Manola Ricciuti | Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (original) (raw)

Papers by Manola Ricciuti

Lecture notes in electrical engineering, 2022

2019 IEEE 9th International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE-Berlin)

The possibility of remote measurement of vital parameters makes it possible to implement telemedi... more The possibility of remote measurement of vital parameters makes it possible to implement telemedicine systems. However these systems are of particular interest for subjects who, due to age or pathologies, are weak and fragile. For these subjects, the management of devices for measuring vital parameters that must be appropriately positioned in contact with the skin, in fixed positions, is difficult. For this reason, in this paper two technologies are shown for the non-contact measurement of two physiological parameters, heart rate and respiratory rate, based on the acquisition and processing of video signals and radar signals. The techniques presented are based on the use of commercial devices. The use of these technologies simplifies the acquisition of vital parameters compared to traditional technologies. The reliability of the measured values was evaluated by comparing the values obtained with a pulse oximeter and an app on a smartphone.

Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good

Fall detection is a well investigated research area, for which different solutions have been desi... more Fall detection is a well investigated research area, for which different solutions have been designed, based on wearable or ambient sensors. Depth sensors, like Kinect, located in front view with respect to the monitored subject, are able to provide the human skeleton through the automatic identification of body joints, and are typically used for their unobtrusiveness and inherent privacy-preserving capability. This paper aims to analyze depth signals captured from a Kinect used in top view, to extract useful features for the automatic identification of falls, despite the unavailability of joints and skeleton data. This study, based on a set of signals captured over a number of test users performing different types of falls and activities, shows that the speed of falling computed over the blob identifying the person, extracted from the depth images, should be used as a feature to spot fall events in conjunction with other metrics, for a better reliability.

2018 IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA), 2018

The inverse association between heart rate and life expectancy, established by scientific researc... more The inverse association between heart rate and life expectancy, established by scientific research, drives the need to reduce sedentary behaviors and stimulate healthy lifestyles. Among older adults, though, compliance to regular physical exercise may be difficult. The recent development of so called exergames, joining physical exercise to the entertainment typical of a gaming activity, may provide a solution in different application areas, from home rehabilitation to the treatment of age-related diseases. Monitoring the older adult’s heart rate during exergaming is nevertheless mandatory. This paper presents a contactless heart rate measurement system based on motion-compensated video signals, that can be implemented with the same device used as a remote controller in exergames. Comparison to a reference Holter-based measurement method, based on 20 subjects and 100 samples, shows a good accuracy of the proposed method, with a mean percent error smaller than 3%.

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, 2021

Sleep is an important phase of a person's life, to which a significant percentage of the day is d... more Sleep is an important phase of a person's life, to which a significant percentage of the day is dedicated. Sleep is a key moment of the day that significantly affects the well-being of our body, so a reduction in sleep often determines serious repercussions on the quality of life and health in general. It is therefore of interest to proceed with an assessment of the physiological parameters of a person during the hours dedicated to sleep. The present work illustrates an experimental activity of extraction of vital parameters of a subject during his stay in bed, based on the elaboration of the BallistoCardioGraphic (BCG) signal. It is shown how the values of heart and respiratory rate can be obtained, and how useful information can be obtained to investigate sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnoea, bruxism, restless leg syndrome, night epilepsy, sleepwalking and narcolepsy.

2018 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2018

Technologies for contactless Heart Rate measurement support the progress in the diagnostic and he... more Technologies for contactless Heart Rate measurement support the progress in the diagnostic and healthcare fields, opening new possibilities even for everyday use at home. Among them, Videoplethysmography based on the Eulerian Video Magnification method has been already validated as an effective alternative to traditional, but often bulky, Electrocardiographic acquisitions. In this paper we study the influence of different measurement parameters on the Heart Rate estimation, in order to assess the reliability of the Videoplethysmography detection method under varying conditions, like different dimensions and positions of the processed regions of interest, pyramidal decomposition levels, and light conditions.

The detection of vital parameters with traditional approaches, as the electrocardiograph, require... more The detection of vital parameters with traditional approaches, as the electrocardiograph, requires to appropriately place electrodes in direct contact with patients' skin, often causing irritation. On the other hand, contactless measurement of physiological parameters provides an unobtrusive and comfortable instrument for subjects' conditions monitoring, with application to home monitoring of aging people and in particular to those suffering of heart disease. In this paper two contactless techniques are proposed, based on radar technology and on video processing from an RGB camera. In order to validate their precision, the proposed methods are compared with three wearable low cost devices, taken as a reference for the outcomes. The developed approaches prove to achieve excellent performances, with an estimated mean relative error of 0.55% with respect to a commercial cardiac strap device.

In the domain of smart homes, technologies for personal safety and security play a prominent role... more In the domain of smart homes, technologies for personal safety and security play a prominent role. This paper presents a low-complexity Android application designed for mobile and embedded devices, that exploits the on-board camera to easily capture two images of the subject, and processes them to discriminate a true 3D and live face from a 2D one. The liveness detection based on such a discrimination provides anti-spoofing capabilities to secure access control based on face recognition. The results obtained are satisfactory even in different ambient light conditions, and further improvements are being developed to deal with low precision image acquisition.

Faced with an increasing number of elderly housed in residential facilities, there is a request f... more Faced with an increasing number of elderly housed in residential facilities, there is a request for greater transparency regarding the state of health of the guests and the level of assistance that these guests are offered. The OPENCARE project described in this article aims to respond to this need to promote communication between residential structures and guest families, by introducing a technological platform able to meet this requirement without the need to increase the workload of the operators. Therefore, this article describes the solution adopted, which are based both on data acquired from sensors and on those entered by the operators through a suitably designed interface.

Journal of Communications Software and Systems, 2018

It is widely recognized that sleep is a basic physiological process having fundamental effects on... more It is widely recognized that sleep is a basic physiological process having fundamental effects on human health, performance and well-being. Such evidence stimulates the research of solutions to foster self-awareness of personal sleeping habits, and correct living environment management policies to encourage sleep. In this context, the use of mobile technologies powered with automatic sleep recognition capabilities can be helpful, and ubiquitous computing devices like smartphones can be leveraged as proxies to unobtrusively analyse the human behaviour. To this aim, we propose the implementation of a real-time sleep recognition methodology relied on a smartphone equipped with a mobile app that exploits contextual and usage information to infer sleep habits. As an improvement of already presented solutions, in this proposed application an initial training stage is required, during which the selected features are processed by k-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine classifiers, in order to select the best model for each user. Moreover, a 1st-order Markov Chain is applied to improve the recognition performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving acceptable results in term of Precision, Recall, and F1-score.

Journal of Imaging, 2020

With the increase in life expectancy, one of the most important topic for scientific research, es... more With the increase in life expectancy, one of the most important topic for scientific research, especially for the elderly, is good nutrition. In particular, with an advanced age and health issues because disorders such as Alzheimer and dementia, monitoring the subjects’ dietary habits to avoid excessive or poor nutrition is a critical role. Starting from an application aiming to monitor the food intake actions of people during a meal, already shown in a previously published paper, the present work describes some improvements that are able to make the application work in real time. The considered solution exploits the Kinect v1 device that can be installed on the ceiling, in a top-down view in an effort to preserve privacy of the subjects. The food intake actions are estimated from the analysis of depth frames. The innovations introduced in this document are related to the automatic identification of the initial and final frame for the detection of food intake actions, and to the str...

Sensors, 2018

Fall detection is one of the most investigated themes in the research on assistive solutions for ... more Fall detection is one of the most investigated themes in the research on assistive solutions for aged people. In particular, a false-alarm-free discrimination between falls and non-falls is indispensable, especially to assist elderly people living alone. Current technological solutions designed to monitor several types of activities in indoor environments can guarantee absolute privacy to the people that decide to rely on them. Devices integrating RGB and depth cameras, such as the Microsoft Kinect, can ensure privacy and anonymity, since the depth information is considered to extract only meaningful information from video streams. In this paper, we propose an accurate fall detection method investigating the depth frames of the human body using a single device in a top-view configuration, with the subjects located under the device inside a room. Features extracted from depth frames train a classifier based on a binary support vector machine learning algorithm. The dataset includes 32 falls and 8 activities considered for comparison, for a total of 800 sequences performed by 20 adults. The system showed an accuracy of 98.6% and only one false positive.

ICST Transactions on Ambient Systems, 2017

Technologies for personal safety and security play an increasing role in modern life, and are amo... more Technologies for personal safety and security play an increasing role in modern life, and are among the most valuable features expected to be supported by so-called smart homes. This paper presents a low-complexity Android application designed for both mobile and embedded devices, that exploits the available on-board camera to easily capture two images of a subject, and processes them to discriminate a true 3D and live face, from a fake or printed 2D one. The liveness detection based on such a discrimination provides antispoofing capabilities to secure access control based on face recognition. The limited computational complexity of the developed application makes it suitable for practical implementation in video-entry phones based on embedded Android platforms. The results obtained are satisfactory even in different ambient light conditions, and further improvements are being developed to deal with low precision image acquisition.

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), Jan 2, 2017

Contactless detection is one of the new frontiers of technological innovation in the field of hea... more Contactless detection is one of the new frontiers of technological innovation in the field of healthcare, enabling unobtrusive measurements of biomedical parameters. Compared to conventional methods for Heart Rate (HR) detection that employ expensive and/or uncomfortable devices, such as the Electrocardiograph (ECG) or pulse oximeter, contactless HR detection offers fast and continuous monitoring of heart activities and provides support for clinical analysis without the need for the user to wear a device. This paper presents a validation study for a contactless HR estimation method exploiting RGB (Red, Green, Blue) data from a Microsoft Kinect v2 device. This method, based on Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM), Photoplethysmography (PPG) and Videoplethysmography (VPG), can achieve performance comparable to classical approaches exploiting wearable systems, under specific test conditions. The output given by a Holter, which represents the gold-standard device used in the test for ECG ...

2020 28th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2021

Pupil size is a valuable source of information since it can reveal the emotional state, fatigue a... more Pupil size is a valuable source of information since it can reveal the emotional state, fatigue and ageing process. A lot of research has been carried out in this area with clinical and even psychiatric validity, since the fluctuations in the size of the pupil are closely linked to the autonomic nervous system. The pupil size analysis of oscillations due to contraction and dilation could be a useful instrument for diagnosis of disorders related to their own control mechanisms and an index of neurological disease affecting other nerve centres. Pupillography is the pupil size clinical examination which involves the use of infrared light, which allows performing an optical analysis of the pupil, varying the light conditions and measuring the pupillary diameter in different luminance levels. The aim of the proposed work is to exploit video processing techniques in visible light to calculate the pupil diameter and analyse the pupil diameter changing as a result of the lighting conditions variation.

Frequency domain analyses in electromyographic (EMG) signals are frequently applied to assess mus... more Frequency domain analyses in electromyographic (EMG) signals are frequently applied to assess muscle fatigue and similar variables. Moreover, Fourier-based approaches are typically used for investigating these procedures. Nonetheless, Fourier analysis assumes the signal as stationary which is unlikely during dynamic contractions. As an alternative method, wavelet-based treatments do not assume this pattern and may be considered as more appropriate for joint time-frequency domain analysis. Based on the previous statements, the purpose of the present study was to compare the application of Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) to assess muscle fatigue in dynamic exercise of a 1-km of cycling (time-trial condition). The results of this study indicated that CWT and STFT analyses have provided similar fatigue estimates (slope) (p > 0.05). However, CWT application represents lesser dispersion (<variance) in comparison with STFT (p < 0.05) for vastus medialis (189.9 ± 82.1 for STFT vs 148.6 ± 60.2 for CWT) and vastus lateralis (151.6 ± 49.6 for STFT vs 103.5 ± 27.9 for CWT). In conclusion, despite the EMG signal did not change (p > 0.05) according to different methods, it is important to note that these responses seem to show greater values for CWT compared to STFT for 2 superficial muscles. Thereby, we are capable of considering CWT as a reliable and useful method to take into consideration when non-stationary or oscillating exercise models are evaluated.