Irish Examiner - Money & Jobs
03-MAR-06
A project using tiny cameras will create a digital diary which could help Alzheimer's sufferers, reports Mark Twomey.
A professor of computing at Dublin's Adaptive Information Cluster, who is leading a research project to create tiny cameras that can record a searchable digital picture diary of your entire day which could bring significant benefits to Alzheimer patients, has praised the work of Science Foundation Ireland for creating massive investment into research and development. Microsoft Research in Redmond, Seattle has teamed up with the Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) group at DCU and UCD to take part in the project. Microsoft has created a "SenseCam" a tiny camera which can be designed into jewellery, buttons or broaches to be unobtrusive or hidden.
Professor of Computing Alan Smeaton, who is leading the research, says: "The SenseCam takes individual images on ,a continuous basis, but in an intelligent way, utilising a couple of sensors one is an "accelerometer", a device that makes the camera aware of a person's (wearing the SenseCam)movements and it also uses an infra-red sensor which detects movement in the environment, like somebody moving in front of you. There is a third sensor, one which detects light so it will measure changes in exposure. "The micro camera takes up to 3000 digital pictures a day and DCU's image and video search technology can then be used to analyse the 3000 pictures and to isolate the "highlights" of the day. "One of the great things about the SenseCam is that it can take up to 3,000photos in a day, but this is also one of the worst things about it, as it could possibly contain over 20,000 images in a week and much much more in a given month," says Professor Alan Smeaton. "Our expertise means that we can manage large amounts of photographs and video clips by detecting when they are similar to one another and therefore redundant, so we will take photographs for one day and compare them with other photographs of that day and previous days and weeks, etc. "Imagine if you go through your normal day this device takes a picture every time somebody walks in front of you. At the end of the day when you upload all of the photographs to a computer, our role is to eliminate the redundant ones, the ones that aren't exciting, novel or different. "We will detect the content of the photograph, we will also detect the faces that appear in your photo automatically and compare with other faces that you may have come across so when a new face appears the system will recognise that as being a landmark event and flag that as being an important event in that day. "Smeaton says that, in effect, the SenseCam will take a couple of pics every minute, which is enough to grab the main things that may occur in the average persons average day "What we end doing every day once the images are uploaded is that we prune those images on a daily basis so that we don't end up with a massive database of images. We also don't have to compare tomorrow's with all of the database. We use clever techniques to summarise the days so, in effect, we end up comparing summaries with summaries," says Prof Smeaton. "This is exactly the kind of expertise we have in the Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) group at DCU.
In one of our projects we provide a searchable database of millions of images on the Internet, and our interest is that we can manage huge volumes of data. This technology does not use basement servers and huge network resources, it uses standard off-the-shelf desktop computers. "An important practical application of the research is for Alzheimer patients. "In the early stages of degenerative disease, when people start to forget large chunks of days, it is being demonstrated that when they have been shown pictures of what they have seen, it can help 'them' to re-remember. Its not curing the disease, or postponing the onset of it, what it is doing is kick-starting the remembering process. The Sense- Cam is providing the visual assistance, as in the case of the visual diary, and there is anecdotal evidence not clinical trials, just anecdotal evidence to say that this can help people to remember things that they have forgotten," says Prof Smeaton. "Another application which is completely different for the Sense- Cam is tourism, a miniaturised device much smaller than the prototype you will see in use could be worn by a tourist, and it just keeps on taking pictures for a three-day break, and in the end it will summarise them for you so you get an automatic visual summary of your weekend away without having to bring a camera or worry about it.
The Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) was established two years ago and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland. It is a multi-disciplinary research group involving leading researchers from UCD and DCU. "Our specific role in this project is that Microsoft in the US have contracted this aspect of the research activity back to us, and this is a great story for Ireland because we have organisations like Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland putting large amounts of money into research in Ireland," says Prof Smeaton. "The recent report from Forfas indicated that this was at a level of investment of 51 Vz-2 billion from both state and private funding, and the great payback for that is when those giant multi-nationals choose locations in Ireland to fund their research activity. When Microsoft sent out the call for this research we weren't the only organisation to respond. "Microsoft employ thousands of people here already in the areas of product development, which is one level of activity which is great to see but when you see them funding our research activity it is a real positive endorsement of the work of Science Foundation Ireland." Louise Williams, daughter of Lyndsay Williams, Microsoft researcher and inventor of the SenseCam, is shown here with a prototype of the SenseCam.