Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the tra... more Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is two-fold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2012
Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) is a new concept aiming to allow higher autonomy to people with lower... more Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) is a new concept aiming to allow higher autonomy to people with lower mobility such as disabled or elderly individuals. Some of the more recent IWs have a multimodal interface, enabling multiple command modes such as joystick, voice commands, head movements, or even facial expressions. In these IW it may be very useful to provide the user with the best way of driving it through an adaptive interface. This paper describes the foundations for creating a simple methodology for extracting user profiles, which can be used to adequately select the best IW command mode for each user. The methodology is based on an interactive wizard composed by a flexible set of simple tasks presented to the user, and a method for extracting and analyzing the user's execution of those tasks. The results achieved showed that it is possible to extract simple user profiles, using the proposed method. Thus, the approach may be further used to extract more complete user profiles, just by extending the set of tasks used, enabling the adaptation of the IW interface to each user's characteristics.
Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation model... more Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation models. Although much work has been done in this field of research there are no universally accepted quantitative methods. In this paper we present a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation that was coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrian and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). An experimental setup to test the concept was envisaged and validated by a group of experts using the Delphi method. A test bed was designed using the Serious Games concept and 22 subjects were selected for a pilot test. Preliminary results are promising, showing that this methodology might be used for the elicitation of human behaviour of subjects when facing an emergency. Moreover, the data acquired is of great importance for the fire safety experts designing new buildings or planning strategies to improve emergency paths. Another possible outcome is to create an artificial population based on human behaviour to populate emergency evacuation simulators.
Quality of life is a concept influenced by social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical ... more Quality of life is a concept influenced by social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state factors. More specifically, the perceived quality of an individual's daily life is an assessment of their well-being or lack of it. In this context, information technologies may help on the management of services for healthcare of chronic patients such as estimating the patient quality of life and helping the medical staff to take appropriate measures to increase each patient quality of life. This paper describes a Quality of Life estimation system developed using information technologies and the application of data mining algorithms to access the information of clinical data of patients with cancer from Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck services of an oncology institution. The system was evaluated with a sample composed of 3013 patients. The results achieved show that there are variables that may be significant predictors for the Quality of Life of the patient: years of smoking (p value 0.049) and size of the tumor (p value<0.001). In order to assign the variables to the classification of the quality of life the best accuracy was obtained by applying the John Platt's sequential minimal optimization algorithm for training a support vector classifier. In conclusion data mining techniques allow having access to patients additional information helping the physicians to be able to know the quality of life and produce a well-informed clinical decision.
Electric wheelchairs are now more intelligent due to the use of algorithms that provide assisted ... more Electric wheelchairs are now more intelligent due to the use of algorithms that provide assisted driving. Typically, the user steers the electric wheelchairs with conventional analog joysticks. This implies the need for an appropriate methodology to map the position of the joystick handle in a Cartesian coordinate system to the wheelchair motor velocities. This mapping of joystick positions to individual wheel speed can be done in an infinite number of combinations. However it is this mapping that will determine the response behavior of the wheelchair to the user manual control. This paper describes the implementation of several joystick mappings in an intelligent wheelchair prototype. Experiments were performed in a realistic simulator using 25 users with distinct driving abilities. The users had 6 different joystick control mapping methods and for each user the usability and preference order was measured. The results achieved enable to conclude that a more direct mapping between the joystick's coordinates and the wheelchair behavior is preferred by the majority of the users.
2013 IEEE 15th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom 2013), 2013
Intelligent wheelchairs can become an important solution to assist physically impaired individual... more Intelligent wheelchairs can become an important solution to assist physically impaired individuals who find it difficult or impossible to drive regular powered wheelchairs. However, when designing the hardware architecture several projects compromise the user comfort and the wheelchair normal usability in order to solve robotic problems. In this paper we describe the main concepts regarding the design of the IntellWheels intelligent wheelchair. Our approach has a user-centered perspective, in which the needs and limitations of physically impaired users are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. Finally, our design was evaluated through a public opinion assessment. A statistical analysis suggested that the design was effective to mitigate the visual and ergonomic impacts caused by the addition of sensorial and processing capabilities on the wheelchair.
ABSTRACT Intelligent wheelchairs (IW) are technologies that can increase the autonomy and indepen... more ABSTRACT Intelligent wheelchairs (IW) are technologies that can increase the autonomy and independence of elderly people and patients suffering from some kind of disability. Nowadays the intelligent wheelchairs and the human-machine studies are very active research areas. This paper presents a methodology and a Data Analysis System (DAS) that provides an adapted command language to an user of the IW. This command language is a set of input sequences that can be created using inputs from an input device or a combination of the inputs available in a multimodal interface. The results show that there are statistical evidences to affirm that the mean of the evaluation of the DAS generated command language is higher than the mean of the evaluation of the command language recommended by the health specialist (p value = 0.002) with a sample of 11 cerebral palsy users. This work demonstrates that it is possible to adapt an intelligent wheelchair interface to the user even when the users present heterogeneous and severe physical constraints.
International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics (IJKDB), 2011
Cerebral Palsy is defined as a group of permanent disorders in the development of movement and po... more Cerebral Palsy is defined as a group of permanent disorders in the development of movement and posture. The motor disorders in cerebral palsy are associated with deficits of perception, cognition, communication, and behaviour, which can affect autonomy and independence. The interface between the user and an intelligent wheelchair can be done with several input devices such as joysticks, microphones, and brain computer interfaces (BCI). BCI enables interaction between users and hardware systems through the ...
This paper focuses on evaluating the usability of an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) in both real and... more This paper focuses on evaluating the usability of an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) in both real and simulated environments. The wheelchair is controlled at a high-level by a flexible multimodal interface, using voice commands, facial expressions, head movements and joystick as its main inputs. A Quasi-experimental design was applied including a deterministic sample with a questionnaire that enabled to apply the System Usability Scale. The subjects were divided in two independent samples: 46 individuals performing the ...
Machine Learning (ML) and Knowledge Discovery (KD) are research areas with several different appl... more Machine Learning (ML) and Knowledge Discovery (KD) are research areas with several different applications but that share a common objective of acquiring more and new information from data. This paper presents an application of several ML techniques in the identification of the opponent team and also on the classification of robotic soccer formations in the context of RoboCup international robotic soccer competition. RoboCup international project includes several distinct leagues were teams composed by different types of real ...
Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the tra... more Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is two-fold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2012
Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) is a new concept aiming to allow higher autonomy to people with lower... more Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) is a new concept aiming to allow higher autonomy to people with lower mobility such as disabled or elderly individuals. Some of the more recent IWs have a multimodal interface, enabling multiple command modes such as joystick, voice commands, head movements, or even facial expressions. In these IW it may be very useful to provide the user with the best way of driving it through an adaptive interface. This paper describes the foundations for creating a simple methodology for extracting user profiles, which can be used to adequately select the best IW command mode for each user. The methodology is based on an interactive wizard composed by a flexible set of simple tasks presented to the user, and a method for extracting and analyzing the user's execution of those tasks. The results achieved showed that it is possible to extract simple user profiles, using the proposed method. Thus, the approach may be further used to extract more complete user profiles, just by extending the set of tasks used, enabling the adaptation of the IW interface to each user's characteristics.
Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation model... more Human behaviour knowledge is an important requirement for implementing realistic evacuation models. Although much work has been done in this field of research there are no universally accepted quantitative methods. In this paper we present a novel methodology for human behaviour elicitation that was coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrian and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). An experimental setup to test the concept was envisaged and validated by a group of experts using the Delphi method. A test bed was designed using the Serious Games concept and 22 subjects were selected for a pilot test. Preliminary results are promising, showing that this methodology might be used for the elicitation of human behaviour of subjects when facing an emergency. Moreover, the data acquired is of great importance for the fire safety experts designing new buildings or planning strategies to improve emergency paths. Another possible outcome is to create an artificial population based on human behaviour to populate emergency evacuation simulators.
Quality of life is a concept influenced by social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical ... more Quality of life is a concept influenced by social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state factors. More specifically, the perceived quality of an individual's daily life is an assessment of their well-being or lack of it. In this context, information technologies may help on the management of services for healthcare of chronic patients such as estimating the patient quality of life and helping the medical staff to take appropriate measures to increase each patient quality of life. This paper describes a Quality of Life estimation system developed using information technologies and the application of data mining algorithms to access the information of clinical data of patients with cancer from Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck services of an oncology institution. The system was evaluated with a sample composed of 3013 patients. The results achieved show that there are variables that may be significant predictors for the Quality of Life of the patient: years of smoking (p value 0.049) and size of the tumor (p value<0.001). In order to assign the variables to the classification of the quality of life the best accuracy was obtained by applying the John Platt's sequential minimal optimization algorithm for training a support vector classifier. In conclusion data mining techniques allow having access to patients additional information helping the physicians to be able to know the quality of life and produce a well-informed clinical decision.
Electric wheelchairs are now more intelligent due to the use of algorithms that provide assisted ... more Electric wheelchairs are now more intelligent due to the use of algorithms that provide assisted driving. Typically, the user steers the electric wheelchairs with conventional analog joysticks. This implies the need for an appropriate methodology to map the position of the joystick handle in a Cartesian coordinate system to the wheelchair motor velocities. This mapping of joystick positions to individual wheel speed can be done in an infinite number of combinations. However it is this mapping that will determine the response behavior of the wheelchair to the user manual control. This paper describes the implementation of several joystick mappings in an intelligent wheelchair prototype. Experiments were performed in a realistic simulator using 25 users with distinct driving abilities. The users had 6 different joystick control mapping methods and for each user the usability and preference order was measured. The results achieved enable to conclude that a more direct mapping between the joystick's coordinates and the wheelchair behavior is preferred by the majority of the users.
2013 IEEE 15th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom 2013), 2013
Intelligent wheelchairs can become an important solution to assist physically impaired individual... more Intelligent wheelchairs can become an important solution to assist physically impaired individuals who find it difficult or impossible to drive regular powered wheelchairs. However, when designing the hardware architecture several projects compromise the user comfort and the wheelchair normal usability in order to solve robotic problems. In this paper we describe the main concepts regarding the design of the IntellWheels intelligent wheelchair. Our approach has a user-centered perspective, in which the needs and limitations of physically impaired users are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. Finally, our design was evaluated through a public opinion assessment. A statistical analysis suggested that the design was effective to mitigate the visual and ergonomic impacts caused by the addition of sensorial and processing capabilities on the wheelchair.
ABSTRACT Intelligent wheelchairs (IW) are technologies that can increase the autonomy and indepen... more ABSTRACT Intelligent wheelchairs (IW) are technologies that can increase the autonomy and independence of elderly people and patients suffering from some kind of disability. Nowadays the intelligent wheelchairs and the human-machine studies are very active research areas. This paper presents a methodology and a Data Analysis System (DAS) that provides an adapted command language to an user of the IW. This command language is a set of input sequences that can be created using inputs from an input device or a combination of the inputs available in a multimodal interface. The results show that there are statistical evidences to affirm that the mean of the evaluation of the DAS generated command language is higher than the mean of the evaluation of the command language recommended by the health specialist (p value = 0.002) with a sample of 11 cerebral palsy users. This work demonstrates that it is possible to adapt an intelligent wheelchair interface to the user even when the users present heterogeneous and severe physical constraints.
International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics (IJKDB), 2011
Cerebral Palsy is defined as a group of permanent disorders in the development of movement and po... more Cerebral Palsy is defined as a group of permanent disorders in the development of movement and posture. The motor disorders in cerebral palsy are associated with deficits of perception, cognition, communication, and behaviour, which can affect autonomy and independence. The interface between the user and an intelligent wheelchair can be done with several input devices such as joysticks, microphones, and brain computer interfaces (BCI). BCI enables interaction between users and hardware systems through the ...
This paper focuses on evaluating the usability of an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) in both real and... more This paper focuses on evaluating the usability of an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) in both real and simulated environments. The wheelchair is controlled at a high-level by a flexible multimodal interface, using voice commands, facial expressions, head movements and joystick as its main inputs. A Quasi-experimental design was applied including a deterministic sample with a questionnaire that enabled to apply the System Usability Scale. The subjects were divided in two independent samples: 46 individuals performing the ...
Machine Learning (ML) and Knowledge Discovery (KD) are research areas with several different appl... more Machine Learning (ML) and Knowledge Discovery (KD) are research areas with several different applications but that share a common objective of acquiring more and new information from data. This paper presents an application of several ML techniques in the identification of the opponent team and also on the classification of robotic soccer formations in the context of RoboCup international robotic soccer competition. RoboCup international project includes several distinct leagues were teams composed by different types of real ...
Uploads
Books by Brígida Faria
Papers by Brígida Faria