HEALTH.Lab - Fakulta elektrotechniky a informatiky

Healthcare Energetics Automation Living and Telemedicine House – HEALTH.Lab

Introduction

HEALTH.Lab - Healthcare Energetics Automation Living and Telemedicine House

HEALTH.Lab are laboratories that correspond to the concept of living laboratories, allowing research and development activities in like-real-world environments. At first sight, the laboratories look like a standard residential space - a one bedroom flat structurally adapted for the life of disabled people. But they are equipped with up-to-date expensive technologies that allow to monitor all the activities of the occupant of the apartment, including their vital signs. These provide a gold standard against which to verify the innovative solutions being developed in the areas of telemedicine, assistive technology and home automation.

HEALTH.Lab represents all technological trends that are related to the quality of life in residential space. It integrates telemedicine and assistive technologies with home automation systems, indoor environmental quality monitoring and trends in energy self-sufficiency in buildings.

HEALTH.Lab also serves for teaching in the study programs Biomedical Assistive Technology, Biomedical Technology, Biomedical Engineering. It also serves as a showroom of current technologies and trends in all these areas for professionals and the public.

HEALTH.Lab contains two almost identical residential laboratories, with different levels of equipment and purpose.

Development HEALTH.Lab is designed for teaching activities, showroom activities and more challenging short-term experiments.
Testing HEALTH.Lab is designed for long-term testing. It allows you to monitor the activities of the occupant over a long period of time to test the long-term impact or functionality of the tested technologies in a like-real-world application.

Joint the virtual tour Development HEALTH.Lab Joint the virtual tour Testing HEALTH.Lab

Facility and Equipment

At first sight, both laboratories look like normal, fully equipped residential spaces with appropriate furniture - a bedroom, a living room connected to the kitchen and a bathroom. Both laboratories are wheelchair accessible and separately accessible. They are complemented by a computer room and installation rooms. The installation areas are located behind almost all the walls of the living spaces and allow access to all the installations in the apartments (water, waste, electrical, lighting) and almost unlimited possibilities to change the installations and add new measuring systems and technologies.

Reference measuring systems

The basic reference measurement systems are:

Sensory floor
Vontactless motion monitoring system in 3D space (Markerless Motion Capture System)- only in Development HEALTH.Lab.
Home automation system
Measuring the quality of the environment in the apartment
Furniture usage monitoring system
System for measuring electricity consumption at each connection point

Portable devices and database

The HEALTH.Lab equipment includes additional portable devices for monitoring biological signals, both Holter precision measurements and a comprehensive telemedicine monitoring system in the home environment. It also includes a suite of assistive technology devices for people with disabilities, eyetracking devices, and precision indoor environmental quality meters.

Measured parameters from most of the installed technologies are stored in the osisoftPI industrial database system.

In case you are interested in a list of these technologies, please contact our HEALTH.Lab coordinator

Projects and cooperation

Mmware radars based fall detector

Radars based on the principle of millimeter waves provide good information about the presence of a person in the detection zone of the radar. They are a technical solution available today, which, together with a high-quality algorithm, can detect a fall very well. We test our own fall detection algorithm in Nursing homes, Hospitals and Residental living facilities.

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SMARTTEST

Serious diseases are often not even noticed and we fail to detect the initial symptoms in time. Wearables can help us do this, but even people at risk of chronic diseases often don't use them. Therefore, let's jointly develop algorithms for detecting changes in behavior and activities, using up-to-date non-contact methods sensing motion and biological signals of people using radar technologies. To do this, we will use new technical solutions and modern approaches to process the data we measure in the Health.lab testbed, nursing homes and at home directly with at-risk individuals.

Contactless Vital signs monitoring of freely moveing people

We create our own algorithms for processing data from mmwave radars, which allow us to calculate the breathing and heart rate of people moving freely in space. For measurements, we use mmwave radar technology at 60GHz or IR-UWB frequencies. We test them in various Activities of Daily Living scenarios and compare them to medical devices. We can measure the respiratory rate with an error of up to 1.5 breaths per minute.

Activities of Daily Living

The "24 hours in 1 hour" study is designed to create a dataset that captures a wide range of common daily activities using innovative monitoring technologies such as the Captury MoCap, SensFloor and Apple Watch systems. The study takes place in a controlled laboratory environment and simulates a typical day condensed into one hour-long session involving various activities such as sleep, work, eating and exercise. This dataset supports human action recognition research and contributes to the development of more effective and adaptive assistive technologies.

DLIVING

Testing the quality of telemedical biological signal detection

Our living laboratories make it possible to test various telemetry devices in like-real life conditions. For this, we use certified medical devices, which are a reference for determining the quality of detection by telemetry equipment. We also verify the detection quality of systems for determining the position of people in space. We use the positional floor and the markerless Motion Capture system as a reference. An example is a comparison of a sleep monitor based on the mmwave principle and various commercial fall detectors.

Contact

The HEALTH.Lab is managed by the steering committee. On a daily basis, the HEALTH.Lab coordinator will be the contact person for questions about procedures or for consultation of users. Practical support and lab access are provided by the student team of Biomedical Engineering Research Group.

prof. Martin Černý Academic staff (450) +420 596 995 992 martin.cerny@vsb.cz EA314, 17. listopadu 2172/15 (map) 708 00 Ostrava - Poruba
prof. Martin Augustynek Academic staff (450) +420 596 995 852 martin.augustynek@vsb.cz 17. listopadu 2172/15 708 00 Ostrava - Poruba
prof. Marek Penhaker Academic staff (450) +420 596 995 853 marek.penhaker@vsb.cz 17. listopadu 2172/15 (map) 708 00 Ostrava - Poruba
Daniel Barvík, Ph.D. Academic staff (450) +420 596 993 996 daniel.barvik@vsb.cz 17. listopadu 2172/15 708 00 Ostrava - Poruba
assoc prof. Roman Hrbáč Academic staff (410) +420 596 995 928 roman.hrbac@vsb.cz 17. listopadu 2172/15 708 00 Ostrava - Poruba