Introduction The ability to build computing systems that can observe, understand and act on day-today physical human activity has long been a goal of computing research. Such systems could have profound conceptual and practical implications. Since the ability to reason and act based on activity is one of the central aspects of human intelligence, from a conceptual viewpoint such a system could ...

Canada is usually considered to be a country with abundant freshwater, but in its western prairie provinces (WPP), an area 1/5 the size of Europe, freshwater is scarce. European settlement of the WPP did not begin until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fortuitously, the period since European settlement appears to have been the wettest century of the past two millennia. The frequent, long...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of monitoring human activities using a network of sensors, including video cameras, in a smart home environment. We introduce an unsupervised method for mining a new kind of qualitative temporally structured activity models from sensor data. We present an application of our method to the recognition of activities of daily living in an elderly care context.

In this paper, we assume that the social reality and the communal meaning about this reality are reflected in each other. In object-related activity two kinds of congruent elements are constructed – objectivated elements oriented internally towards the human mind and objectified elements oriented externally towards the social reality. We propose that the mutual construction of mind and social r...

Thanks to their widespread usage, mobile devices have become one of the main sensors of human behaviour and digital traces left behind can be used as a proxy to study urban environments. Exploring the nature of the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity could thus be a crucial step towards understanding the full spectrum of human activities. Using 10 months of mobile phone records fr...

Healthcare and human activity monitoring has become the most important task in pervasive computing. The paper presents improvements for the present real time health monitoring systems in order to attain more accurate and quick results of the condition analysis of the person in contact with the sensors, the processed method makes sure that the process is efficient and also economically

Introduction Both in generating human activity and in the visual perception of it, the brain is confronted with the many degrees of freedom involved in the movement of body and limbs. Not unlikely, the perception of motor actions is supported by mechanisms that are very similar to those in control of these actions. Hints towards an interaction between perceptual and action processes can be foun...

Handwriting is a complex human activity that entails an intricate blend of cognitive, kinesthetic and perceptual-motor components. Children are expected to acquire a level of handwriting proficiency that enables them to make skillful use of handwriting as a tool to carry out their work at school. Poor handwriters have difficulty developing their writing skills and, as a result, often suffer in ...

A central principle of corporate social responsibility is that firms should treat their stakeholders in an ethical fashion and that this behaviour should embrace environmental, as well as economic and social considerations. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a theoretical exploration of the concept of sustainable development in its broadest sense and, in so doing, encourage researchers a...