Publication in Electronics 2023 journal
M. Papadogiorgaki, N. Grammalidis, A. Grammatikopoulou, K. Apostolidis, E. S. Bei, K. Grigoriadis, S. Zafeiris, G. Livanos, V. Mezaris and M. E. Zervakis, “An Integrated Support System for People with Intellectual Disability”, Electronics, Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Applications, Vol. 12, Issue 18, No 2577826, pp. 1-39, 2023. DOI: 10.3390/electronics12183803.
Short description
People with Intellectual Disability (ID) encounter several problems in their daily living regarding their needs, activities, interrelationships, and communication. In this paper, an interactive platform is proposed, aiming to provide personalized recommendations for information and entertainment, including creative and educational activities, tailored to the special user needs of this population. Furthermore, the proposed platform integrates capabilities for the automatic recognition of health-related emergencies, such as fever, oxygen saturation decline, and tachycardia, as well as location tracking and detection of wandering behavior based on smartwatch/smartphone sensors, while providing appropriate notifications to caregivers and automated assistance to people with ID through voice instructions and interaction with a virtual assistant. A short-scale pilot study has been carried out, where a group of end-users participated in the testing of the integrated platform, verifying its effectiveness concerning the recommended services. The experimental results indicate the potential value of the proposed system in providing routine health measurements, identifying and managing emergency cases, and supporting a creative and qualitative daily life for people with disabilities.
Presentation of QuaLiSID project in AIICA 2023 international conference
M. Papadogiorgaki, K. Apostolidis, G. Livanos, E. S. Bei, S. Zafeiris, G. A. Klados, V. Mezaris and M. E. Zervakis, “A Content Recommendation Platform for People with Intellectual Disability”, 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN), 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Information, Communications, and Applications (AIICA 2023), pp. 49-54, 04-07 July, 2023, Paris, France, doi: 10.1109/ICUFN57995.2023.10199882.
Short description
People with Intellectual Disability (ID) encounter several problems in their daily living regarding their needs, activities, interrelationships, and communication. On this concept, an interactive web-based recommendation platform is proposed, aiming to provide personalized suggestions for information and entertainment, including creative and educational activities, tailored to the special users’ needs of this population. The recommended items concern publicly available web-content, suggested according to the individual user interests, through a user-friendly environment.
Presentation of QuaLiSID project in Kleefstra Syndrome Scientific Conference 2023
Short description
The Kleefstra Syndrome Scientific Conference 2023: “Moving towards the uptake and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research and clinical work” focuses on Kleefstra syndrome, a rare genetic disorder with app. 1000 diagnosed patients worldwide. Due to the rarity of the disease, a global perspective is needed to foster new research insights. The event brings together Kleefstra syndrome PAOs, clinicians and researchers from different domains having a common interest: share new research findings related to Kleefstra syndrome that will lead the Kleefstra community to optimize current care and to reach their final goal, the discovering of a life-changing treatment and cure for Kleefstra syndrome. A special focus is given to artificial intelligence (AI), which is generally still something new for the rare disease communities, but it can play a crucial role, especially in shortening the time needed for new research insights.
The presentation of QuaLiSID at the conference, entitled ¨The QuaLiSID system and related video analysis technologies for supporting individuals with intellectual disabilities¨, focused on two directions: on the hand we focused on the possibilities of information, entertainment and education offered by the system through the provision of multimedia content recommendations based on the user’s interests. On the other hand, we mentioned the possibilities offered by the artificial intelligence technologies we have developed for the analysis of multimedia content (with an emphasis on image and video), which not only have application in providing recommendations but also, with the necessary adaptations and extensions, can probably contribute in the development of improved methods for the analysis of medical data.
More information on Kleefstra Syndrome Scientific Conference 2023 along with the programme are available in https://idefine-europe.org/conference/.
Publication of research article in Open Access journal
N. Gkalelis, D. Daskalakis, V. Mezaris, “ViGAT: Bottom-up event recognition and explanation in video using factorized graph attention network”, IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 108797-108816, 2022. DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3213652
Short description
In this paper a pure-attention bottom-up approach, called ViGAT, that utilizes an object detector together with a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone network to derive object and frame features, and a head network to process these features for the task of event recognition and explanation in video, is proposed. The ViGAT head consists of graph attention network (GAT) blocks factorized along the spatial and temporal dimensions in order to capture effectively both local and long-term dependencies between objects or frames. Moreover, using the weighted in-degrees (WiDs) derived from the adjacency matrices at the various GAT blocks, we show that the proposed architecture can identify the most salient objects and frames that explain the decision of the network. A comprehensive evaluation study is performed, demonstrating that the proposed approach provides state-of-the-art results on three large, publicly available video datasets (FCVID, MiniKinetics, ActivityNet). Source code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/bmezaris/ViGAT
Presentation of the project at the 11th Panhellenic Conference of Social Care Units “Relief”/”Επ’ Αρωγή” (official program offline)
Short description
The 11th Panhellenic Conference of Social Care Units “Relief”/”Επ’ Αρωγή” on the theme: “Dimensions, Structures & Persons of Care” was organized by the Social Welfare Center of the Region of Crete on October 31 and November 1, 2022, at the Mediterranean Architecture Center, in Chania. During the conference, the objectιve and goals of the project were presented, while the framework and functionality of the user interface of the integrated QuaLiSID interactive platform under development was demonstrated.
Publication in Electronics 2022
Apostolidis, K.; Mezaris, V.; Papadogiorgaki, M.; Bei, E.S.; Livanos, G.; Zervakis, M.E. Content and Other Resources Recommendations for Individuals with Intellectual Disability: A Review. Electronics 2022, 11, 3472. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11213472
Abstract
In this review paper, we look into how a recommendation system can be adapted to and support people with intellectual disability (ID). We start by reviewing and comparing the main classes of techniques for general-purpose content recommendation. Then, centering on individuals with ID, we collect information on their special needs that may be relevant to or affected by content recommendation tasks. We review the few existing recommendation systems specifically designed or adapted to the needs of this population and finally, based on the reviewed literature sources, we catalog the traits that a future content recommendation system should have in order to respond well to the identified special needs. We hope this listing of desirable traits and future directions in our concluding sections will stimulate research towards opening the doors to the digital world for individuals with ID.
Presentation to 2022 IEEE-EMBS international conference
M. Revilla-Vallejo, C. Gómez, R. Hornero, M. Antonakakis, S. I. Dimitriadis, M. Zervakis, M. Á. Tola-Arribas, M. Cano, Y. Shigihara, H. Hoshi, J. Poza, “Neural Functional Connectivity of Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment using Finite Element Source Analysis”, 2022 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) – Special Session: Biomedical image and signal methods and applications for analysing human abnormal body responses, September 27-30, 2022, Ioannina, Greece.
Abstract
Complex properties of functional connectivity networks built using source-level neural electromagnetic signals are useful to characterize the alterations of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Source-level signals were obtained from 20 electroencephalographic and 20 magnetoencephalographic longitudinal recordings of MCI patients using a finite element-based approach with a real-head model of five tissues. Afterwards, a multilayer functional network was built using amplitude-to-amplitude coupling (AAC). Our results showed altered robustness of the AAC network comparing the MCI patients which progress to dementia with the MCI patients which do not progress.
Presentation to 2022 IEEE-EMBS international conference
A. Karasmanoglou, M. Antonakakis, F. Pancalidi and M. Zervakis “Monitoring short-time novelty of Electrocardiogram signals for epileptic seizure anticipation using Unsupervised Anomaly Detection”, 2022 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) – Special Session: Biomedical image and signal methods and applications for analysing human abnormal body responses, September 27-30, 2022, Ioannina, Greece.
Abstract
Epilepsy is one of the most common brain diseases with a major effect in more than 50 million people worldwide. Epilepsy is characterized by frequent recurrent seizures or “ictal” states during which a patient’s neurons become hyperexcitable causing uncontrollable muscular contractions which induce loss of mobility and balance resulting in injury or even death.
Presentation to PETRA 2022 conference
A. Grammatikopoulou, N. Grammalidis, M. Papadogiorgaki and M. Zervakis: A platform for health emergency warning and wandering behaviour detection supporting people with Intellectual Disability, The 15th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2022), June 29 – July 01, 2022, Corfu, Greece.
Abstract
People with intellectual disabilities (ID) encounter several problems in their daily life, regarding the interaction with their environment, the communication with their caregivers and their mobility. Mobile and modern smartwatch applications have great potential to provide early warning for medical emergencies, such as fever, oxygen saturation decline and, recently, Covid-19 disease. Furthermore, such apps can also track their position, if necessary, and even automatically detect wandering behaviour. In this paper, we propose a platform that will be able to a) automatically recognize health emergency situations and/or detection of wandering behaviour based on smartwatch/smartphone sensors, b) provide appropriate notifications to both user and caregiver when needed. The final system is currently developed within a Greek national research project and a pilot implementation will be evaluated by a Greek assistive center for people with ID.
Presentation to PETRA 2020 conference
M. Papadogiorgaki, V. Mezaris, N. Grammalidis, K. Grigoriadis, E. S. Bei, G. Livanos, M. E. Zervakis: Quality of Life Support System for People with Intellectual Disability, Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2020), June 2020, No 36, pp. 1-6.
DOI Bookmark:https://doi.org/10.1145/3389189.3397971
Abstract
People with intellectual disabilities (ID) encounter several problems regarding the interaction with their environment in terms of their daily needs, activities and communication. On this concept, an interactive support system with multiple functionalities is proposed, aiming at optimizing the opportunities provided to people with ID in order to cope with particular everyday issues. Specifically, it will provide information as well as entertainment, including creative and educational activities, through specialized learning programs. Additionally, it will automatically recognize health emergency situations, provide appropriate notifications, feature an emergency call button to contact the responsible caregivers, and support interaction using a specialized voice menu of instructions. The final system will be developed within a Greek research project and a pilot implementation will be evaluated by a Greek association of people with ID. The ultimate goal is to provide an affordable and user-friendly solution, tailored to the users’ needs.
