Computer Vision News - December 2016

activity of a person with early stages of Alzheimer’s, it can then infer gradual changes such as if the person stays in bed for longer periods of time. Then, the application alerts caregivers of these changes. It can also help doctors prescribe activities such as cognitive games to keep the patient occupied or social activities with their family and friends that help prevent depression. In addition, if a person leaves the house in a confused or agitated state, that might put him or her in danger. In this case, the application alerts the caregivers of the absence. ICT4LIFE has also discussed the possibility of adding a GPS system to locate the person, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. Although research and other technology to help people with these conditions already exists, ICT4LIFE enhances the technology to improve the care of these patients. For instance, the computer vision datasets previously available online were mainly non- spontaneous activities of people in indoor environments. Moreover, to the team’s knowledge, existing datasets are not shared, in order to preserve the privacy of patients. The ICT4LIFE development team handles the machine intelligence part of the project: this includes many types of sensors such as magnetic sensors placed on furniture, doors, windows. The project also involves medical data that comes to their platform in real time such as monitoring the heart rate. The medical data provides a static parameter related to the condition of the patient such as if the person has diabetes or other conditions that they need to take into account. As a multidisciplinary project , involving also biomedical tasks, they must coordinate with many different partners from different areas such as between one doctor and another or between the doctors and the engineers, in what can be considered an horizontal system involving many disciplines and skills. This input, coupled with computer vision, leads to a big data analysis problem . Big data is now at its height in the industry, but the applications mainly come from the big players in the field like Google, Facebook, or other Silicon Valley companies. ICT4LIFE seeks to take all of this technology to address Computer Vision News Application 23 Application