Nikolaos Voros

Gesture recognition has a crucial role in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and in assisting the elderly to perform automatically their everyday activities. In this paper, three methods for gesture recognition and computer vision were implemented and tested in order to investigate the most suitable one. All methods, machine learning using IMU, machine learning on device, and were combined with certain activities that were determined during a needs analysis research. The same volunteers took part in the pilot testing of the proposed methods. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, revealing that while some methods excel in specific scenarios, the integrated solution of MoveNet and CNN provides a robust framework for real-time gesture recognition.

Gesture recognition has a crucial role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and in assisting the elderly to perform automatically their everyday activities. In this paper three methods for gesture recognition and computer vision were implemented and tested in order to investigate the most suitable one. All methods, Machine learning using IMU, Machine learning on device and were combined with certain activities that were determined during a needs analysis research. The same volunteers took part to the pilot testing of the proposed methods. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, revealing that 60 while some methods excel in specific scenarios, the integrated solution of MoveNet and 61 CNN provides a robust framework for real-time gesture recognition.

Mobile applications that can be used for the training and classification of plant diseases are described in this paper. Professional agronomists can select the species and their diseases that are supported by the developed tool and follow an automatic training procedure using a small number of indicative photographs. The employed classification method is based on features that represent distinct aspects of the sick plant such as, for example, the color level distribution in the regions of interest. These features are extracted from photographs that display a plant part such as a leaf or a fruit. Multiple reference ranges are determined for each feature during training. When a new photograph is analyzed, its feature values are compared with the reference ranges, and different grades are assigned depending on whether a feature value falls within a range or not. The new photograph is classified as the disease with the highest grade. Ten tomato diseases are used as a case study, and the applications are trained with 40–100 segmented and normalized photographs for each disease. An accuracy between 93.4% and 96.1% is experimentally measured in this case. An additional dataset of pear disease photographs that are not segmented or normalized is also tested with an average accuracy of 95%.

From caretaking activities for elderly people to being assistive in healthcare setup, mobile and non-mobile robots have the potential to be highly applicable and serviceable. The ongoing pandemic has shown that human-to-human contact in healthcare institutions and senior homes must be limited. In this scenario, elderlies and immunocompromised individuals must be exclusively protected. Robots are a promising way to overcome this problem in assisted living environments. In addition, the advent of AI and machine learning will pave a way for intelligent robots with cognitive abilities, while enabling them to be more aware of their surroundings. In this paper, we discuss the general perspectives, potential research opportunities, and challenges arising in the area of robots in assisted living environments and present our research work pertaining to certain application scenarios, i.e., robots in rehabilitation and robots in hospital environments and pandemics, which, in turn, exhibits the growing prospects and interdisciplinary nature of the field of robots in assisted living environment.