Active aging in place supported by caregiver-centered modular low-cost platform

Aging in place happens when people age in the residence of their choice, usually their homes because is their preference for living as long as possible. This research work is focused on the conceptualization and implementation of a platform to support active aging in place with a particular focus on the caregivers and their requirements to accomplish their tasks with comfort and supervision. An engagement dimension is also a plus provided by the platform since it supports modules to make people react to challenges, stimulating them to be naturally more active. The platform is supported by IoT, using low-cost technology to increment the platform modularly. Is a modular platform capable of responding to specific needs of seniors aging in place and their caregivers, obtaining data regarding the person under supervision, as well as providing conditions for constant and more effective monitoring, through modules and tools that support decision making and tasks realization for active living. The constant monitoring allows knowing the routine of daily activities of the senior. The use of machine learning techniques allows the platform to identify, in real-time, situations of potential risk, allowing to trigger triage processes with the older adult, and consequently trigger the necessary actions so that the caregiver can intervene in useful time.O envelhecimento no local acontece quando as pessoas envelhecem na residência da sua escolha, geralmente nas suas próprias casas porque é a sua preferência para viver o máximo de tempo possível. Este trabalho de investigação foca-se na conceptualização e implementação de uma plataforma de apoio ao envelhecimento ativo no local, com particular enfoque nos cuidadores e nas suas necessidades para cumprir as suas tarefas com conforto e supervisão. Uma dimensão de engajamento também é um diferencial da plataforma, pois esta integra módulos de desafios para fazer as pessoas reagirem aos mesmos, estimulando-as a serem naturalmente mais ativas. A plataforma é suportada por IoT, utilizando tecnologia de baixo custo para incrementar a plataforma de forma modular. É uma plataforma modular capaz de responder às necessidades específicas do envelhecimento dos idosos no local e dos seus cuidadores, obtendo dados relativos à pessoa sob supervisão, bem como fornecendo condições para um acompanhamento constante e mais eficaz, através de módulos e ferramentas que apoiam a tomada de decisões e realização de tarefas para a vida ativa. A monitorização constante permite conhecer a rotina das atividades diárias do idoso, permitindo que, com a utilização de técnicas de machine learning, a plataforma seja capaz de detetar em tempo real situações de risco potencial, permitindo desencadear um processo de triagem junto do idoso, e consequentemente despoletar as ações necessárias para que o prestador de cuidados possa intervir em tempo útil

Discovering location based services: A unified approach for heterogeneous indoor localization systems

The technological solutions and communication capabilities offered by the Internet of Things paradigm, in terms of raising availability of wearable devices, the ubiquitous internet connection, and the presence on the market of service-oriented solutions, have allowed a wide proposal of Location Based Services (LBS). In a close future, we foresee that companies and service providers will have developed reliable solutions to address indoor positioning, as basis for useful location based services. These solutions will be different from each other and they will adopt different hardware and processing techniques. This paper describes the proposal of a unified approach for Indoor Localization Systems that enables the cooperation between heterogeneous solutions and their functional modules. To this end, we designed an integrated architecture that, abstracting its main components, allows a seamless interaction among them. Finally, we present a working prototype of such architecture, which is based on the popular Telegram application for Android, as an integration demonstrator. The integration of the three main phases –namely the discovery phase, the User Agent self-configuration, and the indoor map retrieval/rendering– demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed integrated architectur

Energy efficiency in short and wide-area IoT technologies—A survey

In the last years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a key application context in the design and evolution of technologies in the transition toward a 5G ecosystem. More and more IoT technologies have entered the market and represent important enablers in the deployment of networks of interconnected devices. As network and spatial device densities grow, energy efficiency and consumption are becoming an important aspect in analyzing the performance and suitability of different technologies. In this framework, this survey presents an extensive review of IoT technologies, including both Low-Power Short-Area Networks (LPSANs) and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), from the perspective of energy efficiency and power consumption. Existing consumption models and energy efficiency mechanisms are categorized, analyzed and discussed, in order to highlight the main trends proposed in literature and standards toward achieving energy-efficient IoT networks. Current limitations and open challenges are also discussed, aiming at highlighting new possible research directions

An Empirical Analysis of Security and Privacy in Health and Medical Systems

Healthcare reform, regulation, and adoption of technology such as wearables are substantially changing both the quality of care and how we receive it. For example, health and fitness devices contain sensors that collect data, wireless interfaces to transmit data, and cloud infrastructures to aggregate, analyze, and share data. FDA-defined class III devices such as pacemakers will soon share these capabilities. While technological growth in health care is clearly beneficial, it also brings new security and privacy challenges for systems, users, and regulators. We group these concepts under health and medical systems to connect and emphasize their importance to healthcare. Challenges include how to keep user health data private, how to limit and protect access to data, and how to securely store and transmit data while maintaining interoperability with other systems. The most critical challenge unique to healthcare is how to balance security and privacy with safety and utility concerns. Specifically, a life-critical medical device must fail-open (i.e., work regardless) in the event of an active threat or attack. This dissertation examines some of these challenges and introduces new systems that not only improve security and privacy but also enhance workflow and usability. Usability is important in this context because a secure system that inhibits workflow is often improperly used or circumvented. We present this concern and our solution in its respective chapter. Each chapter of this dissertation presents a unique challenge, or unanswered question, and solution based on empirical analysis. We present a survey of related work in embedded health and medical systems. The academic and regulatory communities greatly scrutinize the security and privacy of these devices because of their primary function of providing critical care. What we find is that securing embedded health and medical systems is hard, done incorrectly, and is analogous to non-embedded health and medical systems such as hospital servers, terminals, and personally owned mobile devices. A policy called bring your own device (BYOD) allows the use and integration of mobile devices in the workplace. We perform an analysis of Apple iMessage which both implicates BYOD in healthcare and secure messaging protocols used by health and medical systems. We analyze direct memory access engines, a special-purpose piece of hardware to transfer data into and out of main memory, and show that we can chain together memory transfers to perform arbitrary computation. This result potentially affects all computing systems used for healthcare. We also examine HTML5 web workers as they provide stealthy computation and covert communication. This finding is relevant to web applications such as personal and electronic health record portals. We design and implement two novel and secure health and medical systems. One is a wearable device that addresses the problem of authenticating a user (e.g., physician) to a terminal in a usable way. The other is a light-weight and low-cost wireless device we call Beacon+. This device extends the design of Apple's iBeacon specification with unspoofable, temporal, and authenticated advertisements; of which, enables secure location sensing applications that could improve numerous healthcare processes

Enhancing Mobility Applications Through Bluetooth Communications

In the world of short and medium-range wireless technologies, Bluetooth has recently come to the forefront of innovation. Within the next five years its market presence, especially in its Low Energy variation, is expected to nearly double across all market segments. The technology is quickly and steadily gaining importance for a wide range of applications with a specific focus on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The growing availability and variety of such devices constitute an untapped potential that we plan on exploiting. Our focus in this thesis is to understand Bluetooth’s capabilities and explore its potential in mobile contexts. One specific field where this technology remains unexplored is Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Because of the need to implement and moderate vehicular communications, the topic of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) is now trending more than ever. In this thesis we propose two ways we can benefit from Bluetooth in a mobile environment. Firstly, we consider the technology as a communication medium to investigate how di↵erent mobilities a↵ect the link performance between two devices. To do this, we define a set of communication experiments, in our case between two vehicles, to analyse how Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a↵ected by varying speed, distance and traffic conditions. We find that the maximum communication range between two devices can go beyond 100m and that a robust connection, capable of handling sudden signal losses or interference, can be achieved up to a distance of 50m. The experiments were conducted using a proof-of-concept mobile application for o↵-the-shelf smartphones that can be used to transmit data over multiple hops in various Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) scenarios. Secondly, we consider Bluetooth discovery capabilities as an information medium by using a connectionless approach to analyse di↵erent mobility frameworks. As there is an increasing need for vehicles and objects to become aware of their context, we implement Bluetooth as a sensing system to provide contextual information about its surroundings. Our challenge is to find out to what extent we can exploit the Bluetooth discovery and beaconing scheme for this purpose. We collect and analyse a dataset of Bluetooth Classic and BLE discoveries and evaluate their respective characteristics and ability to provide context-aware information from a vehicular perspective. By examining data recorded about encountered devices, such as quantity, quality of signal and device class information, we infer distinctive Bluetooth behaviours related to context and application. For this purpose, we propose a set a features to train a classification model to recognize di↵erent driving environments (i.e. road classes). Investigating the performance of our classifier, we were able to predict up to three classes (highway, city, extra-urban) by using only Bluetooth discovery data and no geographical information. This outcome gives promising results targeted at low energy and privacy-friendly applications and can open up a wide range of research directions. In conclusion, in this thesis we present two ways of applying Bluetooth to mobile contexts for deploying novel human mobility applications

Personal and groupwise broadcasting system for social event networking

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Page 155 blank.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-154).This thesis describes the design and development of a system that is aimed for personalized and group-wise broadcasts to collaboratively distribute information and to coordinate locally created events in infrastructure-free milieu. This system, called XCast, has two targets: One is to permit people to create personalized communicators, "broadcast stations" over mobile devices, for extemporaneous events or individually motivated presentations. The other is to provide people with a cognitive platform for social event awareness that informs what is happening around them and then timely coordinates the events. This system applies wireless/mobile peer-to-peer networking technologies, such as 802.11 ad-hoc and mesh networking. To achieve the targets, in the thesis, we focus on newly designing architecture of the cognitive platform and then developing a robust and agile protocol which makes it possible for the platform to reliably work in wireless ad-hoc/mesh networks. The former work is to build a group of broadcast stations into a distributed crystal-gazing system to be aware seasonably of what is going on in our surroundings. With respect to the latter, we propose a distributed protocol, dubbed "Broadcast Resource Schedule Protocol (BRSP)." It has broadcast operations more reliable and scalable in wireless ad-hoc/mesh networks via synchronization and neighbor knowledge schemes. In the end, the BRSP evolves a wireless peer-to-peer network into a cognitive network to support the platform. This system offers a riper breeding ground for creation of a platform for social event networking and of cooperative media for a local community. The value of this is in considering community networks that are matrices of social collaboration, rather than point connections, as well as sources of novel civic media initiated by grassroots.by Sung-Hyuck Lee.S.M

Hatter: Empowering Buskers through a Social App

The gradual decline of cash and proliferation of digital payments have created a radical shift, promising new levels of convenience for consumers today. This may adversely impact the earning potential of artists and performers from the busking community. Since the busking community primarily relies on hard cash/spare change from their patrons, I will argue, the predictions of a cashless society can pose great challenges for the busking community. This thesis investigates how mobile technology might address this phenomenon to augment methods of making monetary and non-monetary contributions to buskers. Research through ethnographic methods and literature review, as well as usability testing, the gathered insights and results projected a foreseeable need for buskers and patrons to realize an exchange via a mobile application called ‘Hatter.’ Hatter enables patrons to continue to contribute to buskers, who in turn are empowered to receive social and financial capital, even in a cashless society