The NESTORE e-Coach: Designing a Multi-Domain Pathway to Well-Being in Older Age

This article describes the coaching strategies of the NESTORE e-coach, a virtual coach for promoting healthier lifestyles in older age. The novelty of the NESTORE project is the definition of a multi-domain personalized pathway where the e-coach accompanies the user throughout different structured and non-structured coaching activities and recommendations. The article also presents the design process of the coaching strategies, carried out including older adults from four European countries and experts from the different health domains, and the results of the tests carried out with 60 older adults in Italy, Spain and The Netherlands

Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) Bridging Innovation to Health Promotion and Health Service Provision

A number of experiences have demonstrated how digital solutions are effective in improving quality of life (QoL) and health outcomes for older adults. Smart Health Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) is a new concept introduced in Europe since 2017 that combines the concept of Age-Friendly Environments with Information Technologies, supported by health and community care to improve the health and disease management of older adults and during the life-course. This chapter aims to provide an initial overview of the experiences available not only in Europe, based on the research work of the participants of the International Interdisciplinary Network on Health and Well-being in an Age-Friendly Digital World (NET4Age-Friendly), which could be of interest to preventive, health and social authorities. The chapter reports good practices, pain points, and bottlenecks that may require a collaborative, interdisciplinary research approach to facilitate the transformations towards smart, sustainable, health and age-friendly cities and communities

Software Defined Applications in Cellular and Optical Networks

abstract: Small wireless cells have the potential to overcome bottlenecks in wireless access through the sharing of spectrum resources. A novel access backhaul network architecture based on a Smart Gateway (Sm-GW) between the small cell base stations, e.g., LTE eNBs, and the conventional backhaul gateways, e.g., LTE Servicing/Packet Gateways (S/P-GWs) has been introduced to address the bottleneck. The Sm-GW flexibly schedules uplink transmissions for the eNBs. Based on software defined networking (SDN) a management mechanism that allows multiple operator to flexibly inter-operate via multiple Sm-GWs with a multitude of small cells has been proposed. This dissertation also comprehensively survey the studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks. Along with the PHY functional split improvements, the performance of Distributed Converged Cable Access Platform (DCCAP) in the cable architectures especially for the Remote-PHY and Remote-MACPHY nodes has been evaluated. In the PHY functional split, in addition to the re-use of infrastructure with a common FFT module for multiple technologies, a novel cross functional split interaction to cache the repetitive QAM symbols across time at the remote node to reduce the transmission rate requirement of the fronthaul link has been proposed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) Bridging Innovation to Health Promotion and Health Service Provision

A number of experiences have demonstrated how digital solutions are effective in improving quality of life (QoL) and health outcomes for older adults. Smart Health Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) is a new concept introduced in Europe since 2017 that combines the concept of Age-Friendly Environments with Information Technologies, supported by health and community care to improve the health and disease management of older adults and during the life-course. This chapter aims to provide an initial overview of the experiences available not only in Europe, based on the research work of the participants of the International Interdisciplinary Network on Health and Well-being in an Age-Friendly Digital World (NET4Age-Friendly), which could be of interest to preventive, health and social authorities. The chapter reports good practices, pain points, and bottlenecks that may require a collaborative, interdisciplinary research approach to facilitate the transformations towards smart, sustainable, health and age-friendly cities and communities

Exploring a capability-demand interaction model for inclusive design evaluation

Designers are required to evaluate their designs against the needs and capabilities of their target user groups in order to achieve successful, inclusive products. This dissertation presents exploratory research into the specific problem of supporting analytical design evaluation for Inclusive Design. The analytical evaluation process involves evaluating products with user data rather than testing with actual users. The work focuses on the exploration of a capability-demand model of product interaction as the basis for analytical inclusive evaluation. This model suggests that by comparing the measured sensory, cognitive and motor capabilities of a user population to the corresponding product demands, the degree of fit between users and products can be assessed. The research problem was addressed by firstly examining theories of human function and performance together with existing sources of user capability data. It was found that user capability data was fragmented and lacking in terms of predicting design exclusion and difficulty at the population level. More fundamentally, however, it was found that the relationships between measured capability in populations with low functional capacity and real world task performance with products (such as errors, times and difficulty) were not well understood. Given that an understanding of these relationships are necessary to guide capability data collection and to drive valid and robust analytical evaluation methods, the research effort focused on exploring these relationships via empirical and analytical studies. The research process culminated in an experimental study with nineteen users of various functional capability profiles performing tasks with four consumer products (a clock radio, a mobile phone, a blender and a vacuum cleaner). Measures of user capability were related to corresponding product demands (on those capabilities) and task outcome measures. A complex picture emerged, where linear relationships did not generally account for significant variance in task outcome measures. Further, it appeared that multiple capabilities were possibly interacting in unknown ways to support real world interaction. These indicative results point to the further investigation of multivariate and non-linear models for describing capability-demand relationships, and also the replication of similar studies with larger sample sizes to confirm the relationships observed. The resulting overall recommendation, therefore, is that there is a need to direct research efforts in this critical but largely unexplored area of capability-demand model building for Inclusive Design evaluation

Holistic Security and Safety for Factories of the Future

The accelerating transition of traditional industrial processes towards fully automated and intelligent manufacturing is being witnessed in almost all segments. This major adoption of enhanced technology and digitization processes has been originally embraced by the Factories of the Future and Industry 4.0 initiatives. The overall aim is to create smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient future-oriented factories. Unsurprisingly, introducing new production paradigms based on technologies such as machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics does not come at no cost as each newly incorporated technique poses various safety and security challenges. Similarly, the integration required between these techniques to establish a unified and fully interconnected environment contributes to additional threats and risks in the Factories of the Future. Accumulating and analyzing seemingly unrelated activities, occurring simultaneously in different parts of the factory, is essential to establish cyber situational awareness of the investigated environment. Our work contributes to these efforts, in essence by envisioning and implementing the SMS-DT, an integrated platform to simulate and monitor industrial conditions in a digital twin-based architecture. SMS-DT is represented in a three-tier architecture comprising the involved data and control flows: edge, platform, and enterprise tiers. The goal of our platform is to capture, analyze, and correlate a wide range of events being tracked by sensors and systems in various domains of the factory. For this aim, multiple components have been developed on the basis of artificial intelligence to simulate dominant aspects in industries, including network analysis, energy optimization, and worker behavior. A data lake was also used to store collected information, and a set of intelligent services was delivered on the basis of innovative analysis and learning approaches. Finally, the platform was tested in a textile industry environment and integrated with its ERP system. Two misuse cases were simulated to track the factory machines, systems, and people and to assess the role of SMS-DT correlation mechanisms in preventing intentional and unintentional actions. The results of these misuse case simulations showed how the SMS-DT platform can intervene in two domains in the first scenario and three in the second one, resulting in correlating the alerts and reporting them to security operators in the multi-domain intelligent correlation dashboard.The present work has been developed under the EUREKA ITEA3 Project Cyber-Factory#1 (ITEA-17032) and Project CyberFactory#1PT (ANI—P2020 40124) co-funded by Portugal 2020. Furthermore, this work also received funding from the project UIDB/00760/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio