Pervasive Technologies and Support for Independent Living

A broad range of pervasive technologies are used in many domains, including healthcare: however, there appears to be little work examining the role of such technologies in the home, or the different wants and needs of elderly users. Additionally, there exist ethical issues surrounding the use of highly personal healthcare-related data, and interface issues centred on the novelty of the technologies and the disabilities experienced by the users. This report examines these areas, before considering the ways in which they might come together to help support independent-living users with disabilities which may be age-related

Pursuing perspectives on ambient intelligence.

This paper takes a broad perspective on ambient, intelligent technologies in the context of contemporary European society at the turn of the 21st century. The underlying ideas and expectations of ambient intelligence in a period when Europe focuses progressively on the various social, economic, and ethical challenges facing the Information Society are discussed. The use of information and communication technologies in different organizational and economic settings are explored, with an illustrative focus on eHealth. It is particularly argued that more space, effort and facilities need to be created for a public social and ethical debate among European‟s citizens with regard to information and communication technologies development

Towards Personalised Home Care Systems

Home care is increasingly seen as a promising alternative to traditional care services. Programming home care systems remains a significant challenge considering the potentially large scale of deployment, the differences between individual care needs, and the progressive nature of ageing. In this paper, we present ongoing work on programming home care systems to support personalisation, adaptability over time, and dependability. A policy-based approach is used to build such systems. We present the technical details of our approach, including a policy language for home care and the corresponding system architecture. Policy examples are used to illustrate how the approach supports personalisation of home care services

Uranus: A Middleware Architecture for Dependable AAL and Vital Signs Monitoring Applications

The design and realization of health monitoring applications has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Several research challenges have been faced and issues tackled in order to realize effective applications for the management and monitoring of people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities, elderly people. However, there is a lack of efficient tools that enable rapid and possibly cheap realization of reliable health monitoring applications. The paper presents Uranus, a service oriented middleware architecture, which provides basic functions for the integration of different kinds of biomedical sensors. Uranus has also distinguishing characteristics like services for the run-time verification of the correctness of running applications and mechanisms for the recovery from failures. The paper concludes with two case studies as proof of concept

RESTful framework for collaborative internet of things based on IEC 61850

El contenido de los capítulos 2 y 3 está sujeto a confidencialidad 161 p.En 1991, Mark Weiser formuló el paradigma de Computación Ubicua definiendo el concepto de Entorno Inteligente como un espacio físico repleto de dispositivos, muy integrados en el entorno, y con capacidades de identificación, sensorización y actuación. Internet de las Cosas (IoT) expande el ámbito de localización de estos dispositivos y servicios ubicuos, representados como cosas, de un entorno local a internet como red global. Para la implementación de estos escenarios de aplicación, la colaboración entre las cosas es uno de los principales retos de investigación. El objetivo de esta colaboración es ser capaces de satisfacer necesidades globales mediante la combinación de servicios individuales. Esta Tesis propone una arquitectura colaborativa entre las cosas desplegadas en internet.Las tecnologías alrededor de los Servicios Web SOAP/XML, adecuadas para IoT, soportan aspectos claves para un sistema colaborativo como la publicación, descubrimiento, control y gestión de eventos de los dispositivos. Como alternativa, REST ha ganado terreno en este ámbito por ser considerada una opción más ligera, sencilla y natural para la comunicación en internet. Sin embargo, no existen protocolos para descubrimiento y gestión de eventos para recursos REST. Esta Tesis aborda dicha carencia proponiendo una especificación de estos protocolos para arquitecturas REST. Otro aspecto importante es la representación, a nivel de aplicación, de las cosas distribuidas. Entre las propuestas para la estandarización de los modelos de información y comunicación en este dominio que podrían aplicarse, de manera similar, a IoT, destaca el estándar IEC 61850. Sin embargo, los protocolos de comunicación definidos por el estándar no son adecuados para IoT. Esta Tesis analiza la idoneidad del IEC 61850 para escenarios IoT y propone un protocolo de comunicación REST para sus servicios.Por último, se trata la problemática asociada a la confiabilidad que debe proporcionar una arquitectura IoT para dominios de aplicación relacionados con la salud o sistemas de seguridad funcional (Safety)

A classification of emerging and traditional grid systems

The grid has evolved in numerous distinct phases. It started in the early ’90s as a model of metacomputing in which supercomputers share resources; subsequently, researchers added the ability to share data. This is usually referred to as the first-generation grid. By the late ’90s, researchers had outlined the framework for second-generation grids, characterized by their use of grid middleware systems to “glue” different grid technologies together. Third-generation grids originated in the early millennium when Web technology was combined with second-generation grids. As a result, the invisible grid, in which grid complexity is fully hidden through resource virtualization, started receiving attention. Subsequently, grid researchers identified the requirement for semantically rich knowledge grids, in which middleware technologies are more intelligent and autonomic. Recently, the necessity for grids to support and extend the ambient intelligence vision has emerged. In AmI, humans are surrounded by computing technologies that are unobtrusively embedded in their surroundings. However, third-generation grids’ current architecture doesn’t meet the requirements of next-generation grids (NGG) and service-oriented knowledge utility (SOKU).4 A few years ago, a group of independent experts, arranged by the European Commission, identified these shortcomings as a way to identify potential European grid research priorities for 2010 and beyond. The experts envision grid systems’ information, knowledge, and processing capabilities as a set of utility services.3 Consequently, new grid systems are emerging to materialize these visions. Here, we review emerging grids and classify them to motivate further research and help establish a solid foundation in this rapidly evolving area