Towards Smart Homes Using Low Level Sensory Data

Ubiquitous Life Care (u-Life care) is receiving attention because it provides high quality and low cost care services. To provide spontaneous and robust healthcare services, knowledge of a patient’s real-time daily life activities is required. Context information with real-time daily life activities can help to provide better services and to improve healthcare delivery. The performance and accuracy of existing life care systems is not reliable, even with a limited number of services. This paper presents a Human Activity Recognition Engine (HARE) that monitors human health as well as activities using heterogeneous sensor technology and processes these activities intelligently on a Cloud platform for providing improved care at low cost. We focus on activity recognition using video-based, wearable sensor-based, and location-based activity recognition engines and then use intelligent processing to analyze the context of the activities performed. The experimental results of all the components showed good accuracy against existing techniques. The system is deployed on Cloud for Alzheimer’s disease patients (as a case study) with four activity recognition engines to identify low level activity from the raw data captured by sensors. These are then manipulated using ontology to infer higher level activities and make decisions about a patient’s activity using patient profile information and customized rules

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Joint-rollout of FTTH and smart city fiber networks as a way to reduce rollout cost

Making cities smarter is the future. By bringing more technology into existing city infrastructure, smart city applications can arise. Whether these applications track devices e.g. public lightning, environmental measurements e.g. temperature or air quality, or analyze video streams e.g. for people density, it is expected that these will require a (near-) real time data connection. Upcoming 5G networks will be able to handle large amounts of connections at high speeds and low latencies and will therefor outperform current technologies such as 4G and low-power wide-area networks. In order to do so, these 5G networks fall back to numerous fiber connected small cells for up & downlink to the Internet. In this publication, we are looking into the additional fiber equipment and deployment cost to connect the required smart city network infrastructure, taking into account a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network is already available or will be installed as part of the smart city network rollout. More concretely, we are proposing a methodology comparing an anticipated and incremental planning approach for a number of different extensions upon the FTTH-network: connecting all electrical cabinets, connecting public lightning, and the connection of 5G using small cells. From this, we want to learn how much the total rollout cost can be reduced using a future-oriented smart city approach taking into account all future extensions, compared to an incremental short-time planning only planning additional fiber when required. In the meantime, we want to show the additional cost of creating a smart city network is limited when it is being combined with a FTTH rollout. Results of the proposed methodology and use case will be modeled planning and design software Comsof Fiber and will be published in a future work

Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe