In this July 2017 is-sue. . .

• WMAHSN activities• Publications• 2017 outputs

Education and training

The GRaCE team puts a great dealof importance on disseminatingexpertise about mental health riskand safety management and howit can be supported by digital soft-ware. Activities this year include:

1. Presentations to mentalhealth practitioners andorganisations about howGRaCE works and what itcan do for them.

2. Half and full day trainingsessions for mental healthpractitioners. These focuson the holistic and con-nected process of assessingrisks, making risk formula-tions, and creating appro-priate management plans.These sessions also showhow the GRaCE technologysupports the process.

3. Education programmes formembers of the public thatshow how myGRaCE canhelp them understand andaddress issues associatedwith mental health prob-lems. For example, we arepart of the Coventry andWarwickshire Recovery andWellbeing Academy sum-mer and winter programmethis year.

4. GRaCE internships at AstonUniversity.

5. Students from the NuffieldResearch Placements pro-gramme and we are due tohave two for 2017.

6. Support for hackathonsand other competitionsthat are very helpful to un-dergraduate students learn-ing about digital technolo-gies and marketing them.

WMAHSN activities

The West Midlands Academic Health Science Network (WMAHSN) is a memberof the EIT Health Knowledge and Information Communities that is fundingGRaCE-AGE.

GRaCE and GRaCE-AGE exhibited at Meridian LIVE, an interactive eventhosted by the WMAHSN to showcase innovators from across the healthcaresector. The event took place on Wednesday 15 February at the EdgbastonStadium in Birmingham, home to Warwickshire County Cricket Club. MeridianLIVE included exhibition stands from a number of organisations from acrossthe healthcare sector, including one for GRaCE.

Dr Buckingham said that "The Meridian event is a fantastic opportunity todiscuss ideas and shared objectives with other innnovative healthcare organ-isations. We have already made some significant new contacts and I amvery grateful to Meridian for its support and access to connections within theregion."

See the weblink for more information and a video interview with Dr Bucking-ham (starting at 5.18 minutes):

The WMAHSN Annual Stakeholder Event in July celebrated its achieve-ments over the last year at the Hilton Hotel in the Birmingham NEC. GRaCE-AGE is one of the flagship EIT Health projects and was featured in the celebra-tion video shown to the audience. Some snappy photography captured themoment when an interview with the principal investigator of GRaCE-AGE wasbeing shown.

The event was an excellent opportunity to meet other innovative researchersand one of our new partners for 2018, Christopher Golby from Evolyst, waspresenting his work. We are very pleased to have his company on board.

Publications

IDENTIFYING ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING There is rising interest inmonitoring and improving human well-being at home using different typesof sensors including microphones. In the context of Ambient Assisted Living(AAL) sensors can track activities in the home of older adults to help ensurethey are keeping safe and well. Recently, acoustic detection and classificationof scenes and events has gained interest in the scientific community and led tonumerous public databases for a wide range of applications. In this paper weintroduce a database recorded in one living home, over a period of one weekusing an acoustic sensor network. We present the recording and annotationprocedure, the database content and a discussion on a baseline detectionbenchmark. The database is publicly released to provide a common groundfor future research.

Gert Dekkers, Steven Lauwereins, Bart Thoen, Mulu Weldegebreal Adhana,Henk Brouckxon, Bertold Van den Bergh, Toon van Waterschoot, Bart Van-rumste, Marian Verhelst, Peter Karsmakers. (2017). The SINS database fordetection of daily activities in a home environment using an acoustic sen-sor network. Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events, 16November 2017, Munich, Germany.

DETECTING FALLS More than thirty percent of people over 65 years fall atleast once a year and are often not able to get up again. Camera-based falldetection systems can help by triggering an alarm when falls occur. However,they often have high false-alarm rates and this paper shows three ways oflowering them. In one case, these reduced the number of false alarms by afactor of 7 while in another one the ability to detect true falls increased higherthan the false-alarm rate.

Glen Debard, Marc Mertens, Toon Goedemé, Tinne Tuytelaars, and BartVanrumste. (2017). Three Ways to Improve the Performance of Real-LifeCamera-Based Fall Detection Systems. Journal of Sensors, Volume 2017, 15pages, https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/8241910

FUZZY KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING The GRaCE-AGE team have beenworking on ways of making decisions easy to understand and explain. Thispaper presents research on a new hierarchical fuzzy rule-based model. It usesa simplified and effective method for supporting the elicitation of the fuzzyrules and adapting uncertainty propagation that can be intuitively understoodby human experts. Nasser Amaitik has tested the model on predicting leaks inwater pipes and Christopher Buckingham is determining the model’s generalityand usefulness for evaluating mental health risks.

N. M. Amaitik and C. D. Buckingham (2017). Developing a hierarchicalfuzzy rule-based model with weighted linguistic rules: A case study of waterpipes condition prediction. 2017 Computing Conference, pp. 3040. doi:10.1109/SAI.2017.8252078.

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Outputs for 2017

1. GRaCE-AGE web-based soft-ware system that includesthe social network “canopyof care” functionality link-ing clininicans, carers, andolder adults. It willhave automated input fromwearable and environmen-tal sensors and be availableon mobile platforms.

2. Sensors: new contactlesssensors that increase userfriendliness and the rangeof data collected.

3. Education and training: An-other ATHENS (AdvancedTechnology Higher Educa-tion Network/SOCRATES)session; continuing pro-fessional development ofmental-health practition-ers; and engagement withstudents from schools anduniversities.

4. Population language packspecification that provides ageneric solution for any lan-guage and an initial instan-tiation for the Dutch lan-guage.

5. Peer-reviewed researchand/or conference paperswith a target of two.

6. News will be released asindividual stories through-out the year directly onthe GRaCE-AGE website,as now. Twice a year, amore formal publicationswill be produced that canbe printed and distributed.

7. Commercial licencingagreement and protocol forGRaCE-AGE will be firmedup as part of the evolvingbusiness strategy.

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Contact Information:Dr Christopher Buckinghamc.d.buckingham@aston.ac.ukhttp://www.egrist.org/grace-age