World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world population is affected of back pain during his life. Current practices to analyze back problems are expensive, subjective, and invasive. In this work, we propose a novel tool for posture and range of movement estimation based on the analysis of 3D information from depth maps. Given a set of keypoints defined by the user, RGB and depth da...

When the human fingertip is pressed against a surface or bent, the hemodynamic state of the fingertip is altered due to mechanical interactions between the fingernail and bone. Normal force, shear force, and finger extension/flexion all result in different patterns of blood volume beneath the fingernail. This phenomenon has been exploited in order to detect finger forces and finger posture by c...

A Robotic Computer, which moves its monitor "head" and "neck" but has no explicit face, is being designed to interact with users in a natural way for applications such as learning, rapport-building, interactive teaching, and posture improvement. In all these applications, the robot will need to move in subtle ways that express its state, and that promote appropriate movements in the user, but t...

For federally managed fisheries in the USA, National Standard 1 requires that an acceptable biological catch be set for all fisheries and that this catch avoid overfishing. Achieving this goal for data-poor stocks, for which stock assessments are not possible, is particularly challenging. A number of harvest control rules have very recently been developed to set sustainable catches in data-poor...

Higher Order Statistical (HOS) techniques were first proposed over four decades ago. This paper is concerned with higher order statistical analysis of closed loop data for diagnosing the causes of poor control loop performance. The main contributions of this work are to utilize HOS tools such as cumulants, bispectrum and bicoherence to develop two new indices: the Non-Gaussianity Index (NGI) an...