ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

On the Deployment of Healthcare Applications over Fog Computing Infrastructure

Fog computing is considered as the most promising enhancement of the traditional cloud computing paradigm in order to handle potential issues introduced by the emerging Interned of Things (IoT) framework at the network edge. The heterogeneous nature, the extensive distribution and the hefty number of deployed IoT nodes will disrupt existing functional models, creating confusion. However, IoT will facilitate the rise of new applications, with automated healthcare monitoring platforms being amongst them. This paper presents the pillars of design for such applications, along with the evaluation of a working prototype that collects ECG traces from a tailor-made device and utilizes the patient's smartphone as a Fog gateway for securely sharing them to other authorized entities. This prototype will allow patients to share information to their physicians, monitor their health status independently and notify the authorities rapidly in emergency situations. Historical data will also be available for further analysis, towards identifying patterns that may improve medical diagnoses in the foreseeable future

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

SIERRA CLUB, CHEMICAL WEAPONS WORKING GROUP, AND VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA FOUNDATION v. Utah Solid and Hazardous Waste Control Board & U.S. Army and EG&G Defense Materials Inc.: Brief of Respondent

On Petition For Review of Decision of the Utah Solid And Hazardous Waste Control Boar

ADDRESSING CASCADING CONSEQUENCES FOR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND VITAL SOCIETAL FUNCTIONS IN FLOODING EVENTS

Although there have been significant advances in the research field of critical infrastructures and vital societal functions during the last decade, there still exist many challenges in implementing and carrying out studies in practice. One of these challenges is a feasible method for mapping, analysing and visualising the cascading consequences that arise for critical infrastructures and societal functions affected by large spatial hazards. The presented study is the result from commissioned work for the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), aiming at contributing to improved risk, vulnerability and continuity management for regions in Sweden at risk of being affected by severe spatial hazards. The study takes it basis from, and connects to, ongoing work in Sweden relating to the risk of severe flooding events in accordance to the EU Floods Directive and work related to critical infrastructure protection in accordance to the EU Directive on European Critical Infrastructures. The results from the study where mainly derived through a literature review and workshops, utilising a flood prone region in Sweden as a case. The literature review focused on methods and approaches, both scientific and in grey literature, for estimation, visualisation and weighing of consequence arising for critical infrastructures and vital societal functions for large spatial hazards. Here a specific focus was on literature addressing the issue of interdependencies and the use of GIS. The workshops involved participants from critical infrastructure operators, municipalities, regional county boards, MSB, Statistics Sweden, among others, aiming at the practical needs and challenges for a method and for testing the developed method. From the literature review it was clear that most studies focus on analysing the direct consequences of large spatial hazards. Only few studies address the indirect consequences that arise due to interdependencies, revealing that indirect consequences can be as high or higher than the direct consequences. This necessitates the need for addressing indirect consequences systematically. The review also highlighted that the required underlying data is not easily attainable and comes with several challenges with respect to collection, analysis and visualization of the results for decision making. The developed method is concluded to both fulfil a need, as expressed by the participants in the workshops, and was considered as a feasible approach to start addressing the issue of cascading consequences during large spatial events. However, we also conclude that, based on the literature review and the practical challenges present in this area, ample research opportunities exist

WEHST: Wearable Engine for Human-Mediated Telepresence

This dissertation reports on the industrial design of a wearable computational device created to enable better emergency medical intervention for situations where electronic remote assistance is necessary. The design created for this doctoral project, which assists practices by paramedics with mandates for search-and-rescue (SAR) in hazardous environments, contributes to the field of human-mediated teleparamedicine (HMTPM). Ethnographic and industrial design aspects of this research considered the intricate relationships at play in search-and-rescue operations, which lead to the design of the system created for this project known as WEHST: Wearable Engine for Human-Mediated Telepresence. Three case studies of different teams were carried out, each focusing on making improvements to the practices of teams of paramedics and search-and-rescue technicians who use combinations of ambulance, airplane, and helicopter transport in specific chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) scenarios. The three paramedicine groups included are the Canadian Air Force 442 Rescue Squadron, Nelson Search and Rescue, and the British Columbia Ambulance Service Infant Transport Team. Data was gathered over a seven-year period through a variety of methods including observation, interviews, examination of documents, and industrial design. The data collected included physiological, social, technical, and ecological information about the rescuers. Actor-network theory guided the research design, data analysis, and design synthesis. All of this leads to the creation of the WEHST system. As identified, the WEHST design created in this dissertation project addresses the difficulty case-study participants found in using their radios in hazardous settings. As the research identified, a means of controlling these radios without depending on hands, voice, or speech would greatly improve communication, as would wearing sensors and other computing resources better linking operators, radios, and environments. WEHST responds to this need. WEHST is an instance of industrial design for a wearable “engine” for human-situated telepresence that includes eight interoperable families of wearable electronic modules and accompanying textiles. These make up a platform technology for modular, scalable and adaptable toolsets for field practice, pedagogy, or research. This document details the considerations that went into the creation of the WEHST design

Applying human-like intelligence to future generation network to improve communication efficiency

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257).In recent decades, communications network has evolved at drastic speed to provide advanced and intelligent services. This strengthening service provision owes to the successful establishment of various intelligent networks and the use of artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and social networking in communications. It has consequently endowed network users with abundant choices of communication services. While these communications services are bringing convenience to human lives, people in turn are performing more tasks. The current network with its large number of available communications services is then often burdening network users with the complexity and inflexibility in using these services. In particular, the network lacks the initiative and the ability to investigate a user’s most recent communication needs and subsequently adjust the manner of service provision according to these needs and user connecting possibilities. The network needs to be more intelligent to handle these problems. We therefore propose importing human-like intelligence into the network to facilitate communication-session processing according to user needs