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People counting is a challenging task with many applications. We propose a method with a fixed stereo camera that is based on projecting a template onto the depth image. The method was tested on a challenging outdoor dataset with good results and runs in real time.

Motivation--This paper describes our work in progress to develop a personal monitoring system that can monitor the physical and emotional condition of a patient by using contextual information from a sensor network, provide the patient with feedback concerning their health status and motivate the patient to adopt behavior with a positive health impact (such as exercising or taking medication at the right moment).Research approach -- We will extend the capabilities of an existing robotic health buddy with a (DBN based) sensor network. Then we will carry out a series of controlled, long-term field experiments where we identify and evaluate the effects of various agent social communicative behaviours on the user's adoption of health improving lifestyle patterns.Findings/Design -- The findings of the experiments will inform the final design of the health buddy and it's behaviours. We will also realise system adaptivity of the data processing and data fusion methods as well as the health buddy adaptivity to the user's emotional state.Research limitations/Implications -- The project will limit itself to monitoring and motivating people who suffer from cardiovascular chronic conditions and to the home environment.Originality/Value -- The research makes a contribution to the needs of health monitoring for a specific user group. The health buddy will use social behaviours to motivate users over a long-term time period.Take away message -- Home health monitoring and self care can be more enjoyable and easier through motivating smart health buddies.

In this paper we explore the concept of enjoyment as a possible factor influencing acceptance of robotic technology by elderly people. We describe an experiment with a conversational robot and elderly users (n=30) that incorporates both a test session and a long term user observation. The experiment did confirm the hypothesis that perceived enjoyment has an effect on the intention to use a robotic system. Furthermore, findings show that the general assumption in technology acceptance models that intention to use predicts actual use is also applicable to this specific technology used by elderly people.

Based on observations in previous experiments with a robotic companion in eldercare and on findings in related literature, we developed the concept of Perceived Adaptiveness. We integrated this in our technology acceptance methodology for robotic eldercare companions and found in a small experiment that adaptiveness of the system as perceived by elderly users is indeed a relevant item, being a direct influence on Perceived Usefulness.

This paper presents two projects in the field of care and technology in which students are trained in real environments.

This paper presents an experiment carried out to study the design options of a GPS-based navigation aid for elderly with beginning dementia. Results suggest that landmark based instructions may yield higher performance of the system then left/right instructions.

This paper describes a prototype system for matching data provided by a wireless network of autonomous reed switch devices with activities of daily living in a home environment.

Loop closing in vision based SLAM applications is a difficult task. Comparing new image data with all previous image data acquired for the map is practically impossible because of the high computational costs. This problem is part of the bigger problem to acquire local geometric constraints from sensor data for geometric map building termed data association. Commonly the computational costs are kept small by sampling the image data uniformly over time or using a position estimate from a mapping and localization algorithm. In this paper we propose a more natural sampling approach, by determining a subset that best describes the complete image data in the space of all previously seen images. The actual problem of finding such a subset is called the Connected Dominating Set problem which is well studied in field of graph theory. The proposed method is particularly beneficial for realistic mapping scenarios including moving objects and persons, motion blur and changing light conditions. Evaluation on multiple large indoor datasets show that the method performance is very close to that of an exhaustive data association scheme and outperforms other sampling approaches.

This paper presents a study on a natural interface game in the context of a library. We developed a camera-based Virtual Mirror (VM) game, in which the player can see himself on the screen as if he looks at a mirror image. We present an overview of the different aspects of VM games and technologies that can be used. For this study a novel framework and prototype game VMQuiz was developed. The prototype was used to evaluate the difference in experienced enjoyment between gaming via our camera interface, and a traditional mouse based interface. The results from the evaluation show that children like playing games in the library and like book related games. The VM game was not experienced to be more enjoyable than the mouse version.