Towards the Real-Life EEG Applications

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most popular approaches for brain monitoring in many research fields. While the detailed working flows for in-lab neuroscience-targeted EEG experiments conditions have been well established, carrying out EEG experiments under a real-life condition can be quite confusing because of various practical limitations. This chapter gives a brief overview of the practical issues and techniques that help real-life EEG experiments come into being, and the well-known artifact problems for EEG. As a guideline for performing a successful EEG data analysis with the low-electrode-density limitation of portable EEG devices, recently proposed techniques for artifact suppression or removal are briefly surveyed as well.

Social Robots for Pedagogical Rehabilitation

The use of robots as educational learning tools is quite extensive worldwide, yet it is rather limited in special education. In particular, the use of robots in the field of special education is under skepticism since robots are frequently believed to be expensive with limited capacity. The latter may change with the advent of social robots, which can be used in special education as affordable tools for delivering sophisticated stimuli to children with learning difficulties also due to preexisting conditions. Pilot studies occasionally demonstrate the effectiveness of social robots in specific domains. This chapter overviews the engagement of social robots in special education including the authors' preliminary work in this field; moreover, it discusses their proposal for potential future extensions involving more autonomous (i.e., intelligent) social robots as well as feedback from human brain signals.

Control Methods for Bipedal Walking Robots With Integrated Elastic Elements

In this chapter, the problem of controlling bipedal walking robots with integrated elastic elements is considered. A survey of the existing control methods developed for walking robots is given, and their applicability to the task of controlling the robots with elastic elements is analyzed. The focus of the chapter lies with the feedback controller design. The chapter studies the influence that the elastic elements modelled as a spring-damper system have on the behavior of the control system. The influence of the spring-damper parameters and the inertial parameters of the actuator gear box and the motor shaft on the generated control laws and the resulting peak torques are discussed. The changes in these effects associated with motor torque saturation and sensors nonlinearities are studied. It is shown that the introduction of torque saturation changes the way the elastic drive parameters affect the resulting behavior of the control system. The ways to use obtained results in practice are discussed.

Photoplethysmographic Sensors in Automatized Diagnosis of the Cardiovascular System

The implementation of photoplethysmographic sensors in the data capture and data storage to analyze the cardiovascular condition of the patient is a new direction in automatized diagnosis of the cardiovascular system. This chapter contains a description of the use of photoplethysmographic sensors in a computerized patient cardiac monitoring system. The system consists of a portable device for collection of patient's cardiac data by applying photopletithysmographic method and software for mathematical analysis. An important diagnostic parameter that can be determined by the photoplethysmographic signal is the heart rate variability. The current application of the photoplethysmographic sensors in portable automatized system is of particular importance because the results of cardiac data analysis with these methods can provide not only detailed information about the cardiovascular status of the patients but also provide the opportunity to generate new knowledge about the diagnosis, and the prevention of pathology in cardiovascular diseases.

Learner Attitudes Towards Humanoid Robot Tutoring Systems

A novel framework for investigation of the learner attitude towards a humanoid robot tutoring system is proposed in the chapter. The theoretical approach attempts to understand both the cognitive motivation as well as the social motivation of the participants in a teaching session, held by a robotic tutor. For this aim, a questionnaire is delivered after the eye tracking experiment in order to record the type and amount of the learned material as well as the social motivation of the participants. The results of the experiments show significant effects of both cognitive and social motivation influences. It has been shown that cognitive motivation can be observed and analyzed on a very individual level. This is an important biometric feature and can be used to recognize individuals from patterns of viewing behaviors in a lesson. Guidelines, drawn from first-person accounts of learner participation in the study, are also formulated for achieving more intuitive interactions with humanoid robots intended to perform social jobs like being teachers or advisors.

Morphological Component Analysis for Biological Signals

This chapter explains the removal of artifacts from the multi-resource biological signals. Morphological components can be used to distinguish between the brain activities and artifacts that are contaminated with each other in many physical situations. In this chapter, a two-stage wavelet shrinkage and morphological component analysis (MCA) for biological signals is a sophisticated way to analyze the brain activities and validate the effectiveness of artifacts removal. The source components in the biological signals can be characterized by specific morphology and measures the independence and uniqueness of the source components. Undecimated wavelet transform (UDWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), local discrete cosine transform (LDCT), discrete sine transform (DST), and DIRAC are the orthonormal bases function used to build the explicit dictionary for the decomposition of source component of the biological signal in the morphological component analysis. The chapter discusses the implementation and optimization algorithm of the morphological component analysis.

Mathematical Processing of Cardiological Signals and Organization of Access to Holter Databases

The study of human cardiovascular activity is one of the main methods for assessing the health of the human. It is performed in clinical conditions via electrocardiographic devices and in the daily life of a individuals through Holter monitoring. An important diagnostic parameter that can be determined by an electrocardiogram, taking into account the difference between successive heartbeat is heart rate variability – a widely used non-invasive method of measuring heart rate. This parameter makes it possible to assess the risk of various cardiac diseases such as angina, cardiac infarction, life-threatening arrhythmias, etc. This chapter presents the morphological bases of the cardio records, heart rate variability, and its impact on the healthy status of the individual. It describes the created cardiology base of prolongated Holter recordings for the purposes of scientific research project. Presented are internationally approved standards to provide web accessibility to internet-based data bases and other resources for people with disabilities.

Geometric Simplification of Cyber-Physical Systems

Human beings are always attracted to patterns, designs, and shapes. Even infants are attracted to the geometry around them. Angles, shapes, lines, line segments, curves, and other aspects of geometry are ubiquitous. Even the letters are constructed of lines, line segments, and curves. Nature also has an abundance of geometry. Patterns can be found on leaves, in flowers, in seashells, and many other places. Even the human bodies consist of patterns, curves, and line segments. Therefore, like many professions, the cyber-physical systems also require at least a foundational understanding of geometry. This chapter elucidates the use of geometry to simplify the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems to enhance the efficiency in social applications. The knowledge learned through the understanding of geometric principles provides not only an increase in safety but also an increase in the creation of tools, skill level enhancement, and aesthetically pleasing arrangements.

Information Security Problem and Solution Approaches in Social Applications

A social network is a portrayal of the social structure between actors, mostly individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familiar bonds. This chapter exhibits an exhaustive review of various security and protection issues in social networks that directly or indirectly affect the individual member of the network. Furthermore, different threats in social networks have been focused on that appear because of the sharing of interactive media content inside a social networking site. Additionally, the chapter also reports current cutting-edge guard arrangements that can shield social network clients from these dangers.

Merging Realities in Space and Time

The rapid developments in online technology have provided young people with instant communication with each other and highly interactive and engaging visual game playing environments. The traditional ways of presenting museum and heritage assets no longer, therefore, hold their attention and provide them with an exciting and dynamic visitor experience. There is considerable interest in the use of augmented reality to allow visitors to explore worlds that are not immediately accessible to them and relating them to the real worlds around them. These are very effective in providing much needed contextual information, but appear rather static when compared with multi-player games environments where players interact with each other and robotic characters (non-player characters) in real time. By fusing these technologies, the authors postulate a new type of conceptually-led environment (cyber museum) that fuses real (physical), virtual worlds and cyber-social spaces into a single dynamic environment that provides a unique experience of exploring both worlds simultaneously.