| Foreword |
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| Preface |
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| Section 1: Social and Empirical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems for Social Applications |
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Chapter 1 Social Robots for Pedagogical Rehabilitation: Trends and Novel Modeling Principles |
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1 | (21) |
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The use of robots as educational learning tools is quite extensive worldwide, yet it is rather limited in special education. In particular, the use of robots in the field of special education is under skepticism since robots are frequently believed to be expensive with limited capacity. The latter may change with the advent of social robots, which can be used in special education as affordable tools for delivering sophisticated stimuli to children with learning difficulties also due to preexisting conditions. Pilot studies occasionally demonstrate the effectiveness of social robots in specific domains. This chapter overviews the engagement of social robots in special education including the authors' preliminary work in this field; moreover, it discusses their proposal for potential future extensions involving more autonomous (i.e., intelligent) social robots as well as feedback from human brain signals. |
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Chapter 2 Addressing Special Educational Needs in Classroom With Cyber Physical Systems |
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22 | (22) |
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Aleksandra Ivaylova Yosifova |
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The focus of the current chapter is on humanoid robots as part of inclusive education. The investigation of the perception of and attitude of children and teachers to the application of cyber physical systems in education is essential. The data of a survey of the perception and attitude to the application of cyber physical systems in education of teachers and students from several Bulgarian schools are currently being examined. The attitude of teachers in the current study towards robots is positive. The attitude of students is rather neutral, and the difference between the two populations is statistically significant. Both teachers and students think of the robot as of a humanoid, capable of expression emotions. There is no difference between the attitudes towards the role and appearance of the robot of boys and girls. However, older children demonstrate a more negative attitude than younger children. |
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Chapter 3 Existing Robotics Technologies for Implementation of Special Education |
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44 | (18) |
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Collaborative robots (Cobots) are described from the point of view of the cognitive processes underlying the perception and emotional expression of learners based on individual human interacting with non-humanoid robots. The chapter describes a project that is aimed at the development and prototyping of mobile cognitive robotic system designed for service and assistance to people with disabilities. In creating this robot called "AnRI" (anthropomorphic robot intelligent) the experience from building the previous one was used, and it was used in the project Conduct Research into the Adoption of Robotic Technologies in Special Education by Children, Young People, and Pedagogical Specialists. It is described as a device of the robot and realization of cognitive processes to integrate knowledge-related information from sensors, actuators, and multiple sources of information vital to the process of serving people with disabilities. |
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Chapter 4 Learner Attitudes Towards Humanoid Robot Tutoring Systems: Measuring of Cognitive and Social Motivation Influences |
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62 | (24) |
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A novel framework for investigation of the learner attitude towards a humanoid robot tutoring system is proposed in the chapter. The theoretical approach attempts to understand both the cognitive motivation as well as the social motivation of the participants in a teaching session, held by a robotic tutor. For this aim, a questionnaire is delivered after the eye tracking experiment in order to record the type and amount of the learned material as well as the social motivation of the participants. The results of the experiments show significant effects of both cognitive and social motivation influences. It has been shown that cognitive motivation can be observed and analyzed on a very individual level. This is an important biometric feature and can be used to recognize individuals from patterns of viewing behaviors in a lesson. Guidelines, drawn from first-person accounts of learner participation in the study, are also formulated for achieving more intuitive interactions with humanoid robots intended to perform social jobs like being teachers or advisors. |
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Chapter 5 Emotion Model for a Robot |
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86 | (12) |
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Humans have several kinds of intelligence like logical thinking, decision making, social and behavioral intelligence, and many more. However, above all, emotional intelligence plays a vital role to drive action and event. To analyze the need of emotion for robot, it is required to investigate emotion in human and its socio-cognitive effect on event-action relation and behavior. Emotion is not required for a robot that is programmed just to perform certain commanded tasks. However, for a socially interactive assist robot in an environment of home, hospital, office, etc., emotion is important for decision making and to perform action. Moreover, emotion for robot is helpful to define the behavior and even to personalize the robot for its owner. The chapter aims to discuss three prominent questions regarding "emotion for a robot": 1) why we need emotion for robot, 2) what can be a probable solution as an emotion model, and 3) how emotion model can be devised for robot in a real-time environment. |
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Chapter 6 Designing an Extensible Domain-Specific Web Corpus for "Layfication": A Case Study in eCare at Home |
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98 | (58) |
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In the era of data-driven science, corpus-based language technology is an essential part of cyber physical systems. In this chapter, the authors describe the design and the development of an extensible domain-specific web corpus to be used in a distributed social application for the care of the elderly at home. The domain of interest is the medical field of chronic diseases. The corpus is conceived as a flexible and extensible textual resource, where additional documents and additional languages will be appended over time. The main purpose of the corpus is to be used for building and training language technology applications for the "layfication" of the specialized medical jargon. "Layfication" refers to the automatic identification of more intuitive linguistic expressions that can help laypeople (e.g., patients, family caregivers, and home care aides) understand medical terms, which often appear opaque. Exploratory experiments are presented and discussed. |
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Chapter 7 Merging Realities in Space and Time: Towards a New Cyber-Physical Eco-Society |
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156 | (28) |
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The rapid developments in online technology have provided young people with instant communication with each other and highly interactive and engaging visual game playing environments. The traditional ways of presenting museum and heritage assets no longer, therefore, hold their attention and provide them with an exciting and dynamic visitor experience. There is considerable interest in the use of augmented reality to allow visitors to explore worlds that are not immediately accessible to them and relating them to the real worlds around them. These are very effective in providing much needed contextual information, but appear rather static when compared with multi-player games environments where players interact with each other and robotic characters (non-player characters) in real time. By fusing these technologies, the authors postulate a new type of conceptually-led environment (cyber museum) that fuses real (physical), virtual worlds and cyber-social spaces into a single dynamic environment that provides a unique experience of exploring both worlds simultaneously. |
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Chapter 8 Digitization and Preservation of Digital Resources and Their Accessibility for Blind People |
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184 | (23) |
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This chapter explores digital technologies and their use in social applications for blind people. The digitization, creation, and indexing of digital resources aimed at using these resources for the needs of visually impaired people are presented. Standards for digitization, metadata, digital media storage, and media resources are presented. Internet technologies, semantic networks, and ontologies are of particular importance and can be used for blind learners. 3D technologies and 3D models are particularly suitable tools and give new opportunities for blind people. Website standards and website accessibility standards, as well as accessibility technologies for people with disabilities, are a means and a way of socializing. Both digital resources and robots are considered inaccessible to people with visual limitations. They are widespread on a global scale, but their use is rather limited in people with disabilities and in their special education. Particular attention is paid to the interdisciplinary use of digital technologies and social robots as training tools. |
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Chapter 9 Information Security Problem and Solution Approaches in Social Applications |
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207 | (15) |
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A social network is a portrayal of the social structure between actors, mostly individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familiar bonds. This chapter exhibits an exhaustive review of various security and protection issues in social networks that directly or indirectly affect the individual member of the network. Furthermore, different threats in social networks have been focused on that appear because of the sharing of interactive media content inside a social networking site. Additionally, the chapter also reports current cutting-edge guard arrangements that can shield social network clients from these dangers. |
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| Section 2: Engineering and Mathematical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems for Social Applications |
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Chapter 10 Geometric Simplification of Cyber-Physical Systems |
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222 | (18) |
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Human beings are always attracted to patterns, designs, and shapes. Even infants are attracted to the geometry around them. Angles, shapes, lines, line segments, curves, and other aspects of geometry are ubiquitous. Even the letters are constructed of lines, line segments, and curves. Nature also has an abundance of geometry. Patterns can be found on leaves, in flowers, in seashells, and many other places. Even the human bodies consist of patterns, curves, and line segments. Therefore, like many professions, the cyber-physical systems also require at least a foundational understanding of geometry. This chapter elucidates the use of geometry to simplify the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems to enhance the efficiency in social applications. The knowledge learned through the understanding of geometric principles provides not only an increase in safety but also an increase in the creation of tools, skill level enhancement, and aesthetically pleasing arrangements. |
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Chapter 11 Photoplethysmographic Sensors in Automatized Diagnosis of the Cardiovascular System: New Guidelines in Computer-Based Medical Diagnostics |
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240 | (26) |
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Galya Nikolova Georgieva-Tsaneva |
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The implementation of photoplethysmographic sensors in the data capture and data storage to analyze the cardiovascular condition of the patient is a new direction in automatized diagnosis of the cardiovascular system. This chapter contains a description of the use of photoplethysmographic sensors in a computerized patient cardiac monitoring system. The system consists of a portable device for collection of patient's cardiac data by applying photopletithysmographic method and software for mathematical analysis. An important diagnostic parameter that can be determined by the photoplethysmographic signal is the heart rate variability. The current application of the photoplethysmographic sensors in portable automatized system is of particular importance because the results of cardiac data analysis with these methods can provide not only detailed information about the cardiovascular status of the patients but also provide the opportunity to generate new knowledge about the diagnosis, and the prevention of pathology in cardiovascular diseases. |
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Chapter 12 Mathematical Processing of Cardiological Signals and Organization of Access to Holter Databases: Guide for Accessing Data From People With Visual Deficits |
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266 | (25) |
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Galya Nikolova Georgieva-Tsaneva |
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The study of human cardiovascular activity is one of the main methods for assessing the health of the human. It is performed in clinical conditions via electrocardiographic devices and in the daily life of a individuals through Holter monitoring. An important diagnostic parameter that can be determined by an electrocardiogram, taking into account the difference between successive heartbeat is heart rate variability-a widely used non-invasive method of measuring heart rate. This parameter makes it possible to assess the risk of various cardiac diseases such as angina, cardiac infarction, life-threatening arrhythmias, etc. This chapter presents the morphological bases of the cardio records, heart rate variability, and its impact on the healthy status of the individual. It describes the created cardiology base of prolongated Holter recordings for the purposes of scientific research project. Presented are internationally approved standards to provide web accessibility to internet-based data bases and other resources for people with disabilities. |
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Chapter 13 Introduction to Human Electroencephalography: Recording, Experimental Techniques, and Analysis |
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291 | (14) |
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This chapter is a general introduction to electroencephalography and popular methods used to manipulate EEG in order to elicit markers of sensory, cognitive perception, and behavior. With development of interdisciplinary research, there is increased curiosity among engineers towards biomedical research. Those using signal processing techniques attempt to employ algorithms to the real-life signals and retrieve characteristics of signals such as speech, echo, EEG, among others. The chapter briefs the history of human EEG and goes back to the origins and fundamentals of electrical activity in brain, how this activity reaches the scalp, methods to capture this high temporal activity. It then takes the reader through design methodology that goes behind EEG experiments, general schema for analysis of EEG signal. It describes the concept of early evoked potentials, which are known responses for study of sensory perception and are used extensively in medical science. It moves on to another popular manipulation of EEG technique used to elicit event related potentials. |
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Chapter 14 Towards the Real-Life EEG Applications: Practical Problems and Preliminary Solutions |
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305 | (13) |
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Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most popular approaches for brain monitoring in many research fields. While the detailed working flows for in-lab neuroscience-targeted EEG experiments conditions have been well established, carrying out EEG experiments under a real-life condition can be quite confusing because of various practical limitations. This chapter gives a brief overview of the practical issues and techniques that help real-life EEG experiments come into being, and the well-known artifact problems for EEG. As a guideline for performing a successful EEG data analysis with the low-electrode-density limitation of portable EEG devices, recently proposed techniques for artifact suppression or removal are briefly surveyed as well. |
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Chapter 15 Morphological Component Analysis for Biological Signals: A Sophisticated Way to Analyze Brain Activities in Various Movable Conditions |
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318 | (22) |
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This chapter explains the removal of artifacts from the multi-resource biological signals. Morphological components can be used to distinguish between the brain activities and artifacts that are contaminated with each other in many physical situations. In this chapter, a two-stage wavelet shrinkage and morphological component analysis (MCA) for biological signals is a sophisticated way to analyze the brain activities and validate the effectiveness of artifacts removal. The source components in the biological signals can be characterized by specific morphology and measures the independence and uniqueness of the source components. Undecimated wavelet transform (UDWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), local discrete cosine transform (LDCT), discrete sine transform (DST), and DIRAC are the orthonormal bases function used to build the explicit dictionary for the decomposition of source component of the biological signal in the morphological component analysis. The chapter discusses the implementation and optimization algorithm of the morphological component analysis. |
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Chapter 16 Attitude and Heading Reference System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles |
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340 | (25) |
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The methods that have been used in navigation over the centuries have changed as have the goals they serve. One of these methods is inertial navigation. Nowadays inertial navigation offers many advantages over other types of navigation. A major advantage is the lack of dependence on external transmitters or other devices, which means independence of the system. With the development of new technologies, the accuracy of these systems is increasing, which increases their applicability. An important aspect is the reduction in the price of sensors, which is a prerequisite for their application in new areas where they have not yet been offered. An important advantage of inertial navigation is the ability to give in real-time information about acceleration, speed, and location and the possibility of autonomous operation of the object. |
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Chapter 17 Control Methods for Bipedal Walking Robots With Integrated Elastic Elements |
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365 | (21) |
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In this chapter, the problem of controlling bipedal walking robots with integrated elastic elements is considered. A survey of the existing control methods developed for walking robots is given, and their applicability to the task of controlling the robots with elastic elements is analyzed. The focus of the chapter lies with the feedback controller design. The chapter studies the influence that the elastic elements modelled as a spring-damper system have on the behavior of the control system. The influence of the spring-damper parameters and the inertial parameters of the actuator gear box and the motor shaft on the generated control laws and the resulting peak torques are discussed. The changes in these effects associated with motor torque saturation and sensors nonlinearities are studied. It is shown that the introduction of torque saturation changes the way the elastic drive parameters affect the resulting behavior of the control system. The ways to use obtained results in practice are discussed. |
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| Compilation of References |
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386 | (48) |
| About the Contributors |
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434 | (5) |
| Index |
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439 | |
