Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

The Smart House Intelligent Management System : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information Engineering at Massey University

In October 2002, Massey University embarked on the Smart House Project. It was intended to be a test bed of different technologies that improve the safety and quality of life within the home. This thesis presents the design and current status of the Smart House Intelligent Management System, a management system for processing the commands received in the Massey University Smart House. There will be two parts to this Management System: an Expert System which will be responsible for the supervision of the house, its rules and its devices, as well as a conversation module which will converse with the occupant/s of the Smart House. The system will receive voice or text commands from the user as input and process the information through performing database queries about the received command, to ascertain whether it is valid. Validity is dependent on the command's adhering to house rules, which have been set by the user beforehand. This Management System will communicate with three other modules: the Bluetooth Smart Watch, the Speech Recognition/Generation System and the Ethernet Switching System, which enables access to the house devices

Development of a simulation tool for measurements and analysis of simulated and real data to identify ADLs and behavioral trends through statistics techniques and ML algorithms

openCon una popolazione di anziani in crescita, il numero di soggetti a rischio di patologia è in rapido aumento. Molti gruppi di ricerca stanno studiando soluzioni pervasive per monitorare continuamente e discretamente i soggetti fragili nelle loro case, riducendo i costi sanitari e supportando la diagnosi medica. Comportamenti anomali durante l'esecuzione di attività di vita quotidiana (ADL) o variazioni sulle tendenze comportamentali sono di grande importanza.With a growing population of elderly people, the number of subjects at risk of pathology is rapidly increasing. Many research groups are studying pervasive solutions to continuously and unobtrusively monitor fragile subjects in their homes, reducing health-care costs and supporting the medical diagnosis. Anomalous behaviors while performing activities of daily living (ADLs) or variations on behavioral trends are of great importance. To measure ADLs a significant number of parameters need to be considering affecting the measurement such as sensors and environment characteristics or sensors disposition. To face the impossibility to study in the real context the best configuration of sensors able to minimize costs and maximize accuracy, simulation tools are being developed as powerful means. This thesis presents several contributions on this topic. In the following research work, a study of a measurement chain aimed to measure ADLs and represented by PIRs sensors and ML algorithm is conducted and a simulation tool in form of Web Application has been developed to generate datasets and to simulate how the measurement chain reacts varying the configuration of the sensors. Starting from eWare project results, the simulation tool has been thought to provide support for technicians, developers and installers being able to speed up analysis and monitoring times, to allow rapid identification of changes in behavioral trends, to guarantee system performance monitoring and to study the best configuration of the sensors network for a given environment. The UNIVPM Home Care Web App offers the chance to create ad hoc datasets related to ADLs and to conduct analysis thanks to statistical algorithms applied on data. To measure ADLs, machine learning algorithms have been implemented in the tool. Five different tasks have been identified. To test the validity of the developed instrument six case studies divided into two categories have been considered. To the first category belong those studies related to: 1) discover the best configuration of the sensors keeping environmental characteristics and user behavior as constants; 2) define the most performant ML algorithms. The second category aims to proof the stability of the algorithm implemented and its collapse condition by varying user habits. Noise perturbation on data has been applied to all case studies. Results show the validity of the generated datasets. By maximizing the sensors network is it possible to minimize the ML error to 0.8%. Due to cost is a key factor in this scenario, the fourth case studied considered has shown that minimizing the configuration of the sensors it is possible to reduce drastically the cost with a more than reasonable value for the ML error around 11.8%. Results in ADLs measurement can be considered more than satisfactory.INGEGNERIA INDUSTRIALEopenPirozzi, Michel

Ambient assisted living deployment aims to empower people living with dementia (AnAbEL)

Ambient Assisted Living aims to support the wellbeing of people with special needs by offering assistive solutions. Those systems focused on dementia claim to increase the autonomy of people living with dementia by monitoring their activities. Thus, topics such as Activity Recognition related to dementia and specific solutions such as reminders and tracking users by Global Positioning System offer great advances that seek users' safety and to preserve their healthier lifestyle. However, these solutions address secondary parties by providing useful activities logs or alerts but excluding the main interested user: the person living with dementia. Although primary users are taken into consideration at some design stages by using user-centred design frameworks, final products tend not to fully address the user's needs. This paper presents an Ambient Intelligent system aimed to reduce this limitation by developing a final solution more strongly focused on enhancing a healthy lifestyle by empowering the user's autonomy. Through continued activities monitoring in real-time, the system can provide reminders to the users by coaching them to keep healthy routines. Continuous monitoring also provides a complete user's behaviour tracking and the context-awareness logic used involves the caregivers through alerts when necessary to ensure the user's safety. This article describes the process followed to develop the system aimed to cover the previous concerns and the practical feedback from health professionals over the system deployment working in a real environment

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

The Regulation of Commercial Profiling — A Comparative Analysis

The authors, all data protection experts, discuss the status of the relevant data protection regulatory framework on profiling in the business sector in sev eral countries worldwide, from the constitutional level to some individual regulation including the general attitude towards the topic. The EU perspective is presented on the basis of the present directives as well as the General Data Protection Regulation. The United Kingdom, Germany and France, as three of the largest EU Member States with partly highly differing regulatory approaches represent Member State law. Australia, Brazil and the US regulation exemplify the different integration of data protection standards and different models of approaching pro filing in the globalised IT world

A novel Big Data analytics and intelligent technique to predict driver's intent

Modern age offers a great potential for automatically predicting the driver's intent through the increasing miniaturization of computing technologies, rapid advancements in communication technologies and continuous connectivity of heterogeneous smart objects. Inside the cabin and engine of modern cars, dedicated computer systems need to possess the ability to exploit the wealth of information generated by heterogeneous data sources with different contextual and conceptual representations. Processing and utilizing this diverse and voluminous data, involves many challenges concerning the design of the computational technique used to perform this task. In this paper, we investigate the various data sources available in the car and the surrounding environment, which can be utilized as inputs in order to predict driver's intent and behavior. As part of investigating these potential data sources, we conducted experiments on e-calendars for a large number of employees, and have reviewed a number of available geo referencing systems. Through the results of a statistical analysis and by computing location recognition accuracy results, we explored in detail the potential utilization of calendar location data to detect the driver's intentions. In order to exploit the numerous diverse data inputs available in modern vehicles, we investigate the suitability of different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, and propose a novel fuzzy computational modelling methodology. Finally, we outline the impact of applying advanced CI and Big Data analytics techniques in modern vehicles on the driver and society in general, and discuss ethical and legal issues arising from the deployment of intelligent self-learning cars