2015 Jack Perkins Prize

The 2015 Jack Perkins Prize for the best paper in the journal Medical Physics and Engineering has been awarded to the 2014 paper entitled "Automatic detection of wakefulness and rest intervals in actigraphic signals: A data driven approach" co--authored by Diego Martín-Martínez (former PhD student at LPI and currently at Ernst and Young), Pablo Casaseca-de-la-Higuera (currently at the University of West Scotland at Paisley), the physicians Jesús Andrés-de-Llano, J.R. Garmendia and Susana Alberola-López, and by Carlos Alberola-López, professor at the University of Valladolid. The added value of this paper is the absence of a traning stage, i.e., the method is fully automatic and it is based solely on models and thresholds determined from the data to be analyzed, hence the last part of the title "a data driven approach". This method has been applied to the analysis of actigraphic data in children to help diagnose ADHD as well as on senior people to analyze their sleep patterns.