Improving the well-being of older people by reducing their energy consumption through energy-aware systems

Abstract-Fuel poverty is becoming a problem amongst the older community in the UK. We propose an assistive technology for reduced energy consumption in aid of active aging. We introduce how the well-being of older people within the community can be improved by reducing anxiety associated with fuel poverty. A recommender and behavioural change system will be introduced, which enables older people to improve their energy footprint through energy-aware systems. Using systems to help reduce fuel poverty will invariably improve their general well-being. Results show how this technology can be accepted and act as an enabler in improving the overall well-being of older people

Energy-aware systems for improving the well-being of older people by reducing their energy consumption

Fuel poverty is becoming a problem amongst the older community in the UK. To help reduce the anxiety that fuel poverty places on older members of the community, this paper will first address why such systems are necessary before introducing a system and various interfaces for engaging and promoting better energy usage. Key areas of the proposed prototype will be discussed which focuses on a recommender and behavioural change system which enables older people to improve their energy footprint through energy-aware systems. Using systems to help reduce fuel poverty will invariably improve their general well-being. Results show how this technology can be accepted and act as an enabler in improving the overall well-being of older people as well as other system considerations. In addition, a number of subsequent phases of the project will be detailed which will discuss a longer test duration, an analysis of the data harvested and future directions

Energy-Aware systems for improving the well-being of older people by reducing their energy consumption

Fuel poverty is becoming a problem amongst the older community in the UK. To help reduce the anxiety that fuel poverty places on older members of the community, this paper will first address why such systems are necessary before introducing a system and various interfaces for engaging and promoting better energy usage. Key areas of the proposed prototype will be discussed which focuses on a recommender and behavioural change system which enables older people to improve their energy footprint through energy-aware systems. Using systems to help reduce fuel poverty will invariably improve their general well-being. Results show how this technology can be accepted and act as an enabler in improving the overall well-being of older people as well as other system considerations. In addition, a number of subsequent phases of the project will be detailed which will discuss a longer test duration, an analysis of the data harvested and future directions

Ubiquitous Robotics System for Knowledge-based Auto-configuration System for Service Delivery within Smart Home Environments

The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system’s goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research

Wireless Sensor Networks in Support of E-Health Applications

Nowadays, with the smart device developing and life quality improving, people’s requirement of real-time, fast, accurate and smart health service has been increased. As the technology advances, E-Health Care concept has been emerging in the last decades and received extensive attention. With the help of Internet and computing technologies, a lot of E-Health Systems have been proposed that change traditional medical treatment mode to remote or online medical treatment. Furthermore, due to the rapidly development of Internet and wireless network in recent years, many enhanced E-Health Systems based on Wireless Sensor Network have been proposed that open a new research field. This research work has reviewed the E-Health Care System development and limitations in recent years and proposes a novel E-Health System based on Wireless Sensor Network by taking the advantage of the latest technologies. The proposed E-Health System is a wireless and portable system, which consists of the Wireless E-Health Gateway and Wireless E-Health Sensor Nodes. The system has been further enhanced by Smart Technology that combined the advantages of the smart phone. The proposed system has change the mechanisms of traditional medical care and provide real-time, portable, accurate and flexible medical care services to users. With the E-Health System wieldy deployed, it requires powerful computing center to deal with the mass health record data. Cloud technology as an emerging technology has applied in the proposed system. This research has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Cloud Computing Services to develop a powerful, scalable and fast connection web service for proposed E-Health Management System. The security issue is a common problem in the wireless network, and it is more important for E-Health System as the personal health data is private and should be safely transferred and storage. Hence, this research work also focused on the cryptographic algorithm to reinforce the security of E-Health System. Due to the limitations of embedded system resources, such as: lower computing, smaller battery, and less memory, which cannot support modem advance encryption standard. In this research, Rivest Cipher Version 5 (RC5) as the simple, security and software or hardware deployable encryption algorithm has been in-depth studied. As the Logistic map has good cryptographic algorithm properties, like unpredictable, random, and sensitive to the initial parameters it has been investigated. In this thesis, an enhanced RC5 cryptographic algorithm has been proposed that uses 1-D Logistic mapping in the random sub-key generation during each encryption round, which increases the unpredictability significantly. In addition, an effective cipher feedback model has been combined to further increase the cipher security. After in-depth research of the 1-D Logistic map, a 2-D Logistic map has been proposed that provides more complex chaotic behaviors than the 1-D Logistic map and further improves the security. Another novel RC5 cryptographic algorithm with 2-D Logistic map has been proposed in this thesis. The proposed algorithm uses a 2-D Logistic map to generate the sub-key and modified RC5 operations to encrypt data. Appropriate experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance. The results show the proposed algorithms are better than standard RC5 or other modified RC5. The contributions and innovation of this research project are summarized: • Build up a Wireless E-Health Care System based on Wireless Sensor Network. • Create the Cloud Management System for E-Health Care System. • Proposed RC5 cryptographic algorithms based on Logistic Map to increase the randomness and security of cipher data

Modelo informático de integración AmI-IoT para el cuidado de adultos mayores CARE_HOME16

Las personas de la tercera edad sufren deterioro físico y mental, que les impiden y/o dificultan el control de las tareas del hogar, la pérdida de su independencia y autonomía, afectando su calidad de vida y bienestar. En este proyecto se diseña un modelo integrado AmI-IoT en capas que integra funcionalidades de Internet de las Cosas (IoT) e Inteligencia Ambiental (AmI), y brinda una referencia para el monitoreo y asistencia de las personas de la tercera edad que viven solas. El modelo plantea tres segmentos encargados de automatizar la vivienda, supervisar al usuario, tomar decisiones, supervisar eventos, identificar hábitos, y acceder a servicios AmI e IoT.Elderly people suffer physical and mental deterioration, which halt and/or difficult the control of the homework, loss of independency and autonomy, affecting their quality of life and well-ness. In this project, an integrated AmI-IoT layered model is designed that integrates functio-nalities of Internet of Thinks (IoT) and Environmental Intelligence (AmI) and provides a refe-rence from monitoring and assistance of elderly people living alone. The model involves three segments responsible for automating housing, supervising the user, making decisions, monito-ring events, identifying habits and accessing AmI and IoT services.Magíster en Ingeniería de Sistemas y ComputaciónMaestrí

Integración de herramienta de analítica en el modelo AMI-IOT Quysqua

El problema central del presente trabajo de grado se basa en el desarrollo de un modelo ex-tendido que integre los modelos de solución AmI-IoT y SICOBIO. Esta integración está dividida en dos dimensiones; la primera dimensión se enfoca no solo en el cuidado y bienestar de personas de la tercera edad, sino también adultos mayores enfermos que necesitan cuidado médico en casa. Con lo que se pretende tener un marco común, que de la posibilidad a tener un impacto mayor en la calidad de vida, bienestar y cuidado médico remoto de la persona de la tercera edad en su hogar; la segunda dimensión se enfoca en el ámbito informático, incorporando y profundizando el componente de herramientas genéricas para analítica.The central problem of the present degree work is based on the development of an extended model that integrates the AmI-IoT and SICOBIO solution models. This integration is divided into two dimensions; The first dimension focuses not only on the care and well-being of the elderly, but also on parents who need medical care at home. Which means that it has a com-mon framework, which can have a major impact on the quality of life, well-being and remote medical care of the elderly person in their home; the second dimension focuses on the com-puter field, incorporating and deepening the component of generic tools for analysis.Magíster en Ingeniería de Sistemas y ComputaciónMaestrí

Healthcare system focusing on emotional aspect -Using augmented reality， facial expression and ECG-

芝浦工業大学201