Presence and rehabilitation: toward second-generation virtual reality applications in neuropsychology

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a blend of attractive attributes for rehabilitation. The most exploited is its ability to create a 3D simulation of reality that can be explored by patients under the supervision of a therapist. In fact, VR can be defined as an advanced communication interface based on interactive 3D visualization, able to collect and integrate different inputs and data sets in a single real-like experience. However, "treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best" (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi). For rehabilitators, this statement supports the growing interest in the influence of positive psychological state on objective health care outcomes. This paper introduces a bio-cultural theory of presence linking the state of optimal experience defined as "flow" to a virtual reality experience. This suggests the possibility of using VR for a new breed of rehabilitative applications focused on a strategy defined as transformation of flow. In this view, VR can be used to trigger a broad empowerment process within the flow experience induced by a high sense of presence. The link between its experiential and simulative capabilities may transform VR into the ultimate rehabilitative device. Nevertheless, further research is required to explore more in depth the link between cognitive processes, motor activities, presence and flow

Inter-organization cooperation for ambient assisted living

In the last years we have witnessed to a substantial increase on the number of people in need of care services, espe-cially among the elderly, a phenomenon related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes, and blood pressure have been increasing amongst young adults. This is a new reality which needs to be dealt by the healthcare sector, specifically the public one. Given these new scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost-effective ways for health care delivery are of particular relevance, especially when it is believed that these new patients should not be removed from their natural, day-to-day life, environment. The evolution of the, so called, new technolo-gies may pay here a very important role as they may become part of the solution for this new problematic. Actually, they are already been used as, in recent years, several projects have raised in this relatively new area of work. These projects, although legitimate ones, were essential for delineating a path to pursue for others to come, as they were in some case, very simple ones (e.g. panic buttons), and, especially, reactive ones. In this paper, we are going to present how we are trying to evolve these projects a step further, through the introduction of proactiveness as a key factor, taking advantage of “new”, as in applied to this areas, techniques of decision making, idea generation, argumentation and data quality, applied, not only to the in transit information, but also to the one provided by the several intervenient as well as themselves. In order to be able to pursue this delineated path, a new approach for knowledge representation, reasoning, and even for problem solving is proposed. To achieve these goals, the VirtualECare environment is presented, together with its sustaining infrastructure and architecture. Particular attention will be paidto how it may be used to simulate a virtual Assisted Living Environment in order to, later, bet-ter monitor real ones, attending to its customers’ needs

Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling

The report Envisioning Digital Europe 2030 is the result of research conducted by the Information Society Unit of IPTS as part of the CROSSROAD Project - A Participative Roadmap on ICT research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling (www.crossroad-eu.net ). After outlining the purpose and scope of the report and the methodological approach followed, the report presents the results of a systematic analysis of societal, policy and research trends in the governance and policy modelling domain in Europe. These analyses are considered central for understanding and roadmapping future research on ICT for governance and policy modelling. The study further illustrates the scenario design framework, analysing current and future challenges in ICT for governance and policy modelling, and identifying the key impact dimensions to be considered. It then presents the scenarios developed at the horizon 2030, including the illustrative storyboards representative of each scenario and the prospective opportunities and risks identified for each of them. The scenarios developed are internally consistent views of what the European governance and policy making system could have become by 2030 and of what the resulting implications for citizens, business and public services would be. Finally, the report draws conclusions and presents the proposed shared vision for Digital Europe 2030, offering also a summary of the main elements to be considered as an input for the future development of the research roadmap on ICT for governance and policy modelling.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Development of a simulation tool for measurements and analysis of simulated and real data to identify ADLs and behavioral trends through statistics techniques and ML algorithms

openCon una popolazione di anziani in crescita, il numero di soggetti a rischio di patologia è in rapido aumento. Molti gruppi di ricerca stanno studiando soluzioni pervasive per monitorare continuamente e discretamente i soggetti fragili nelle loro case, riducendo i costi sanitari e supportando la diagnosi medica. Comportamenti anomali durante l'esecuzione di attività di vita quotidiana (ADL) o variazioni sulle tendenze comportamentali sono di grande importanza.With a growing population of elderly people, the number of subjects at risk of pathology is rapidly increasing. Many research groups are studying pervasive solutions to continuously and unobtrusively monitor fragile subjects in their homes, reducing health-care costs and supporting the medical diagnosis. Anomalous behaviors while performing activities of daily living (ADLs) or variations on behavioral trends are of great importance. To measure ADLs a significant number of parameters need to be considering affecting the measurement such as sensors and environment characteristics or sensors disposition. To face the impossibility to study in the real context the best configuration of sensors able to minimize costs and maximize accuracy, simulation tools are being developed as powerful means. This thesis presents several contributions on this topic. In the following research work, a study of a measurement chain aimed to measure ADLs and represented by PIRs sensors and ML algorithm is conducted and a simulation tool in form of Web Application has been developed to generate datasets and to simulate how the measurement chain reacts varying the configuration of the sensors. Starting from eWare project results, the simulation tool has been thought to provide support for technicians, developers and installers being able to speed up analysis and monitoring times, to allow rapid identification of changes in behavioral trends, to guarantee system performance monitoring and to study the best configuration of the sensors network for a given environment. The UNIVPM Home Care Web App offers the chance to create ad hoc datasets related to ADLs and to conduct analysis thanks to statistical algorithms applied on data. To measure ADLs, machine learning algorithms have been implemented in the tool. Five different tasks have been identified. To test the validity of the developed instrument six case studies divided into two categories have been considered. To the first category belong those studies related to: 1) discover the best configuration of the sensors keeping environmental characteristics and user behavior as constants; 2) define the most performant ML algorithms. The second category aims to proof the stability of the algorithm implemented and its collapse condition by varying user habits. Noise perturbation on data has been applied to all case studies. Results show the validity of the generated datasets. By maximizing the sensors network is it possible to minimize the ML error to 0.8%. Due to cost is a key factor in this scenario, the fourth case studied considered has shown that minimizing the configuration of the sensors it is possible to reduce drastically the cost with a more than reasonable value for the ML error around 11.8%. Results in ADLs measurement can be considered more than satisfactory.INGEGNERIA INDUSTRIALEopenPirozzi, Michel

Activities suggestion based on emotions in AAL environments

The elderly population is increasing and the response of the society was to provide them with services directed to them to cope with their needs. One of the oldest solutions is the retirement home, providing housing and permanent assistance for the elderly. Furthermore, most of the retirement homes are inhabited by multiple elderly people, thus creating a community of people who are somewhat related in age and medical issues. The ambient assisted living (AAL) area tries to solve some of the elderly issues by producing technological products, some of them dedicated to elderly homes. One of the identified problem is that elderly people are sometimes discontent about the activities that consume most of their day promoted by the retirement home social workers. The work presented in this paper attempts to improve how these activities are scheduled taking into account the elderlies' emotional response to these activities. The aim is to maximize the group happiness by promoting the activities the group likes, minding if they are bored due to activities repetition. In this sense, this paper presents an extension of the Cognitive Life Assistant platform incorporating a social emotional model. The proposed system has been modelled as a free time activity manager which is in charge of suggesting activities to the social workers. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Angelo Costa thanks the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) the Post-Doc scholarship with the Ref. SFRH/BPD/102696/2014. This work is also supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013 and partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications