Deus ex Machina: Participants present results at end of year meeting

2.1.2018

 

Partners and participants of DeM (Deus ex Machina), an initiative led by Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS that involves the cooperation of six interdisciplinary university groups, gathered at FhP-AICOS for an end of year meeting, where the results of the various ongoing projects were presented.

 

Present at the meeting were most of DeM’s co-promoters: ALGORITMI Research Centre from the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, the Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS), the Centre for Textile Science and Technology, and the Center for Psychology of the University of Porto (CPUP).

DeM was created as an initiative that aims to coordinate efforts to address the symbiotic relationship of humans with technology, and deal with challenges that stem from waste, inadequate use of resources, lack of integrated solutions and effort replication.

The project is structured in two parallel research lines. The first, the ‘Eyes of the Internet of Things’ Competence Centre (EITCC), will research and create technological building blocks, from tangible to intangible elements, while the second, the ‘Companion’ Competence Centre (C3), will put these building blocks at the service of pressing societal needs in European and African countries. The EITCC will concentrate on understanding the environment, the user, their context and actions, while the C3 will study relevant societal challenges within scientific domains in relation to humans, in order to design ‘companions’, which are non-intrusive, assistive tools for everyday life in several domains, as Health and wellbeing, Nutrition and Agriculture.

Among the talked about projects were: Fall Risk Assessment, iBoccia, MalariaScope, Pandlets, DataRepo, WiBACK networks, Mobile Screening of Diabetic Retinopathy, and Pervasive Data Mining Engine.

The Fall Risk Assessment was among those with outstanding results. The solution, who needs to collect data on user factors such as gait analysis and physical activity to assess risk, is using Pandlets to detect activities, and so far the achieved results shows an accuracy above 97%. Within the scope of this project a new method for eating and drinking recognition in free-living conditions is being developed, and tests have shown an overall weighted accuracy of 86% of activity detection.

Another topic discussed during the meeting was FhP-AICOS' potential future work in the field of Precision Agriculture. FhP-AICOS' researchers Filipe Soares, Carlos Resende, Pedro Madureira, and Luís Moreira, presented a scenario for precision farming and the technological blocks of the EITCC ('Eyes of the Internet of Things' Competence Center) research line needed to make it functional.

The meeting was devoted to presenting the current state of ongoing projects, as well as the analysis of the impact of each so far, namely, work developed, submitted patents and published articles, along with other indicators as per the initial plan of each project.