This paper presented the assessment of cognitive load (as an effective real-time index of task difficulty) and the level of brain activation during an experiment in which eight visually impaired subjects performed two types of tasks while using the white cane and the Sound of Vision assistive device with three types of sensory input—audio, haptic, and multimodal (audio and haptic simultaneously). The first task was to identify object properties and the second to navigate and avoid obstacles in both the virtual environment and real-world settings. The results showed that the haptic stimuli were less intuitive than the audio ones and that the navigation with the Sound of Vision device increased cognitive load and working memory. Visual cortex asymmetry was lower in the case of multimodal stimulation than in the case of separate stimulation (audio or haptic). There was no correlation between visual cortical activity and the number of collisions during navigation, regardless of the type of navigation or sensory input. The visual cortex was activated when using the device, but only for the late-blind users. For all the subjects, the navigation with the Sound of Vision device induced a low negative valence, in contrast with the white cane navigation.
The remote monitoring of river water quality plays an important role in the integrated water resources management. Among the most inconvenient features encountered in the development of a real time system for monitoring river water quality, there are: variability and uncertainty in river basins, the nonlinearity of the ecological systems, the problems of high costs and low reliability caused by online sensors deployment. A global monitoring system of a hydrologic basin has a distributed (in space and functionally) and hierarchical architecture involving different mobile or static devices, various types of communication, software applications, data base and friendly interfaces with the users. This paper presents a reliable solution for a real time monitoring system for a river basin, involving multiparameters measurement instruments with local data acquisition and processing embedded devices, wireless communication system and a central server for information management. Energy constraint, routing protocols, memory restriction, data accuracy, sensor localization and not at least the cost minimization were the most challenging goals of this research. Taking into account that in the next steps of the water resources management system development, all data should be integrated and visualized by using a Geographical Information System (GIS), the generated database was a special task of this work. The design hardware and software were tested and validated in laboratory and real deployment environment.
This work presents the design aspects of TRAVEE, a neuromotor rehabilitation system. The TRAVEE system relies on innovative concepts for improving the rehabilitation process and increasing the patient recovery rate. One such concept is to present the patient an augmented feedback as part of a learning process based on neuroplasticity. Most of the rehabilitation exercises are based on visual feedback aimed at restoring the brain function for upper limbs control. This feedback is provided in a virtual reality setting by presenting the patient with a virtual model of his/her body. The movements executed by the patient are augmented in the virtual reality. Assisting the patient by a virtual therapist when executing the recovery exercises is another original feature of the proposed system. TRAVEE is a complex system, that integrates virtual reality, robotics, electrical stimulation, electromyography and brain-computer interfaces to boost the rehabilitation process. The challenges posed to the architectural design of TRAVEE reside in the complexity of its functioning in a setup that integrates a variety of devices, with real-time operation constraints and requirements of keeping the system at accessible costs, easy to install and use. In this paper, we present the proposed hardware and software architecture for TRAVEE. We analyze and discuss the advantages of our approach and the mechanisms that address the various constraints in TRAVEE.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.