequately support senior citizens in aging societies with respect to quality of life and quality and efficiency of health care processes. For investigating and for providing answers on whether new information and communication technologies can contribute to keeping, or even improving quality of life, health and self-sufficiency in ageing societies through new ways of living and new forms of care, the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing (GAL) had been established as a five years research project, running from 2008 to 2013.

Hierarchical pose estimation for human gait analysis.

Articulated structures like the human body have many degrees of freedom. This makes an evaluation of the configuration's likelihood very challenging. In this work we propose new linked hierarchical graphical models which are able to efficiently evaluate likelihoods of articulated structures by sharing visual primitives.

Monitoring systems for the support of home care.

In this article, the design of a system for the ambient, unobtrusive and automatic monitoring of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) is described. In the context of the growing imbalance between (potentially young) caregivers and (most often older) people receiving care, technical monitoring systems may help to organise care more efficiently and to identify degrading abilities very early to trigger preventive measures. To improve the acceptance of the system described in this article, the selection process of the sensors to be integrated into the flat or to be worn by the older people has been steered by the results of focus group interviews with older people, their relatives and professional caregivers.

The Lower Saxony research network design of environments for ageing: towards interdisciplinary research on information and communication technologies in ageing societies.

Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the 'Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing' (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project.

Automatic registration of serial sections of mouse lymph node by using Image-Reg.

The first step towards the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of histological structures from serial sectioned tissue blocks is the proper alignment of microscope image sequences. We have accomplished an automatic rigid registration program, named Image-Reg, to align serial sections from mouse lymph node and Peyer's patch. Our approach is based on the calculation of the pixel-correlation of objects in adjacent images.

Six-color segmentation of multicolor images in the infection studies of Listeria monocytogenes.

Multiple immunofluorescent staining is a powerful strategy for visualizing the spatial and temporal relationship between antigens, cell populations, and tissue components in histological sections. To segment different cell populations from the multicolor image generated by immunostaining based on color addition theory, a systems approach is proposed for automatic segmentation of six colors. After image acquisition and processing, images are automatically segmented with the proposed approach and six-pseudo channels for individual or colocalized fluorescent dye are generated to distinguish different cell types.

Use of Autostitch for automatic stitching of microscope images.

Image stitching is the process of combining multiple images to produce a panorama or larger image. In many biomedical studies, including those of cancer and infection, the use of this approach is highly desirable in order to acquire large areas of certain structures or whole sections, while retaining microscopic resolution. In this study, we describe the application of Autostitch, viz.

Six-colour fluorescent imaging of lymphoid tissue based on colour addition theory.

Multi-colour imaging of immunofluorescently labelled tissue using confocal microscopy was accomplished by using colour addition theory. This new technique includes several improvements for immunolabelling: (1) the co-localization of two or more markers on one cell for the identification of specific cell populations; (2) the co-localization of two fluorescent dyes from secondary reagents for the identification of the cells; (3) a multi-step staining protocol with two primary antibodies originating from the same host species or with two or three biotin-conjugated primary antibodies. After image acquisition, colour segmentation/unmixing are applied to the single multi-colour image to generate multi-pseudo-channels for individual or co-localized fluorescent dyes.