DoMAIns: Domain-based Modeling for Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence and Smart Home Automation systems are currently emerging as feasible and ready to exploit solutions to support more intelligent features inside future and current homes. Thanks to increased availability of off-the-shelf components and to relatively easy to implement solutions we are experiencing a steady evolution of households, causing an ever-increasing users’ awareness of the capabilities of such innovative environments. To foster effective adoption of Smart Home Automation technologies in our home environments, traditional architectural and plant design must be complemented by sound design methodologies and tools, supporting the whole environment design cycle, including for example modeling, simulation and emulation, as well as, when feasible, formal model-checking and verification. Several research efforts have already addressed the design of expressive modeling tools, mostly based on Semantic Web technologies, as well as of suitable platforms for adding interoperation and rule-based intelligence to home environments. This paper proposes a new modeling methodology designed to fit the different phases of Intelligent Environments design, with a particular focus on validation and verification of the whole system. Carefully designed separation of modeled entities permits to exploit the DoMAIns framework during all phases of the environment design, from early abstract conception to the final in-field deployment. The DoMAIns design methodology is applied to a sample use case that involves comprehensive modeling and simulation of a Bank Security Booth, including the environment, the control algorithms, the automation devices and the user. Results show that the approach is feasible and that can easily handle different types of environment modeling, required in the different design phases, and for each of them it may support simulation, emulation, or other verification techniques

SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments

The emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur

Divided right atrium. Diagnosis by echocardiography, and considerations on the functional role of the Eustachian valve

A child presented at birth with severe cyanosis. Echocardiography showed hypoplasia of the right heart with a right-to-left shunt at atrial level. A conservative approach was adopted initially, and the situation improved over a few months, with reversal of the atrial shunt. Surgery was successfully performed at 4 years of age after further echocardiography revealed a congenitally large Eustachian valve and an atrial septal defec

Towards Computational Notebooks for IoT Development

Internet of Things systems are complex to develop. They are required to exhibit various features and run across several environments. Software developers have to deal with this heterogeneity both when configuring the development and execution environments and when writing the code. Meanwhile, computational notebooks have been gaining prominence due to their capability to consolidate text, executable code, and visualizations in a single document. Although they are mainly used in the field of data science, the characteristics of such notebooks could make them suitable to support the development of IoT systems as well. This work proposes an IoT-tailored literate computing approach in the form of a computational notebook. We present a use case of a typical IoT system involving several interconnected components and describe the implementation of a computational notebook as a tool to support its development. Finally, we point out the opportunities and limitations of this approach

IoT Meets Caregivers: a Healthcare Support System in Assisted Living Facilities

This paper presents a system that exploits the synergy between wearable/mobile technology and smart caring environments to support caregivers in Assisted Living Facilities (ALFs) for persons with physical and cognitive disabilities. In particular, this healthcare support system allows caregivers to be automatically alerted of potentially hazardous situations that happen to the inhabitants while these are alone. The design stemmed from six system requirements derived from the results of three focus groups conducted with 30 caregivers of different ALFs in Northern Italy

DOGeye: Controlling your Home with Eye Interaction

Nowadays home automation, with its increased availability, reliability and with its ever reducing costs is gaining momentum and is starting to become a viable solution for enabling people with disabilities to autonomously interact with their homes and to better communicate with other people. However, especially for people with severe mobility impairments, there is still a lack of tools and interfaces for effective control and interaction with home automation systems, and general-purpose solutions are seldom applicable due to the complexity, asynchronicity, time dependent behavior, and safety concerns typical of the home environment. This paper focuses on user-environment interfaces based on the eye tracking technology, which often is the only viable interaction modality for users as such. We propose an eye-based interface tackling the specific requirements of smart environments, already outlined in a public Recommendation issued by the COGAIN European Network of Excellence. The proposed interface has been implemented as a software prototype based on the ETU universal driver, thus being potentially able to run on a variety of eye trackers, and it is compatible with a wide set of smart home technologies, handled by the Domotic OSGi Gateway. A first interface evaluation, with user testing sessions, has been carried and results show that the interface is quite effective and usable without discomfort by people with almost regular eye movement control