Activities & Announcements                                                                     (updated 3/26/2006)
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CareMedia Posters and Presentations presented by Dr. Ashok Bharucha:

Continuous Audiovisual Capture in a Dementia Unit: Recruitment and Ethical Challenges. Ashok J. Bharucha. 58th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Orlando, FL, November 20, 2005

CareMedia: Automated Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care. Bharucha, A. J. Under the panel, Innovations in Geriatric Care (Co-Chairs: Mark Miller, MD, Patricia Arean, PhD). Annual Meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 10-13, 2006. [View Abstract]

CareMedia: Automated Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care. Bharucha, A. J., Atkeson, C., Stevens, S., Chen, D., Wactlar, H., Pollock, B., Dew, M. A. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 12, 2006.

CareMedia: Automated Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care. Bharucha, A. J., Pollock, B.G., Dew, M.A., Atkeson, C., Chen, D., Stevens, S., Wactlar, H., Poster presenting the feasibility pilot data at the 29th Annual Meeting of the American Medical Directors Association (AMDA), Dallas, Texas, March 17, 2006. [View Abstract]

Carnegie Mellon Scientists Present at Columbia University Seminar
Presented at:

Informedia & CareMedia: Automatic Digital Video
Thursday, February 16, 2006

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), at Columbia University welcomed Howard Wactlar, Mike Christel and Scott Stevens at their February 16, 2006, University Seminar in New Media Teaching & Learning. The educational application of Informedia and CareMedia were demonstrated and discussed.

Informedia: Informedia digital video research focuses on improving access to broadcast video information through speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing techniques. Automatically derived descriptors for the video are used to construct information visualization interfaces for querying, summarizing, and browsing the video. For over 12 years, Informedia has recorded and analyzed several hours a day of CNN, Chinese, and Arabic news video.

CareMedia: CareMedia research centers on the automatic analysis of audio and video for behavioral research. Their most recent work captured video from 23 cameras in public spaces of a nursing home dementia ward. Video was captured from each camera, 24 hours a day for 25 days. The data collected totaled over 13,000 hours of video stored on 35 Terabytes of hard disks. Clearly, this volume of data precludes manual analysis.

CareMedia's interdisciplinary research is developing, integrating, and refining a suite of tools supporting the automatic collection, annotation, access, analysis, and archiving of such massive amounts of behavioral data. These tools capture a continuous audiovisual record of individual and group activity in various settings and apply machine intelligence technology to automatically process that record for efficient use by analytical observers to monitor situational behavior over time. The annotated record provides a level of completeness not feasible with human observers, and allows, for the first time, large-scale longitudinal clinical and behavioral research based on continuously captured and processed data, enabled through extensible interfaces accessing such voluminous records in a user-friendly utilitarian manner.

CareMedia presents at the White House Conference on Aging --
December 12-14, 2005.

Press Release: Carnegie Mellon, Pitt demo technology to help elderly at CAST exhibition in Washington

The White House Conference on Aging occurs once a decade to make aging policy recommendations to the President and Congress, and to assist the public and private sectors in promoting dignity, health, independence and economic security of current and future generations of older persons. The 2005 White House Conference on Aging occurs as the first wave of the baby boom generation prepares for retirement, creating an important opportunity to creatively assess aging in America and improve the lives of older Americans.

As part of the Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) Technolgy Pavilion, CareMedia presented along with other technology researchers from Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. There were over 30 technology displays showcased at the Pavilion from companies and universitiaround the country. Technologies featured ranged from those just entering the market to those that could be available within the next ten years.

Howard Wactlar Co-Chairs the UbiHealth 2004: Third International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing for Pervasive Healthcare Applications
Presented at UbiComp 2004, The Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Nottingham, England, September 7-10, 2004

The UbiHealth 2004 workshop is focused on bringing ubiquitous computing technology to bear on challenges in health and social care. It includes technology to support people at home or in care facilities, and to broadly improve the delivery of health and social care. The aim of pervasive care is to deliver continuous, appropriate and effective aids so that the recipient is provided with an improved quality of life. This spans assisting people with cognitive, perceptual and mobility impairments independent of age. If these aids are used by the care provider, the goal is further to deliver that care more efficiently, less stressfully, and always with compassion. The aim of the workshop is to build a global community of researchers who are working in this combined context. This year our emphasis will be to examine real world applications of ubiquitous computing to health and social care, considering how it can be introduced, evaluated and delivered for the benefit patients and caregivers within government regulatory frameworks. The workshop will explore these issues through the presentation of papers describing the participant's experiences with early deployment, their visions for future research and application opportunities, and a panel question and answer session. Experts will be invited to initiate the panel discussion with a talk on ethical issues.

Presentation at: IEEE IT and Public Policy Symposium on Addressing the Healthcare Needs of our Aging Population with Technology, Washington, DC, June 4, 2004

Howard Wactar presented "CareMedia: Video and Sensor Analysis for Geriatric Care" at the symposium on Addressing the Healthcare Needs of Our Aging Population with Technology. The objective of the symposium is to improve the role of computer, communication and other electronic technologies to improve the quality and cost-efficiency of geriatric care. This symposium was sponsored by: IEEE, MitreTek Systems and Intel.

This symposium was also featured in IEEE-USA in the News

Congratulations to Wei-Hao Lin who won the Physiological Data Modeling Contest at the 21st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'04), Alberta, Canada, July 4-8, 2004

Wei-Hao's white paper Informedia at PDMC details is work. Physiological data offers many challenges to the machine learning community including dealing with large amounts of data, sequential data, issues of sensor fusion, and a rich domain complete with noise, hidden variables, and significant effects of context. The Physiological Data Modeling Contest will use data collected using BodyMedia wearable body monitors. These collect and store continuous data from multiple sensors packaged in an unobtrusive armband. A dataset comprising several months of data from more than a dozen subjects exists and will be provided by BodyMedia for the contest. Competitors will receive the training data early in 2004 and will submit entries consisting of predictions for the test data shortly before ICML 2004. At the workshop, the performance of each entrant will be announced, a winner rewarded, and the various techniques discussed and analyzed in detail. A small prize will be awarded to the winning competitors, and honorable mentions given to the best competitor on each sub-part of the competition. Additionally, the organizers will help collect the best of the entrants' white papers into an article for a technical journal or magazine. For more information on this context, click here.

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