Ontology-driven monitoring of patient's vital signs enabling personalized medical detection and alert

A major challenge related to caring for patients with chronic conditions is the early detection of exacerbations of the disease. Medical personnel should be contacted immediately in order to intervene in time before an acute state is reached, ensuring patient safety. This paper proposes an approach to an ambient intelligence (AmI) framework supporting real-time remote monitoring of patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF). Its novelty is the integration of: (i) personalized monitoring of the patients health status and risk stage; (ii) intelligent alerting of the dedicated physician through the construction of medical workflows on-the-fly; and (iii) dynamic adaptation of the vital signs' monitoring environment on any available device or smart phone located in close proximity to the physician depending on new medical measurements, additional disease specifications or the failure of the infrastructure. The intelligence lies in the adoption of semantics providing for a personalized and automated emergency alerting that smoothly interacts with the physician, regardless of his location, ensuring timely intervention during an emergency. It is evaluated on a medical emergency scenario, where in the case of exceeded patient thresholds, medical personnel are localized and contacted, presenting ad hoc information on the patient's condition on the most suited device within the physician's reach

Real-Time Monitoring of High-Level States in Smart Environments

Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of devices and sensors aimed at intelligent services. The presence of these diverse devices has raised a major problem of managing complex environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the respective smart environments using user defined goals. Generally, the solution advocates that the user goal(s) can be represented by combining devices (smart appliances and sensor/actuators) in particular states. `Domotic Effects' is a high level modeling approach, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with a high level abstract layer that enables the definition of user goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. This paper describes an approach for the automatic evaluation of domotic effects combined through Boolean expressions, that can provide efficient and intelligent monitoring of the domotic structure of the environment. ``Effects Evaluation'' addresses the problem of finding the new values of all the domotic effects defined for the environment when one or more devices change their state or one or more sensor value is recorded in the environment, hence determining a new overall state of the environment. The paper also presents an architecture to implement the evaluation of domotic effects. Results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the approach and highlight responsiveness of the implemented effect evaluation

Design Time Methodology for the Formal Modeling and Verification of Smart Environments

Smart Environments (SmE) are intelligent and complex due to smart connectivity and interaction of heterogeneous devices achieved by complicated and sophisticated computing algorithms. Based on their domotic and industrial applications, SmE system may be critical in terms of correctness, reliability, safety, security and other such vital factors. To achieve error-free and requirement-compliant implementation of these systems, it is advisable to enforce a design process that may guarantee these factors by adopting formal models and formal verification techniques at design time. The e-Lite research group at Politecnico di Torino is developing solutions for SmE based on integration of commercially available home automation technologies with an intelligent ecosystem based on a central OSGi-based gateway, and distributed collaboration of intelligent applications, with the help of semantic web technologies and applications. The main goal of my research is to study new methodologies which are used for the modeling and verification of SmE. This goal includes the development of a formal methodology which ensures the reliable implementation of the requirements on SmE, by modeling and verifying each component (users, devices, control algorithms and environment/context) and the interaction among them, especially at various stages in design time, so that all the complexities and ambiguities can be reduced

Device Cooperation in Ad-hoc Multimedia Ensembles

Users can be overwhelmed by the abundance of functionality that smart ad-hoc environments offer. This thesis investigates how to assist the user in controlling such environments. We present an approach that enables the devices in an ad-hoc environment to cooperatively generate and execute an action sequence to fulfill the user's goals. Device cooperation happens spontaneously and in a completely distributed fashion. In a quantitative user study, we show that users accept the assistance such a system provides even if it is suboptimal.Nutzer von intelligenten Ad-hoc-Umgebungen sind oft überfordert von der Fülle an Funktionalität, die solche Umgebungen bieten. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit steht die Frage, wie man Nutzern solcher Umgebungen assistieren kann. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versetzt die Geräte in Ad-hoc-Umgebungen in die Lage, kooperativ eine Aktionssequenz zu generieren und auszuführen, die die Nutzerziele erfüllt. Die Gerätekooperation erfolgt spontan und komplett verteilt. In einer quantitativen Nutzerstudie zeigen wir, dass Nutzer die Assistenz eines solchen Systems akzeptieren, auch wenn sie suboptimal ist

An Integrated Formal Task Specification Method for Smart Environments

This thesis is concerned with the development of interactive systems for smart environments. In such scenario different interaction paradigms need to be supported and according methods and development strategies need to be applied to comprise not only explicit interaction (e.g., pressing a button to adjust the light) but also implicit interactions (e.g., walking to the speaker’s desk to give a talk) to assist the user appropriately. A task-based modeling approach is introduced allowing basing the implementing of different interaction paradigms on the same artifact

Personalized City Tours - An Extension of the OGC OpenLocation Specification

A business trip to London last month , a day visit in Cologne next saturday and romantic weekend in Paris in autumn – this example exhibits one of the central characteristics of today’s tourism. People in the western hemisphere take much pleasure in frequent and repeated short term visits of cities. Every city visitor faces the general problems of where to go and what to see in the diverse microcosm of a metropolis. This thesis presents a framework for the generation of personalized city tours - as extension of the Open Location Specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium. It is founded on context-awareness and personalization while at the same time proposing a combined approach to allow for adaption to the user. This framework considers TimeGeography and its algorithmic implementations to be able to cope with spatio-temporal constraints of a city tour. Traveling salesmen problems - for which a heuristic approache is proposed – are subjacent to the tour generation. To meet the requirements of today’s distributed and heterogeneous computing environments, the tour framework comprises individual services that expose standard-compliant interfaces and allow for integration in service oriented architectures

Supporting goal-based interaction with dynamic intelligent environments

Abstract. Modern technical infrastructures and appliances provide a multitude of opportunities for simplifying and streamlining the ev-eryday life. However, many of the systems available today – such as the typical feature-loaded audio and video components – are not always efficiently usable for the average person. But, in an environ-ment where features abound, the easy access of these features more and more becomes the key quality criterion for the user. We present a planner-based approach to helping the user to inter-act with such complex infrastructures. Specifically, we concentrate on the application domain of networked infotainment systems and home control. Also, we describe the architectural concept, which makes it possible to integrate classical Artificial Intelligence tech-nology – such as planning and scheduling – into the domain of net-worked consumer appliances within the scope of a multimodal assis-tance system. The work we present is part of the EMBASSI-project, a joint project with 19 partners from industry and academia that aims at es-tablishing an interoperable system infrastructure for multimodal and multimedia assistance systems.

Supporting Goal-Based Interaction with Dynamic Intelligent Environments

Abstract. Modern technical infrastructures and appliances provide a multitude of opportunities for simplifying and streamlining the everyday life. However, many of the systems available today – such as the typical feature-loaded audio and video components – are not always efficiently usable for the average person. But, in an environment where features abound, the easy access of these features more and more becomes the key quality criterion for the user. We present a planner-based approach to helping the user to interact with such complex infrastructures. Specifically, we concentrate on the application domain of networked infotainment systems and home control. Also, we describe the architectural concept, which makes it possible to integrate classical Artificial Intelligence technology – such as planning and scheduling – into the domain of networked consumer appliances within the scope of a multimodal assistance system. The work we present is part of the EMBASSI-project, a joint project with 19 partners from industry and academia that aims at establishing an interoperable system infrastructure for multimodal and multimedia assistance systems.

Dienstekomposition in intelligenten Umgebungen basierend auf KI-Planung

In intelligenten Umgebungen wird das Zusammenspiel mehrerer Dienste benötigt, welches durch eine Dienstekomposition erzielt werden kann. KIPlanung ist eine Methode, dies umzusetzen. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde experimentell das Laufzeitverhalten von verschiedenen Planern untersucht. Daneben wurden die Möglichkeiten der Modellierung von Problemen der Dienstekomposition evaluiert, was zu einer Richtline für die verteilte Modellierung von Dienstbeschreibungen führte. Basierend auf den Erfahrungen wurde ein Composer entworfen und umgesetzt, der verschiedene Planer nutzen kann

Coordinating services embedded everywhere via hierarchical planning

The spaces we live in are provided with different devices and technologies, such as sensors for recognising our presence. The aim of such spaces is to improve our comfort, productivity, and even reduce our energy bills. The problem with fulfilling the aim is that devices alone cannot do much to achieve such difficult goals. People would also have problems in manually searching for the best situation accomplishing their needs. A way to deal with this problem is to coordinate devices automatically. For example, our home can autonomously figure out that some lamps can be turned off because the living room has enough natural light and the activity we are currently doing requires a low light level. The benefits are improved comfort and a reasonable amount of energy saved. We therefore explore the possibilities of using a system based on automated planning. This planning produces a set of device services, such as turn off a lamp, that achieves a given goal. We use a method, called hierarchical planning, which enables us to organise the knowledge we have about spaces and devices in hierarchical forms. We show that planning is suitable for this kind of problems by using hierarchical planning to save energy in the Bernoulliborg building at the University of Groningen. The results show energy and money savings, and that people are satisfied with our system. We also improve the system and show that even more money can be saved without sacrificing the well-being of people if we can buy energy from several energy providers