Do-it-yourself as a means for making assistive technology accessible to elderly people: Evidence from the ICARE project

New assistive technology (AT) is at our disposal for improving the everyday life of people in need. Yet, the current way how AT is produced and provisioned is hindering certain marginalised groups in the population, particularly elderly people, to get access to it. To expedite time-to-market, reduce costs, and increase accessibility to otherwise unattainable AT, we explore if do-it-yourself (DIY) could be a feasible and desirable alternative to commercial applications. We provide answers to the following research questions: (1) For whom does the DIY approach work in the context of assistive technology? (2) Under which circumstances do DIY work? and (3) How can researchers make DIY a satisfying experience? The evidence we collected during the “iCare” project suggests that DIY attracts both, elderly people with a need-based motive and a hedonic motive. It also shows that a participatory approach and an early engagement with potential users, their family members, and informal caregivers is beneficial for improving design and use-related aspects of the AT and the DIY intervention.     

Testing the reliability of monocular obstacle detection methods in a simulated 3D factory environment

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing - Automated driving in public traffic still faces many technical and legal challenges. However, automating vehicles at low speeds in controlled industrial...     

Precipitate number density determination in microalloyed steels by complementary atom probe tomography and matrix dissolution

Journal of Materials Science - Particle number densities are a crucial parameter in the microstructure engineering of microalloyed steels. We introduce a new method to determine nanoscale...     

From Emerson-Lei automata to deterministic,limit-deterministic or good-for-MDP automata

Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering - The topic of this paper is the determinization problem of $$omega $$ -automata under the transition-based Emerson-Lei acceptance (called TELA),...     

Scale-dependent and example-based grayscale stippling

We present an example-based approach to synthesizing stipple illustrations for static 2D images that produces scale-dependent results appropriate for an intended spatial output size and resolution. We show how treating stippling as a grayscale process allows us to both produce on-screen output and to achieve stipple merging at medium tonal ranges. At the same time we can also produce images with high spatial and low color resolution for print reproduction. In addition, we discuss how to incorporate high-level illustration considerations into the stippling process based on discussions with and observations of a stipple artist. Also, certain features such as edges can be extracted and used to control the placement of dots to improve the result. The implementation of the technique is based on a fast method for distributing dots using halftoning and can be used to create stipple images interactively. We describe both a GPU implementation of the basic algorithm that creates stipple images in real-time for large images and an extended CPU method that allows a finer control of the output at interactive rates.     

Ego noise cancellation of a robot using missing feature masks

We describe an architecture that gives a robot the capability to recognize speech by cancelling ego noise, even while the robot is moving. The system consists of three blocks: (1) a multi-channel noise reduction block, comprising consequent stages of microphone-array-based sound localization, geometric source separation and post-filtering; (2) a single-channel noise reduction block utilizing template subtraction; and (3) an automatic speech recognition block. In this work, we specifically investigate a missing feature theory-based automatic speech recognition (MFT-ASR) approach in block (3). This approach makes use of spectro-temporal elements derived from (1) and (2) to measure the reliability of the acoustic features, and generates masks to filter unreliable acoustic features. We then evaluated this system on a robot using word correct rates. Furthermore, we present a detailed analysis of recognition accuracy to determine optimal parameters. Implementation of the proposed MFT-ASR approach resulted in significantly higher recognition performance than single or multi-channel noise reduction methods.     

Stress recovery with Krylov-subspaces in reduced elastic multibody systems

A method for the recovery of stresses in reduced elastic multibody systems is presented. Elastic coordinates of a flexible body belonging to a reduced elastic multibody system are therefore premultiplied with a matrix of shape functions for stresses. Whereas the classic procedures for stress recovery in elastic multibody systems use shape functions for stresses that belong to eigenmodes and particular modes, this work also investigates shape functions for stresses that are derived from a Krylov-subspace projection. The presented method for stress recovery is implemented in a process chain containing different software tools and allows the evaluation of stresses during the runtime of the elastic multibody simulation. Accordingly, the performance of the developed process is examined with the help of a simple example. Results show that the usage of shape functions for stresses that are derived from a Krylov-subspace projection can improve the approximation of stresses in a user-defined frequency range.