Monday March 11 we met for the kick-off of the Care 4 Balance project. In this AAL project, coordinated by iMinds Belgium we cooperate within a European consortium on a system that supports informal carers to give assistance to elderly, and to cooperate with formal carers in this. We will design an innovative and reciprocal service design based on dashboard systems representing the status & context of the actors involved.
kick-off Care 4 Balance at HvA in Amsterdam
More than 30 participants participated in this behaviour analysis experiment
Hayley Hung and Gwenn Englebienne from my group at UvA together with researchers from the group of Maarten van Steen at the VU organised a collaborative experiment to record people interacting with each other when taking part in a game event, using audio, video, position, and motion sensors.
For more than six month we collected data from wireless sensor networks in assisted living apartments ‘de Flank’ in Naarderheem. Together with the elderly users and all researchers we had a dinner at which we explained the first results and new plans.
Students occupational therapy explain their research
March 16. 2012, we had the kick-off meeting of the ‘Balance-IT’ project in which we work on intelligent camera surveillance systems for care applications, in particular fall detection, fall prevention and wandering detection. We collaborate with 10 SME’s in the field of computer vision and care technology.
At the Hogeschool van Amsterdam I coordinate a minor programme on ‘Ambient Interaction’. Students learn about new technologies, interaction design and research methods for interaction in ambient intelligent environments. Students perform small research projects for innovative companies like IJsfontein, Ngage media, or living labs like Healthlab or Naarderheem. This week the students and researchers visited Philips Experience Labs. And had some fun on the ice!
Handing out the sensors (Photo: Ork de Rooij)
Audience in De Rode Hoed
In collaboration with the group of Maarten van der Steen from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Hayley Hung and Gwenn Englebienne from my group at UvA, carried out a unique experiment using a wireless sensor network. The experiment addresses two simple questions:
This experiment is quite unique, if only due to the size of the wireless network, consisting of over 200 mobile nodes. To the best of our knowledge, an equivalent experiment of this size has not been conducted before, ever. 70 of the mobile nodes logged accelerometer data. We want to check if we can discriminate between the different wearers from their activity patterns.
Data was gathered during the event ‘30 Years of Informatics Education in Amsterdam’, which was held in ‘De Rode Hoed’. The joint meeting featured talks by both past and present researchers of both VU University Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, addressing the past, present and future of the field.
And also: Arnoud Visser showing the robots
Interaction between users (Photo: Ork de Rooij)
Entrance of the cortege
The stage: the Aula of the UvA
Because I became professor in ‘Ambient Robotics’ I held my inaugural speech on ‘Living in a Robot’. The full speech is available as web lecture. In my speech I focussed on the societal developments, the technology, the impact on novel research methods like ‘living labs’ and their role for the educational programs.
Living in a Robot
Members of the board
