Balazs Janko

University of Reading · Department of Biomedical Engineering

Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are a potential way to monitor the mobility of people outside clinical or laboratory settings at an acceptable cost. To increase accuracy, multiple IMUs can be used. By embedding multiple sensors into everyday clothing, it is possible to simplify having to put on individual sensors, ensuring sensors are correctly l...

Sit-to-stand transitions are an important part of activities of daily living and play a key role in functional mobility in humans. The sit-to-stand movement is often affected in older adults due to frailty and in patients with motor impairments such as Parkinson's disease leading to falls. Studying kinematics of sit-to-stand transitions can provide...

Sit-to-stand transitions are an important part of activities of daily living and play a key role in functional mobility in humans. The sit-to-stand movement is often affected in older adults due to frailty and in patients with motor impairments such as Parkinson's disease leading to falls. Studying kinematics of sit-to-stand transitions can provide...

Human activity recognition is progressing from automatically determining what a person is doing and when, to additionally analyzing the quality of these activities—typically referred to as skill assessment. In this chapter, we propose a new framework for skill assessment that generalizes across application domains and can be deployed for near-real-...

Small embedded systems, in our case wearable healthcare devices, have significant engineering challenges to reduce their power consumption for longer battery life, while at the same time supporting ever-increasing processing requirements for more intelligent applications. Research has primarily focused on achieving lower power operation through har...

To be successful, hand exoskeletons require customisable low encumbrance design with multi-compliant materials. This paper details the modification and testing of a fused filament fabrication printer to produce three categories of multi-compliant material that can be incorporated into the design of hand exoskeletons. Demonstration of the multi-comp...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the amount of energy that is required to successfully transmit information inside the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising packets. There are applications that require more than one BLE node to simultaneously transmit data. The BLE protocol utilizes a specific communication method termed advertising mode to...

Background: Falls and near falls are common among people with Parkinson's (PwP). To date, most wearable sensor research focussed on fall detection, few studies explored if wearable sensors can detect instability. Research question: Can instability (caution or near-falls) be detected using wearable sensors in comparison to video analysis? Method...

In this paper, we present SPW-1; a low-profile versatile wearable activity tracker that employs two ultra-low-power accelerometers and relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for wireless communication. Aiming for a low maintenance system, SPW-1 is able to offer a battery lifetime of multiple months. Measurements on its wireless performance in a real...

Wearable technologies are valuable tools that can encourage people to monitor their own well-being and facilitate timely health interventions. In this paper, we present SPW-2; a low-profile versatile wearable sensor that employs two ultra low power accelerometers and an optional gyroscope. Designed for minimum maintenance and a long-term operation...

This article tackles the problem of the estimation of simplified human limb kinematics for home health care. Angular kinematics are widely used for gait analysis, for rehabilitation and more generally for activity recognition. Residential monitoring requires particular sensor constraints to enable long-term user compliance. The proposed strategy is...

Technology has been seen as a possible solution to the increasing costs of healthcare and the globally aging population. It is known that many elderly people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as possible and remote monitoring can be a solution, but often such systems lack useful information or are prohibitive due to cost, ease of use/deploy...

Supercapacitors are likely to be adopted as power sources for wearable sensors; in particular where the sensor mechanism relies on energy harvesting. A specific advantage of supercapacitors over traditional batteries is their performance over large numbers of discharge cycles. Likewise, in the case of wearable devices, it is essential to efficientl...

Inadequate physical activity is a leading risk factor in public health and inactive people are more vulnerable to having chronic diseases. In addition, levels of physical activity may be an indicator of health problems in elderly individuals, a particular problem in many societies where there is a growing ratio of elderly people. Identifying levels...

Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relaye...

In this paper, we present SPW-1; a low-profile versatile wearable activity tracker that employs two ultra-low-power accelerometers and relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for wireless communication. Aiming for a low maintenance system, SPW-1 is able to offer a battery lifetime of multiple months. Measurements on its wireless performance in a real...

Self-report underpins our understanding of falls among people with Parkinson’s (PwP) as they largely happen unwitnessed at home. In this qualitative study, we used an ethnographic approach to investigate which in-home sensors, in which locations, could gather useful data about fall risk. Over six weeks, we observed five independently mobile PwP at...

Industrial robotic manipulators can be found in most factories today. Their tasks are accomplished through actively moving, placing and assembling parts. This movement is facilitated by actuators that apply a torque in response to a command signal. The presence of friction and possibly backlash have instigated the development of sophisticated compe...

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of a number of miniaturized wearable or implanted sensor nodes that are employed to monitor vital parameters of a patient over long duration of time. These sensors capture physiological data and wirelessly transfer the collected data to a local base station in order to be further processed. Almost all of...

Coordinating aerial and ground based robotic platforms together with sensor payloads is described and some results are presented on the deployment of these robots in an urban environment for reconnaissance, in particular to find military threats. This work was done with the aim of competing in the UK MOD Grand Challenge competition in August 2008....