Development of an ambient assisted living ecosystem

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresThe society that we live in faces today big demographic changes. Nowadays, peo-ple live longer, and it is expected that this trend will proceed. In 2000, there were already 420 million people with more than 65 years old, which correspond to about 7% of the world population. In 2050, it is expected that this number reaches 1500 million which corresponds to about 16% of the world population. Naturally, in these circumstances, the number of disabled people will increase as well. This context brings new challenges to the traditional health care systems in Portugal and in the rest of the world. There is an urgent need to search for new solutions that will allow people to live in the best possible way, in the latest stages of life. In order to fulfill this need, it is necessary to develop systems that allow to extend their life in their favorite environment, improving their safety, autonomy, mobility and welfare. Nowadays, information and communication technologies (ICT) offer new opportunities to provide care and assistance. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), is such a paradigm, in which technology is used as a way to improve the independ-ence and welfare of aged or disabled people at their homes. This dissertation has the purpose of contributing to providing an answer to this necessity, associated to a development of an ecosystem for Ambient Assisted Living, associated to a business model and the search for the possibility of collabo-rative networks creation, in order to look for efficient and accessible solutions for AAL services provision

Non-Invasive Ambient Intelligence in Real Life: Dealing with Noisy Patterns to Help Older People

This paper aims to contribute to the field of ambient intelligence from the perspective of real environments, where noise levels in datasets are significant, by showing how machine learning techniques can contribute to the knowledge creation, by promoting software sensors. The created knowledge can be actionable to develop features helping to deal with problems related to minimally labelled datasets. A case study is presented and analysed, looking to infer high-level rules, which can help to anticipate abnormal activities, and potential benefits of the integration of these technologies are discussed in this context. The contribution also aims to analyse the usage of the models for the transfer of knowledge when different sensors with different settings contribute to the noise levels. Finally, based on the authors’ experience, a framework proposal for creating valuable and aggregated knowledge is depicted.This research was partially funded by Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation, and J.O.-M. also wants to recognise the support obtained from the EU RFCS program through project number 793505 ‘4.0 Lean system integrating workers and processes (WISEST)’ and from the grant PRX18/00036 given by the Spanish Secretaría de Estado de Universidades, Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades

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

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Design of Cloud Robotic Services for Senior Citizens to Improve Independent Living and Personal Health Management

A cloud robotics solution was designed and initially tested with a mobile robotic platform and a smart environment, in order to provide health-care management services to senior citizens and improve their independent living. The solution was evaluated in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and tested in the realistic scenario of the DomoCasa Living Lab, Peccioli, Italy. In particular, a medication reminding service, a remote home monitoring and a user indoor localization algorithm were outsourced in the cloud and provided to the robots, users and carers. The system acquired data from a smart environment and addressed the robot to the user for service delivery. Experiments showed a service's Reliability of Response at least of the 0.04 % and a Time of Response of the same order of magnitude of the processing time required by the user localization algorithm

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential