Volume 25, Issue 1 - Special Issue on Intelligent healthcare systems

Usually, people talk neutrally in environments where there are no abnormal talking conditions such as stress and emotion. Other emotional conditions that might affect people’s talking tone include happiness, anger, and sadness. Such emotions are directly affected by the patient’s health status. In neutral talking environments, speakers can be easily verified; however, in emotional talking environments, speakers cannot be easily verified as in neutral talking ones. Consequently, speaker verification systems do not perform well in emotional talking environments as they do in neutral talking environments. In this work, a two-stage approach has been employed and evaluated to improve speaker verification performance in emotional talking environments. This approach employs speaker’s emotion cues (text-independent and emotion-dependent speaker verification problem) based on both hidden Markov models (HMMs) and suprasegmental HMMs as classifiers. The approach is composed of two cascaded stages that combine and integrate an emotion recognizer and a speaker recognizer into one recognizer. The architecture has been tested on two different and separate emotional speech databases: our collected database and the Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts database. The results of this work show that the proposed approach gives promising results with a significant improvement over previous studies and other approaches such as emotion-independent speaker verification approach and emotion-dependent speaker verification approach based completely on HMMs.

Breast cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in women. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to reduce the mortality rate and increase patients’ lifespan. Mammography is effective in early detection. This study proposes a computer-aided diagnosis system based on the mini-Mammographic Image Analysis Society database for analyzing mammograms. After selecting the regions of interest, we computed three typical features: the shape, spatial, and spectral domain features. We then applied the structural equation model to obtain relations between the features and the breast tissue type, lesion class, and tumor severity after feature extraction by information gain. Finally, we used the decision tree and classification and regression tree to construct computer-aided diagnosis rules; we generated 10 rules for predicting the classification of abnormal lesions and 11 rules for classifying the tumor severity. These rules can help clinicians detect and identify breast cancer efficiency from mammograms and improve medical care quality.

This article outlines a decision support system that seeks to help community nurses monitor the well-being of their chronically ill patients. It is designed for nurses to stay in contact with their patients without spending unnecessary time on less productive aspects of community nursing, such as avoidable driving to and from patients’ houses and taking measurements of vital signs to assess their health condition. It therefore allows the nurse to spend more time on managing the factors that could lead to a healthier patient. The decision support system is developed for two levels of mathematical capability. Nurses with a statistical background are provided with in-depth information allowing them to detect changes in mean, mean square error (and hence variation), and correlations using a variation on dynamic principle components. Less mathematically inclined nurses are offered information about trends, change points, and a simpler multivariate view of a patient’s well-being involving parallel coordinate plots.

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technology is of considerable interest in supporting the independence and quality of life of older adults. As such, it is a core focus of the emerging field of gerontechnology, which considers how technological innovation can aid health and well-being in older age. For this scoping review, a comprehensive search of databases and key journals was conducted from January to April of 2013 in order to identify AAL technologies that have the potential to help deal with some of the challenges associated with aging. In particular, we focused on technologies that could potentially be used by people living with some degree of cognitive impairment, ranging from normal cognitive aging to mild cognitive impairment up to earlier stages of dementia. Options currently available and those still under development were both included in our search. Fifty-nine technologies were identified and are outlined here, along with a discussion of history of AAL from a gerontological perspective and related theoretical considerations.

This article describes the construction phase of a corpus of everyday life sounds for a system of separation and classification of audio sources in a habitat: an application for telemonitoring of the elderly or disabled. We first present the key concepts of the research area, and then we present works and projects that address detection of distress situations and recognition of activities. Thereafter, we discuss the different sounds used in an application for telemonitoring, which inspired us to create our database. Finally, we present our experiment aimed at classifying the various environmental sounds in a habitat. The objective of this experiment is to present the global idea of our future work and to explain the necessity of creating a database of everyday life sounds.