Irene Ballester is a PhD student and research assistant at the Computer Vision Lab at TU Wien. She is a Marie Curie ITN fellow for the visuAAL project working on AI for dementia care.

She holds a BSc degree in Industrial Technology Engineering (2017) and an MSc degree in Industrial Engineering (2020), both from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Before joining CVL, Irene worked as a research trainee in the Department of Perception and Cognition at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Munich, where she completed her master’s thesis on dynamic SLAM.

Her current research focuses on Active Assisted Living (AAL) and computer vision.

Conference Proceedings 

• Adeli, V., Mehraban S., Ballester, I.  et al.,  (2024) “Benchmarking skeleton-based motion encoder models for clinical applications: Estimating Parkinson’s disease severity in walking sequences”. In International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, (Accepted at FG’2024).
• Ballester, I., Kampel, M. (2024). “Action Recognition from 4D Point Clouds for Privacy-Sensitive Scenarios in Assistive Contexts”. In:  International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs. (Accepted at ICCHP 24)
• Ballester, I., Gall, M.. Münzer, T., Kampel, M. (2024). “Vision-Based Toilet Assistant for People with Dementia in Real-Life Situations.” In: 2024 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops).
• Ballester, I., Kampel, M. (2022). “Automated vision-based toilet assistance for people with dementia”. In: Matteo Zallio (eds) Human Factors in Accessibility and Assistive Technology. AHFE (2022) International Conference. AHFE Open Access, vol 37. AHFE International, USA. http://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1001638
• Ballester, I., Mujirishvili, T., Kampel, M. (2022). “RITA: A Privacy-Aware Toileting Assistance Designed for People with Dementia”. In: Lewy, H., Barkan, R. (eds) Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare. PH 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 431. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99194-4_20
• Ballester, I., Fontan, A., Civera, J., Strobl, K. H., & Triebel, R. (2021). “DOT: Dynamic Object Tracking for Visual SLAM”. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 11705-11711). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561452

Posters 

• Ballester I., Gall M., Kampel M.  (2023) “Interaction Design of a Toileting Assistive System for People with Dementia“,  presented at WISH Symposium at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
• Ballester, I.,  Güemes , A., Navarro, A., Montiel, J.M.M. (2017) “Measurement of volumes and distances for the evaluation of breast surgery” in XXIII Congress of the Spanish Surgical Research Society, Madrid, 16-17 Nov., 2017.

Presentations

• “ToiletHelp: Leveraging 3D sensors to assist people with dementia in the toilet”. Jahreskongress der ÖGGG 2024 (Austrian Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology). UniWien. April 5, 2024.
• “AI for Dementia Care – 3rd VisuAAL Doctoral Seminar”. TU Wien. December 1, 2023.
• “Behavior Analysis for Dementia Care”. University of Toronto. November 8, 2023.
• “AI for Dementia Care – 2nd VisuAAL Doctoral Seminar”. Stockholm University. April 20, 2023
• “Transferability Workshop for AlgoCareProject “.  TU Wien. August 23, 2022.
• “AI for Dementia Care – 1st VisuAAL Doctoral Seminar”. RWTH Aachen. May 5, 2022