Smart integration of sensors, computer vision and knowledge representation for intelligent monitoring and verbal human-computer interaction.

The details presented in this article revolve around a sophisticated monitoring framework equipped with knowledge representation and computer vision capabilities, that aims to provide innovative solutions and support services in the healthcare sector, with a focus on clinical and non-clinical rehabilitation and care environments for people with mobility problems. In contemporary pervasive systems most modern virtual agents have specific reactions when interacting with humans and usually lack extended dialogue and cognitive competences. The presented tool aims to provide natural human-computer multi-modal interaction via exploitation of state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision, speech recognition and synthesis, knowledge representation, sensor data analysis, and by leveraging prior clinical knowledge and patient history through an intelligent, ontology-driven, dialogue manager with reasoning capabilities, which can also access a web search and retrieval engine module. The framework's main contribution lies in its versatility to combine different technologies, while its inherent capability to monitor patient behaviour allows doctors and caregivers to spend less time collecting patient-related information and focus on healthcare. Moreover, by capitalising on voice, sensor and camera data, it may bolster patients' confidence levels and encourage them to naturally interact with the virtual agent, drastically improving their moral during a recuperation process.