Abstract

Abstract
The use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology to train professionals has increased over the years due to its advantages over traditional training. This paper presents a study comparing the effectiveness of a Virtual Environment (VE) and a Real Environment (RE) designed to train firefighters. To measure the effectiveness of the environments, a new method based on participants' Heart Rate Variability (HRV) was used. This method was complemented with self-reports, in the form of questionnaires, of fatigue, stress, sense of presence, and cybersickness. An additional questionnaire was used to measure and compare knowledge transfer enabled by the environments. The results from HRV analysis indicated that participants were under physiological stress in both environments, albeit with less intensity on the VE. Regarding reported fatigue and stress, the results showed that none of the environments increased such variables. The results of knowledge transfer showed that the VE obtained a significant increase while the RE obtained a positive but non-significant increase (median values, VE: before - 4 after - 7, p = .003; RE: before - 4 after - 5, p = .375). Lastly, the results of presence and cybersickness suggested that participants experienced high overall presence and no cybersickness. Considering all results, the authors conclude that the VE provided effective training but that its effectiveness was lower than that of the RE.

Abstract
Clinical in-bed video-based human motion analysis is a very relevant computer vision topic for several relevant biomedical applications. Nevertheless, the main public large datasets (e.g. ImageNet or 3DPW) used for deep learning approaches lack annotated examples for these clinical scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce BlanketSet, an RGB-IRD action recognition dataset of sequences performed in a hospital bed. This dataset has the potential to help bridge the improvements attained in more general large datasets to these clinical scenarios. Information on how to access the dataset is available at rdm.inesctec.pt/dataset/nis-2022-004.

Abstract
Human motion analysis has seen drastic improvements recently, however, due to the lack of representative datasets, for clinical in-bed scenarios it is still lagging behind. To address this issue, we implemented BlanketGen, a pipeline that augments videos with synthetic blanket occlusions. With this pipeline, we generated an augmented version of the pose estimation dataset 3DPW called BlanketGen3DPW. We then used this new dataset to fine-tune a Deep Learning model to improve its performance in these scenarios with promising results. Code and further information are available at https://gitlab.inesctec.pt/brain-lab/brainlab-public/blanket-gen-releases.

Abstract
Agriculture work is physically demanding and the sector workers have a high incidence of musculoskeletal disorders. The shift to Agriculture 5.0 and the advancement of precision agriculture have involved the digitalization of this industry, but tend to marginalise the workers, though they are still essential to more thorough tasks that cannot be automated. In order to tackle the necessity to support the monitoring of agriculture workers, we developed quantification algorithms, incorporated in a mobile application, which calculate metrics based on the signals gathered by wearable sensors. Our proximity to the Douro region lead us to focus on metrics that could be more meaningful for viniculture, namely the quantification of trunk inclinations and shear cuts, very common in this production. The developed algorithms showed an error of 1.36 degrees for the calculus of inclination and 2.43 cuts for the prediction of cuts when tested with on-field data. These results suggest that the created system has the viability to be used by agricultures and give reliable feedback on their workers.