I-Corps: Video Interface for Behavioral Evaluation

The stated goal of the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Teams Program is to “identify NSF-funded researchers who will receive additional support – in the form of mentoring and funding – to accelerate innovation that can attract subsequent third-party funding.” After two rounds of interviews with the staff members from the I-Corps program, we have been invited to submit a proposal for participation. This is a short proposal (5-page) which will only undergo internal review in an expedited track (1 month turnaround). Our innovation is a novel audio-visual monitoring system called the Video Interface for Behavioral Evaluation (VIBE) for the purposes of collecting data on behaviors for clinical use. The VIBE combines state-of-the-art multi-modal surveillance, privacy protection, and event coding technologies. It is currently being developed under the NSF grant 1018241 titled “CIF:Small:Privacy Protection of Multimedia Processing” between September, 2010 to August, 2014. The goals of the VIBE system are to provide (1) a pervasive audio-visual monitoring system with secure cloud storage that requires little maintenance, (2) a variety of audio-visual privacy protection filters to safeguard sensitive information while providing sufficient clinical values for different stakeholders, and (3) various intelligent action and event detectors that assist clinicians in coding target behaviors. This technology is expected to improve clinicians’ capability in collecting and analyzing audio-visual data useful for diagnostics and outcome assessments.