Towards nation-wide analytical healthcare infrastructures: A privacy-preserving augmented knee rehabilitation case study

The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards the near-future privacy-preserving big data analytical healthcare platforms, capable of processing streamed or uploaded timeseries data or videos from patients. The experimental work includes a real-life knee rehabilitation video dataset capturing a set of exercises from simple and personalised to more general and challenging movements aimed for returning to sport. To convert video from mobile into privacy-preserving diagnostic timeseries data, we employed Google MediaPipe pose estimation. The developed proof-of-concept algorithms can augment knee exercise videos by overlaying the patient with stick figure elements while updating generated timeseries plot with knee angle estimation streamed as CSV file format. For patients and physiotherapists, video with side-to-side timeseries visually indicating potential issues such as excessive knee flexion or unstable knee movements or stick figure overlay errors is possible by setting a-priori knee-angle parameters. To address adherence to rehabilitation programme and quantify exercise sets and repetitions, our adaptive algorithm can correctly identify (91.67%-100%) of all exercises from side- and front-view videos. Transparent algorithm design for adaptive visual analysis of various knee exercise patterns contributes towards the interpretable AI and will inform near-future privacy-preserving, non-vendor locking, open-source developments for both end-user computing devices and as on-premises non-proprietary cloud platforms that can be deployed within the national healthcare system.

Left-handed representation in top 100 male professional tennis players: Multi-disciplinary perspectives

A commonly held opinion is that left-handed tennis players are overrepresented compared to the percentage of left-handers within the general population. This study provides the domain insights supported by data analysis that could help inform the decision of parents and coaches considering whether a child should start playing tennis as left- or right-handed when there is no strong arm-handed dominance. Compared to the commonly cited figure of about 10% of left-handed male population, data analysis from the official ATP web site for the top 100 ranked tennis players over the past decades (1985-2016) shows evidence of overrepresentation of left-handed elite tennis players (about 15%). The insights and data analysis can inform the handedness decision, advance coaching and strategic game concepts, enhance media coverage/analytics, left-handed facts and statistics, and inform tennis equipment manufacturing.

Towards Real-time Drowsiness Detection for Elderly Care

The primary focus of this paper is to produce a proof of concept for extracting drowsiness information from videos to help elderly living on their own. To quantify yawning, eyelid and head movement over time, we extracted 3000 images from captured videos for training and testing of deep learning models integrated with OpenCV library. The achieved classification accuracy for eyelid and mouth open/close status were between 94.3%-97.2%. Visual inspection of head movement from videos with generated 3D coordinate overlays, indicated clear spatiotemporal patterns in collected data (yaw, roll and pitch). Extraction methodology of the drowsiness information as timeseries is applicable to other contexts including support for prior work in privacy-preserving augmented coaching, sport rehabilitation, and integration with big data platform in healthcare.