Digital Healthcare, Mobile Development, HoloLens and more! Andreas Jakl is a lecturer for Digital Healthcare @ St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences and Microsoft MVP for Windows Development.
In this article, we add a click listener to a RecyclerView on Android. Advanced language features of Kotlin make it far easier than it has been with Java. However, you need to understand a few core concepts of the Kotlin language.
To get started with the RecyclerView, follow the steps in the previous article or check out the finished project on GitHub. Continue reading “How To: RecyclerView with a Kotlin-Style Click Listener in Android”
RecyclerView is the best approach to show scrolling lists on Android. It ensures high performance & smooth scrolling, while providing list elements with flexible layouts. Combined with modern language features of Kotlin, the code overhead of the RecyclerView is greatly reduced compared to the traditional Java approach.
In this article, we’ll walk through a sample scenario: a scrolling list for a maintenance app, listing machine parts: “PartsList”. However, this scenario only affects the strings we use – you can copy this approach for any use case you need. Continue reading “Kotlin & RecyclerView for High Performance Lists in Android”
In this last part, we bring the vital sign check list to life. Artificial Intelligence interprets assessments spoken in natural language. It extracts the relevant information and manages an up-to-date, browser-based checklist. Real-time communication is handled through Web Sockets with Socket.IO.
The example scenario focuses on a vital signs checklist in a hospital. The same concept applies to countless other use cases.
In this article, we’ll query the Microsoft LUIS Language Understanding service from a Node.js backend. The results are communicated to the client through Socket.IO.
In the previous article, we verified that our LUIS service works fine. Now, it’s time to connect all components. The aim is to query LUIS from our Node.js backend. Continue reading “Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 4: Real-World AI Service & Socket.IO”
Training Artificial Intelligence to perform real-life tasks has been painful. The latest AI services now offer more accessible user interfaces. These require little knowledge about machine learning. The Microsoft LUIS service (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) performs an amazing task: interpreting natural language sentences and extracting relevant parts. You only need to provide 5+ sample sentences per scenario.
In this article series, we’re creating a sample app that interprets assessments from vital signs checks in hospitals. It filters out relevant information like the measured temperature or pupillary response. Yet, it’s easy to extend the scenario to any other area.
After creating the backend service and the client user interface in the first two parts, we now start setting up the actual language understanding service. I’m using the LUIS Language Understanding service from Microsoft, which is based on the Cognitive Services of Microsoft Azure. Continue reading “Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 3: LUIS Language Understanding Service”
The vision: automatic checklists, filled out by simply listening to users explaining what they observe. The architecture of the sample app is based on a lightweight architecture: HTML5, Node.js + the LUIS service in the cloud.
Such an app would be incredibly useful in a hospital, where nurses need to perform and log countless vital sign checks with patients every day.
In part 1 of the article, I’ve explained the overall architecture of the service. In this part, we get hands-on and start implementing the Node.js-based backend. It will ultimately handle all the central messaging. It communicates both with the client user interface running in a browser, as well as the Microsoft LUIS language understanding service in the Azure Cloud.
Node.js is a great fit for such a service. It’s easy to setup and uses JavaScript for development. Also, the code runs locally for development, allowing rapid testing. But, it’s easy to deploy it to a dedicated server or the cloud later.
I’m using the latest version of Node.js (currently 9.3) and the free Visual Studio Code IDE for editing the script files. Continue reading “Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 2: Node.js Backend & User Interface”
We don’t have a Christmas tree in our apartment. But in today’s world, this is what Augmented Reality is for, right? Therefore, I decided to create an AR Christmas Tree in 5 minutes. This also gave me an opportunity to check out the new Google ARCore Developer Preview 2.
First off, you need a 3D model of a Christmas tree. Two of the most accessible sources are Google Poly and Microsoft Remix 3D. Sticking to models created directly by Google and Microsoft, these two are the choices:
During the last few years, cognitive services became immensely powerful. Especially interesting is natural language understanding. Using the latest tools, training the computer to understand real spoken sentences and to extract information is reduced to a matter of minutes. We as humans no longer need to learn how to speak with a computer; it simply understands us.
I’ll show how to use the Language Understanding Cognitive Service (LUIS) from Microsoft. The aim is to build an automated check-list for nurses working at hospitals. Every morning, they record the vital sign of every patient. At the same time, they document the measurements on paper checklists.
With the new app developed in this article, the process is much easier. While checking the vital signs, nurses usually talk to the patients about their assessments. The “Vital Signs Checklist” app filters out the relevant data (e.g., the temperature or the pupillary response) and marks it in a checklist. Nurses no longer have to pick up a pen to manually record the information.
In this article, we’ll create a simple app that uses the natural language understanding APIs (“LUIS”) of the Microsoft Cognitive Services on Microsoft Azure. The service extracts the relevant data from freely spoken assessments.
LUIS just went from preview state to general availability. This important milestone brings SLAs and more worldwide availability regions. So, it’s a great time to start using it! Continue reading “Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 1: Introduction & Architecture”
ARCore has a great feature – light estimation. The ARCore SDK estimates the global lighting, which you can use as input for your own shaders to make the virtual objects fit in better with the captured real world. In this article, I’m taking a closer look at how the light estimation works in the current ARCore preview SDK.
Note: this article is based on the ARCore developer preview 1. Some details changed in the developer preview 2 – although the generic process is still similar. Continue reading “Real-Time Light Estimation with Google ARCore”
Following the basic project setup of the first part of this article, we now get to the fascinating details of the ARCore SDK. Learn how to find and visualize planes. Additionally, I’ll show how to instantiate objects and how to anchor them to the real world using Unity.
The ARCore example contains a simple script to visualize planes, point clouds and to place the Android mascot. We’ll create a shorter version of the script here. Continue reading “Getting Started with Google ARCore, Part 2: Visualizing Planes & Placing Objects”
ARCore by Google is still in preview and only runs on a select few phones including the Google Pixel 2. In this article, I’m creating a demo app for ARCore using the ARCore SDK for Unity (Preview 1).
It’s following up on the blog post series where I segmented a 3D model of the brain from an MRI image. Instead of following these steps, you can download the final model used in this article for free from Google Poly.
Previously, the AR efforts of Google were focused on the Tango platform. It included additional hardware depth sensors for accurate recognition of the environment. Unfortunately, only two phones are commercially available equipped with the necessary hardware to run Tango – the Asus ZenFone AR and the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro. Continue reading “Getting Started with Google ARCore, Part 1: Project Setup & ARCore SDK”