Satish Reddy Bethi

Satish Reddy Bethi

Recent advancements in technology have improved the connectivity between humans enhancing the transfer of information. Leveraging these technological marvels in the healthcare industry has led to the development of telehealth allowing patients and clinicians to receive and administer treatment remotely. Telerehabilitation is a subset of telehealth that facilitates remote rehabilitation treatment for patients. Providing rehabilitative services to the aging baby boomer population requires tech-savvy solutions to augment the therapists and clinicians for effective remote monitoring and tele-medicine. Hence, this thesis develops easy-to-use exergames for low-cost mechatronic devices targeting rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. Specifically, it demonstrates wearable inertial sensors for exergames consisting of an animated virtual coach for providing patients with instructions for performing range of motion exercises. Next, a gaming environment is developed for task-specific rehabilitation such as eating. Finally, exergames are developed for rehabilitation of pincer grasping. In addition to gamified interfaces providing an engaging rehabilitation experience to the user, the data acquired from the mechatronic devices facilitate data-driven telerehabilitation.

O. Miksik, I. Munasinghe, J. Asensio-Cubero et al.

Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which somewhat limits their usability and user experience. We propose, that the next generation of such devices should be able to proactively provide the right information in the right way at the right time, without being prompted by the user. However, achieving this is not straightforward, since there is the danger it could interrupt what the user is doing too much, resulting in it being distracting or even annoying. Furthermore, it could unwittingly, reveal sensitive/private information to third parties. In this report, we discuss the challenges of developing proactively initiated interactions, and suggest a framework for when it is appropriate for the device to intervene. To validate our design assumptions, we describe firstly, how we built a functioning prototype and secondly, a user study that was conducted to assess users' reactions and reflections when in the presence of a proactive voice assistant. This pre-print summarises the state, ideas and progress towards a proactive device as of autumn 2018.