Design process enabling adaptation in pervasive heterogeneous contexts

International audienceIn the next decades, the growth in population ageing will cause important problems to most industrialized countries. To tackle this issue, Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) systems can reinforce the well-being of elderly people, by providing emergency, autonomy enhancement, and comfort services. These services will postpone the need of a medicalized environment, and will allow the elderly to stay longer at home. However, each elderly has specific needs and a deployment environment of such services is likely unique. Furthermore, the needs evolve over time, and so does the deployment environment of the system. In this paper, we propose the use of a model-based development method, the adaptive medium approach, to enable dynamic adaptation of AAL systems. We also propose improvements to make it more suited to the AAL domain, such as considering heterogeneity and a composition model. The paper includes an evaluation of the prototype implementing the approach, and a comparison with related work

Engineering context-aware systems and applications:A survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: (A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; (B) Context-aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; (C) Context-aware systems conceptualization

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: a survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; B) Context aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; C) Context aware systems conceptualization

Adaptive dashboard for IoT environments: application for senior residences

Les tableaux de bord sont de puissants outils électroniques qui peuvent fournir des informations exploitables et utiles pour une intervention rapide et une prise de décision éclairée. Ils peuvent être particulièrement bénéfiques pour favoriser un vieillissement en bonne santé en fournissant aux professionnels de la santé un aperçu en un coup d'œil des conditions du patient (par exemple, les personnes âgées). Alors que la population des personnes âgées augmente dans plusieurs pays, dont le Canada, un grand nombre d'entre eux seront forcés de déménager dans des résidences pour personnes âgées pour des raisons telles que la fragilité, la démence ou le sentiment de solitude. Cette population importante de personnes âgées augmentera la charge de travail des infirmières et des professionnels de la santé travaillant dans ces lieux, en raison du fait que les personnes âgées ont besoin de visites fréquentes et d'une surveillance en raison de leur état de santé. Ce problème a le potentiel de mettre plus de pression sur le système de santé déjà tendu dans les prochaines années. La pénurie d'infirmières et de main-d'œuvre rend la situation plus grave, en particulier dans les pays développés. Il faudrait donc prendre des initiatives pour soutenir les soignants de ces résidences. Le tableau de bord peut jouer un rôle clé pour aider les professionnels de la santé dans leurs tâches car il peut fournir des informations en un coup d'œil et en temps réel sur la situation actuelle. De nos jours, avec les progrès technologiques dans les dispositifs de détection et l'infrastructure IoT ainsi qu'un accès Internet élargi, la surveillance des patients à distance est devenue une option réalisable. Par ailleurs, en utilisant un tableau de bord, les professionnels de la santé peuvent visualiser les informations collectées à distance pour surveiller les personnes âgées vivant dans des résidences, ce qui fera gagner un temps considérable aux professionnels de la santé et les aidera à servir plus de patients. Cependant, il est important de considérer que les résidences pour personnes âgées accueillent généralement un grand nombre de résidents et les professionnels de la santé qui les desservent. Chaque professionnel de la santé est motivé par certains objectifs et exécute des tâches précises selon des priorités différentes. Cette différence change la façon dont chaque fournisseur de soins de santé utilisera le tableau de bord, car ils ont besoin d'informations qui les aident dans leurs tâches principales. Les informations qu'un groupe de professionnels de la santé trouve bénéfiques peuvent ne pas être utiles pour un autre groupe. Ainsi, la méthode de visualisation utilisée pour un individu peut ne pas être significative pour un autre. Par conséquence, les informations doivent être présentées de manière personnalisée et adaptée à un utilisateur ciblé. Il est important de souligner que la visualisation appropriée des informations dans les tableaux de bord est un facteur clé pour offrir une valeur réelle aux utilisateurs. Cette diversité de besoins, de préférences et de priorités doit être prise en compte tout au long de l'élaboration du tableau de bord. En raison de la diversité des rôles et des intérêts existant dans les résidences pour personnes âgées, et compte tenu du coût élevé du développement du tableau de bord, il est très difficile de développer des tableaux de bord séparés pour chaque partie. Cependant, les solutions existantes dans la littérature sont développées à l'aide de méthodes statiques et se concentrent sur la satisfaction des besoins d'un groupe particulier. Ces approches limitent les capacités des tableaux de bord existants à s'adapter aux besoins des différentes personnes. Dans cette étude, nous présentons AMI-Dash comme une tentative de réalisation d'une solution de tableau de bord qui permet une conception dynamique et une visualisation appropriée des informations pour plusieurs groupes. Notre solution vise à fournir les bonnes informations aux bonnes personnes en minimisant le temps nécessaire pour fournir un tableau de bord aux professionnels la santé, afin de les aider dans l'exercice de leurs fonctions en accédant à des informations exploitables. Nous avons également évalué notre solution sous deux aspects : l'évaluation de l'interaction homme-machine et l'évaluation technique. Le résultat de notre évaluation montre que la solution proposée peut satisfaire à la fois les exigences de l'utilisateur final et les exigences techniques tout en maintenant un haut niveau de satisfaction.Abstract: Dashboards are powerful electronic tools that can provide actionable insights for timely intervention and wise decision-making. They can be particularly beneficial to support healthy aging by providing healthcare professionals with at-a-glance overview of health conditions of patients (e.g., older adults). As the population of older adults is increasing in several countries including Canada, a large number of them will be forced to move to Senior Residences due to reasons like frailty, dementia or loneliness. This swelled senior population will increase the workload of nurses and health professionals working in these places, due to the fact that older adults need frequent visits and monitoring because of their health condition. This issue has the potential to put more pressure on the already stretched healthcare system in the next years. The situation is aggravated when it is coincided with the shortage of nurses and workforce especially in developed countries. Therefore, initiative should be taken to support healthcare professionals in these residences. Dashboard can play a key role to support healthcare professionals in their tasks as it can provide real-time information about the current situation in more helpful visualization form. Nowadays, with technological advancements in sensing devices and IoT infrastructure along with broadened internet access, remote patient monitoring has become a feasible option. By utilizing a dashboard, healthcare professionals can visualize information collected remotely to monitor patients/ older adults living in senior residences, which will save a considerable time of healthcare professionals and support them to serve more patients. However, it is important to consider that senior residences usually host a large number of older adults and healthcare professionals that serve them. Each healthcare professional is driven with certain goals, and they have different tasks and priorities. This difference, change how each healthcare professional will utilize the dashboard, as they need information that helps them in their main tasks. The information that a group of healthcare professionals find beneficial might not be useful for another group, and the visualization method used for an individual might not be meaningful for another. Therefore, information should be presented in a personalized way to the targeted user. It is important to emphasize that appropriate visualization of interesting information, in dashboards is a key factor to deliver real value to dashboard users. Due to the variety of roles and interests that exists in senior residences, and considering high development cost of a dashboard, developing separate dashboards for each party is not only difficult but also time consuming. Still, existing solutions in the literature are developed using static methods and they focused on satisfying the needs of a particular group in their domain. These approaches limited the capabilities of existing dashboards to adapt to the needs of different people. We argue that dashboard has to be tailored in order to address the diversity in needs, preferences and priorities of healthcare professionals. In this study we introduce AMI-Dash as an attempt to achieve a dashboard solution that allows dynamic design and information visualization. Our solution focused on providing the right information to the right people while minimizing the time required to deliver a dashboard to health professionals, so that supporting them in performing their duties by accessing timely and actionable information. We also evaluated our proposed solution from two aspects: Human-Computer Interaction Evaluation and Technical Evaluation. The result of our evaluation shows that proposed solution can satisfy both end-user and technical requirements while maintaining a high-level of satisfaction among users

Multimodal Shared-Control Interaction for Mobile Robots in AAL Environments

This dissertation investigates the design, development and implementation of cognitively adequate, safe and robust, spatially-related, multimodal interaction between human operators and mobile robots in Ambient Assisted Living environments both from the theoretical and practical perspectives. By focusing on different aspects of the concept Interaction, the essential contribution of this dissertation is divided into three main research packages; namely, Formal Interaction, Spatial Interaction and Multimodal Interaction in AAL. As the principle package, in Formal Interaction, research effort is dedicated to developing a formal language based interaction modelling and management solution process and a unified dialogue modelling approach. This package aims to enable a robust, flexible, and context-sensitive, yet formally controllable and tractable interaction. This type of interaction can be used to support the interaction management of any complex interactive systems, including the ones covered in the other two research packages. In the second research package, Spatial Interaction, a general qualitative spatial knowledge based multi-level conceptual model is developed and proposed. The goal is to support a spatially-related interaction in human-robot collaborative navigation. With a model-based computational framework, the proposed conceptual model has been implemented and integrated into a practical interactive system which has been evaluated by empirical studies. It has been particularly tested with respect to a set of high-level and model-based conceptual strategies for resolving the frequent spatially-related communication problems in human-robot interaction. Last but not least, in Multimodal Interaction in AAL, attention is drawn to design, development and implementation of multimodal interaction for elderly persons. In this elderly-friendly scenario, ageing-related characteristics are carefully considered for an effective and efficient interaction. Moreover, a standard model based empirical framework for evaluating multimodal interaction is provided. This framework was especially applied to evaluate a minutely developed and systematically improved elderly-friendly multimodal interactive system through a series of empirical studies with groups of elderly persons

CONDITION MONITORING BASED ON A WIRELESS, DISTRIBUTED AND SCALABLE PLATFORM

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Liquid stream processing on the web: a JavaScript framework

The Web is rapidly becoming a mature platform to host distributed applications. Pervasive computing application running on the Web are now common in the era of the Web of Things, which has made it increasingly simple to integrate sensors and microcontrollers in our everyday life. Such devices are of great in- terest to Makers with basic Web development skills. With them, Makers are able to build small smart stream processing applications with sensors and actuators without spending a fortune and without knowing much about the technologies they use. Thanks to ongoing Web technology trends enabling real-time peer-to- peer communication between Web-enabled devices, Web browsers and server- side JavaScript runtimes, developers are able to implement pervasive Web ap- plications using a single programming language. These can take advantage of direct and continuous communication channels going beyond what was possible in the early stages of the Web to push data in real-time. Despite these recent advances, building stream processing applications on the Web of Things remains a challenging task. On the one hand, Web-enabled devices of different nature still have to communicate with different protocols. On the other hand, dealing with a dynamic, heterogeneous, and volatile environment like the Web requires developers to face issues like disconnections, unpredictable workload fluctuations, and device overload. To help developers deal with such issues, in this dissertation we present the Web Liquid Streams (WLS) framework, a novel streaming framework for JavaScript. Developers implement streaming operators written in JavaScript and may interactively and dynamically define a streaming topology. The framework takes care of deploying the user-defined operators on the available devices and connecting them using the appropriate data channel, removing the burden of dealing with different deployment environments from the developers. Changes in the semantic of the application and in its execution environment may be ap- plied at runtime without stopping the stream flow. Like a liquid adapts its shape to the one of its container, the Web Liquid Streams framework makes streaming topologies flow across multiple heterogeneous devices, enabling dynamic operator migration without disrupting the data flow. By constantly monitoring the execution of the topology with a hierarchical controller infrastructure, WLS takes care of parallelising the operator execution across multiple devices in case of bottlenecks and of recovering the execution of the streaming topology in case one or more devices disconnect, by restarting lost operators on other available devices

Conception architecturale des systèmes robotiques orientée services

Robotics has experienced an increasing evolution and interest from the society in recent years. Robots are no longer produced exclusively to perform repetitive tasks in factories, they have been designed to collaborate with humans in several important application domains. Robotic systems that control these robots are therefore becoming larger, more complex, and difficult to develop. In this scenario, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been investigated as a promising architectural style for the design of robotic systems in a flexible, reusable, and productive manner. Despite the existence of a considerable amount of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems (SORS), most of them have been developed in an ad hoc manner. The little attention and limited support devoted to the design of SORS software architectures may not only hamper the benefits of SOA adoption, but also reduce the overall quality of robotic systems, which are often used in safety-critical contexts. This thesis aims at improving the understanding and systematization of SORS architectural design.La Robotique a connu une évolution remarquable au cours des dernières années, couplée à un intérêt croissant de la société pour ce domaine. Les robots ne sont plus fabriqués exclusivement pour effectuer des tâches répétitives dans les usines, mais ils sont aussi créés pour collaborer avec les humains dans plusieurs domaines d'application d'importance. Les systèmes robotiques qui contrôlent ces robots sont donc de plus en plus larges, complexes et difficiles à développer. Dans ce contexte, l'Architecture Orientée Services (SOA) a été identifiée comme un style d'architecture logicielle prometteur pour concevoir des systèmes robotiques de manière flexible, réutilisable et productive. Cependant, malgré le nombre considérable de Systèmes Robotiques Orientées Services (SORS) existants aujourd'hui, la plupart d'entre eux ont été développés de manière ad hoc. Le peu d'attention et le soutien limité portés à la conception d'architectures logicielles SORS peuvent non seulement masquer les avantages de l'adoption de la SOA, mais aussi réduire la qualité globale des systèmes robotiques, qui sont souvent utilisés dans des contextes de sécurité critiques. Cette thèse vise à améliorer la compréhension et la systématisation de la conception architecturale SORS. Elle décrit une taxonomie des services pour le domaine de la robotique, puis propose un processus ainsi qu'une architecture de référence afin de systématiser la conception d'architectures logicielles SORS. Les résultats obtenus dans les études d'évaluation montrent qu'à la fois le processus et l'architecture de référence peuvent avoir un impact positif sur la qualité des architectures logicielles SORS et, par conséquent, contribuent à l'amélioration des systèmes robotique