19,044 research outputs found
Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination
Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data.
Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability.
Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered.
Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results
Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey
As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors
deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown
a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has
predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These
sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to
add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling,
reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays
critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be
successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context
awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by
introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning.
Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a
subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial
solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the
last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our
evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some
possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of
techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and
middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only
to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate
their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201
Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges
Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten
years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware,
phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more.
As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond
inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the
predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of
the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for
full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena
that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine
learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive
decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop.
Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile
computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure
Context-aware Dynamic Discovery and Configuration of 'Things' in Smart Environments
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network
consisting of Internet-connected objects, such as RFIDs, sensors, actuators, as
well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral
component of the future Internet. Currently, such Internet-connected objects or
`things' outnumber both people and computers connected to the Internet and
their population is expected to grow to 50 billion in the next 5 to 10 years.
To be able to develop IoT applications, such `things' must become dynamically
integrated into emerging information networks supported by architecturally
scalable and economically feasible Internet service delivery models, such as
cloud computing. Achieving such integration through discovery and configuration
of `things' is a challenging task. Towards this end, we propose a Context-Aware
Dynamic Discovery of {Things} (CADDOT) model. We have developed a tool
SmartLink, that is capable of discovering sensors deployed in a particular
location despite their heterogeneity. SmartLink helps to establish the direct
communication between sensor hardware and cloud-based IoT middleware platforms.
We address the challenge of heterogeneity using a plug in architecture. Our
prototype tool is developed on an Android platform. Further, we employ the
Global Sensor Network (GSN) as the IoT middleware for the proof of concept
validation. The significance of the proposed solution is validated using a
test-bed that comprises 52 Arduino-based Libelium sensors.Comment: Big Data and Internet of Things: A Roadmap for Smart Environments,
Studies in Computational Intelligence book series, Springer Berlin
Heidelberg, 201
Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes
Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work
Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.
In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture
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