Varela Aldas, José
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Varela Aldas, José
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Ambato
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josevarela@uti.edu.ec
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57192546163

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Development of a Scale Prototype of Smart Bed Controlled Using a Mobile Application

2022 , Soberon J.C. , Gamboa G. , Castillo F. , Palacios-Navarro G. , Varela Aldas, José

The need for a technological system for health care for sick people is evident. This work develops a scale prototype of a smart bed controlled through a mobile application. The electronic design consists of two servomotors that act to position the bed; these actions can be activated through the mobile application. At the same time, the patient can be monitored by a camera and an infrared thermometer that sends the data to the application through the Internet. The local operating code is designed so that the position of the bed changes automatically according to a preset sequence. The electronic system is based on the ESP32 board; this chip integrates WiFi communication that allows the connection of the bed with the cloud-based in Firebase. Temperature tests were carried out with the help of people to ensure that the data taken was correct. In addition, bed positions and reception of camera images were tested on a mannequin. As a result, adequate communication was obtained between the mobile application and all the devices installed in the smart bed. Finally, an acceptance test is applied that validates this proposal with a good score. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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Virtual Reality applications based on activities of daily living (ADL) for cognitive diagnosis and rehabilitation

2022 , Buele, Jorge , Varela Aldas, José , Palacios-Navarro G.

Traditionally, screening tools are available to help diagnose a person's cognitive problem. Therefore, rehabilitation techniques are lab exercises that lack adequate ecological validity. In this paper, we propose to establish the projection of a methodology for the development of serious games based on activities of daily living (ADL). Both for real and immersive environments, to assess what provides better results when applied in healthy patients at first, but with a focus on those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. It is expected that when this research is completed, precedents will be established for the development of new proposals based on virtual environments. © 2022 IEEE.

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A comparison in the teaching of programming for development kits with IoT

2022 , Varela Aldas, José , Miranda M. , Palacios-Navarro G.

Education 4.0 promotes programming at all training levels, making block programming a compatible alternative, including developing applications with hardware. This paper compares UIFLOW and Arduino IDE in programming the M5Stack Core2 development kit for education. The designed task allows students to read, locally view, send, and remotely view the inertial sensor data integrated into the device. The programming in UIFLOW application uses block programming; this software is for the M5stack kits. To program in C code using Arduino IDE is need to install the necessary libraries for compatibility with M5Stack. Students of computer science engineering implement the program using both programming languages. The compared data are development times and acceptance of the participants. The results show the coding times of the program and the scores obtained in the acceptance test, determining faster times in the case of block programming and a better acceptance rate that demonstrates the advantages of using this language in programming education. © 2022 IEEE.

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Immersive virtual reality app to promote healthy eating in children

2020 , Fuentes E.M. , Varela Aldas, José , Palacios-Navarro G. , García-Magariño I.

An immersive virtual reality application was developed as a serious game to support children on their decisions about food, the system was composed by the Gear VR (Viewer and controller), and a phone which contains the mobile application developed in Unity, providing the immersive environment, the platform was based on a path where the player has to go through it choosing between different sort of meals and also between different physical activities, the effect of balanced diet plus adequate physical activity seems reflected on the avatar previously chosen by the user, the app was tested on 12 children between 8 and 10 years old during one week, children participated on the study after receiving an informed consent, analyzing the tendencies of food choice on children before and after, a notorious positive effect could be seen on the users according to the avatar analyzed at the end of the round, besides a System usability ore was also applied to evaluate the degree of usability of the app, reaching a ore of 88.33% which rates the app as very usable, this results were even better than what was planned at the beginning of the experience. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Immersive virtual reality app for mild cognitive impairment

2019 , Varela Aldas, José , Palacios-Navarro G. , García-Magariño I.

A characteristic symptom of neurodegenerative diseases is the deterioration of the memory. These problems usually worsen with the progression of the disease, being the cognitive rehabilitation an important tool in order to slow down the progress of the disease in the patient. This work presents the development of a mobile virtual reality application through a serious game to boost the memory by solving mazes in three levels of difficulty. The application uses the Gear VR glasses to provide the user with an immersive experience. The results present the proposed application, showing the components of the virtual environment. © 2019, Associacao Iberica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informacao. All rights reserved.

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Fog computing for assisting and tracking elder patients with neurodegenerative diseases

2019 , García-Magariño I. , Varela Aldas, José , Palacios-Navarro G. , Lloret J.

U.S. hospitals transmit and manage great amounts of information with the avenue of Internet of things. This work departs from a real need detected by healthcare centers and hospitals in U.S., Spain and Ecuador. This work focuses on the application of fog computing for obtaining an app rich in visual content that will not overload U.S. hospital infrastructures even if it was used massively. The simulation results showed that the proposed fog-based approach could support a regular use (one day out of three on average) by 1% of patients of one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in 14 states in U.S (i.e. 36,400 patients in total) with only a traffic of 528 KB per day on average when using one hospital per state. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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Head-mounted display-based application for cognitive training

2020 , Varela Aldas, José , Palacios-Navarro G. , Amariglio R. , García-Magariño I.

Virtual Reality (VR) has had significant advances in rehabilitation, due to the gamification of cognitive activities that facilitate treatment. On the other hand, Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) produces outstanding results due to the interactive features with the user. This work introduces a VR application for memory rehabilitation by walking through a maze and using the Oculus Go head-mounted display (HMD) technology. The mechanics of the game require memorizing geometric shapes while the player progresses in two modes, autonomous or manual, with two levels of difficulty depending on the number of elements to remember. The application is developed in the Unity 3D video game engine considering the optimization of computational resources to improve the performance in the processing and maintaining adequate benefits for the user, while the generated data is stored and sent to a remote server. The maze task was assessed with 29 subjects in a controlled environment. The obtained results show a significant correlation between participants’ response accuracy in both the maze task and a face–pair test. Thus, the proposed task is able to perform memory assessments. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

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Development of a WBGT Index Meter Based on M5Stack Core2

2022 , Varela Aldas, José , Buele, Jorge , Mosquera H. , Palacios-Navarro G.

Environmental working conditions are of crucial importance for job performance. Thus, thermal comfort helps the human body to withstand long working hours without stress. There are several indicators of heat stress, but one of the most complete is the WBGT (Wet Bulb Globe Temperature) index, which considers 3 temperatures to determine the heat stress index, the dry bulb temperature, the wet-bulb temperature, and the temperature of radiation. For this reason, this document describes the process of building a low-cost heat stress meter. Two DHT22 sensors and M5Stack Core2 controller are used that includes a screen for the presentation of the information. The user interface includes buttons for changing the view type to show indoor or outdoor results, as well as the battery level. In addition, all this information is sent to the IoT platform of ThingSpeak through internet access using WiFi communication, this information can be displayed graphically from a web browser and from anywhere in the world. The data are compared with a commercial meter to validate this prototype, obtaining an error of less than 5% and no significant differences were found. In this way, it is possible to offer equipment for industrial solutions, but at a fraction of its cost. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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A virtual reality-based cognitive telerehabilitation system for use in the covid-19 pandemic

2021 , Varela Aldas, José , Buele, Jorge , Lorente P.R. , García-Magariño I. , Palacios-Navarro G.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s lives and the way in which certain services are provided. Such changes are not uncommon in healthcare services and they will have to adapt to the new situation by increasing the number of services remotely offered. Limited mobility has resulted in interruption of treatments that traditionally have been administered through face-to-face modalities, especially those related to cognitive impairments. In this telerehabilitation approach, both the patient and the specialist physician enter a virtual reality (VR) environment where they can interact in real time through avatars. A spaced retrieval (SR) task is implemented in the system to analyze cognitive performance. An experimental group (n = 20) performed the SR task in telerehabilitation mode, whereas a control group (n = 20) performed the SR task through a traditional face-to-face mode. The obtained results showed that it is possible to carry out cognitive rehabilitation processes through a telerehabilitation modality in conjunction with VR. The costeffectiveness of the system will also contribute to making healthcare systems more efficient, overcoming both geographical and temporal limitations. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

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Internet of things (IoT)-based assistive system for patients with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA): a case report

2024 , Varela Aldas, José , vila-Armijos W. , Palacios-Navarro G.

Purpose: Assistive technologies based on IoT can contribute to improve quality of living of patients with severe motor difficulties by providing partial or total independence. The aim of this work was to analyse the usability and performance of an assistive system based on the IoT when is evaluated by a child patient with spinal muscular atrophy type 1 (SMA-I). Materials and methods: The study involved a child with SMA-I and his caregiver. The materials used include an M5Stack Core2 kit, a mobile app, and a smart switch based on the ESP-01S card. The patient sends requests to the caregiver from the app installed on the M5Stack Core2 to a mobile app, and controls smart switches located in the rooms. The system was tested by the participants for a period of 30 days to later evaluate its usability and performance. Results: The results show that the control function of smart switches is the most used and there is no decrease in interactions over the days for the system in general. In addition, the scores obtained from both usability tests (patient and caregiver) were 87.5% and 90%, respectively. The average performance of the entire system was 93.33%. Conclusion: The application of assistive technologies based on the IoT allows obtaining a practical solution that improves the development of daily activities in a patient with SMA-I. © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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