Search

e-Health technologies may potentially improve healthcare assistance for frail elderly subjects. However, despite the interest and potential benefits of the field, research highlighted that several challenges remain, such as scarce wide spreading of information and communication technology technologies among the elderly and infrastructural difficulties. The aim of this survey was to assess to what extent digital technologies are widespread and used among Italian geriatricians. We conducted an online survey addressed to geriatricians, from the SIGOT (The Italian Geriatric Society) website, collecting the 78 completed questionnaires. We then analyzed with descriptive statistics the data. Results showed a still scarce use of digital technologies in geriatric practice in Italy. However, more than 60% of the SIGOT geriatricians who participated in the survey responded that the use of digital technology had increased significantly due to COVID-19 pandemic and for 80% of the members, the priority areas for the use of technologies for the care and treatment of the elderly are the management of chronic diseases and the prevention of hospitalization.

In the past few years, the technology of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) has notably advanced. In particular, in the context of factory and warehouse automation, different approaches have been presented for detecting and localizing pallets inside warehouses and shop-floor environments. In a related research paper Mohamed et al., 2018, we show that an AGVs can detect, localize, and track pallets using machine learning techniques based only on the data of an on-board 2D laser rangefinder. Such sensor is very common in industrial scenarios due to its simplicity and robustness, but it can only provide a limited amount of data. Therefore, it has been neglected in the past in favor of more complex solutions. In this paper, we release to the community the data we collected in Ref. Mohamed et al., 2018 for further research activities in the field of pallet localization and tracking. The dataset comprises a collection of 565 2D scans from real-world environments, which are divided into 340 samples where pallets are present, and 225 samples where they are not. The data have been manually labelled and are provided in different formats. Keywords: 2D laser rangefinder, Object detection, Robotics, Automated guided vehicle