A home automation architecture based on LoRa technology and Message Queue Telemetry Transfer protocol

none5noIn recent years, Internet of Things technologies gained momentum in various application areas, including the Smart Home field. In this view, the smart objects available in the house can communicate with each other and with the outside world by adopting solutions already proposed for Internet of Things. In fact, among the challenges to face during the design and implementation of an Internet of Things–based Smart Home infrastructure, battery usage represents a key point for the realization of an efficient solution. In this context, the communication technology chosen plays a fundamental role, since transmission is generally the most energy demanding task, and Internet of Things communication technologies are designed to reduce as much as possible the power consumption. This article describes an Internet of Things-oriented architecture for the Smart Home, based on the long-range and low-power technology LoRa. Moreover, in order to enable the devices to communicate with each other and the outside world, the Message Queue Telemetry Transfer protocol is used as a domotic middleware. We show that LoRa, designed by having in mind the typical requirements of Internet of Things (i.e. low power consumption, sporadic transmission, and robustness to interference), is well-suited to also meet the need of more established home automation systems, specifically the low latency in message delivery. Interoperability among different devices may also be obtained through the Message Queue Telemetry Transfer midlleware.openEnnio Gambi, Laura Montanini, Danny Pigini, Gianluca Ciattaglia, Susanna SpinsanteGambi, Ennio; Montanini, Laura; Pigini, Danny; Ciattaglia, Gianluca; Spinsante, Susann

Parma consensus statement on metabolic disruptors

A multidisciplinary group of experts gathered in Parma Italy for a workshop hosted by the University of Parma, May 16–18, 2014 to address concerns about the potential relationship between environmental metabolic disrupting chemicals, obesity and related metabolic disorders. The objectives of the workshop were to: 1. Review findings related to the role of environmental chemicals, referred to as “metabolic disruptors”, in obesity and metabolic syndrome with special attention to recent discoveries from animal model and epidemiology studies; 2. Identify conclusions that could be drawn with confidence from existing animal and human data; 3. Develop predictions based on current data; and 4. Identify critical knowledge gaps and areas of uncertainty. The consensus statements are intended to aid in expanding understanding of the role of metabolic disruptors in the obesity and metabolic disease epidemics, to move the field forward by assessing the current state of the science and to identify research needs on the role of environmental chemical exposures in these diseases. We propose broadening the definition of obesogens to that of metabolic disruptors, to encompass chemicals that play a role in altered susceptibility to obesity, diabetes and related metabolic disorders including metabolic syndrome

Smartphone Applications for AAL and Well-being in the Home Environment

La crescente diffusione dei dispositivi smartphone e il loro uso sempre più pervasivo ha aperto nuovi scenari di utilizzo in diversi ambiti, come ad esempio l’educazione, la salute e il marketing. La portabilità, la vasta gamma di sensori e di interfacce di comunicazione lo rendono uno strumento versatile e utile a numerosi scopi. L’obiettivo di questa tesi è quello di investigare come le applicazioni smartphone possano incrementare la qualità della vita sia di persone fragili, come anziani e disabili, sia di persone sane in ambiente domestico. In particolare, la ricerca si è focalizzata su due aspetti fondamentali: l’uso dello smartphone come interfaccia di comunicazione verso gli ambienti di vita intelligenti e l’uso dello smartphone come collettore di dati personali dell’utente. A tale scopo, è stato condotto uno studio approfondito dello stato dell’arte al fine di individuare i vantaggi e i limiti che lo caratterizzano. Successivamente, la ricerca si è focalizzata sui problemi e le sfide da affrontare in fase di progetto sia quando esso viene usato come sistema di interfacciamento, sia quando viene usato come collettore di dati. In particolare, sono state identificate in letterature indicazioni e linee guida per una corretta progettazione al fine di ottenere un sistema effettivamente utile, usabile e accettabile, ponendo particolare attenzione alle esigenze di persone anziane e disabili, affette da limitazioni fisiche o cognitive. Infine, allo scopo di dimostrare come l’uso dello smartphone possa effettivamente contribuire ad aumentare la qualità della vita in ambiente domestico, diversi casi d’uso sono stati realizzati e testati

Smartphone Applications for AAL and Well-being in the Home Environment

La crescente diffusione dei dispositivi smartphone e il loro uso sempre più pervasivo ha aperto nuovi scenari di utilizzo in diversi ambiti, come ad esempio l’educazione, la salute e il marketing. La portabilità, la vasta gamma di sensori e di interfacce di comunicazione lo rendono uno strumento versatile e utile a numerosi scopi. L’obiettivo di questa tesi `e quello di investigare come le applicazioni smartphone possano incrementare la qualità della vita sia di persone fragili, come anziani e disabili, sia di persone sane in ambiente domestico. In particolare, la ricerca si è focalizzata su due aspetti fondamentali: l’uso dello smartphone come interfaccia di comunicazione verso gli ambienti di vita intelligenti e l’uso dello smartphone come collettore di dati personali dell’utente. A tale scopo, è stato condotto uno studio approfondito dello stato dell’arte al fine di individuare i vantaggi e i limiti che lo caratterizzano. Successivamente, la ricerca si è focalizzata sui problemi e le sfide da affrontare in fase di progetto sia quando esso viene usato come sistema di interfacciamento, sia quando viene usato come collettore di dati. In particolare, sono state identificate in letterature indicazioni e linee guida per una corretta progettazione al fine di ottenere un sistema effettivamente utile, usabile e accettabile, ponendo particolare attenzione alle esigenze di persone anziane e disabili, affette da limitazioni fisiche o cognitive. Infine, allo scopo di dimostrare come l’uso dello smartphone possa effettivamente contribuire ad aumentare la qualità della vita in ambiente domestico, diversi casi d’uso sono stati realizzati e testati.The increasing spread of smartphone devices and their pervasive use open up new opportunities in many fields, such as education, health and marketing. The wide range of sensors and communication interfaces and the portability, make it a versatile and useful tool, suitable for many different purposes. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how smartphone applications can improve the Quality of Life of both fragile, such as elderly and disabled people, and healthy people, in the home environment. Particularly, the research focuses on two fundamental aspects: the use of the smartphone as an interface towards smart living environments, and the use of the smartphone as a collector of user’s behavioural data. To this aim, a thorough study of the state of the art has been conducted to identify its advantages and weakness. Subsequently, the research has focused on issues and challenges to face during the design phase of smarphone applications aimed at interfacing and collecting data. More in detail, indications and guidelines have been identified in the literature to enable a proper design and to obtain a useful, usable and acceptable system, paying particular attention to the specific needs of elderly and disabled people, suffering from physical or cognitive impairments. Finally, in order to demonstrate the actual contribution of smartphone applications in incrementing the user’s Quality of Life in the home environment, several use cases have been realized and tested

Interoperability in IoT infrastructures for enhanced living environments

The concept of Internet of Things is being applied in several areas and involves a dramatically increasing number of market sectors. There is a large variety of commercial products, and the competition between different vendors often causes incompatibility among the available solutions. Due to the lack of a reference standard, in the highly fragmented arena of Ambient Assisted Living systems and Smart Home environments, the support to interoperability is recognized as a key requirement for the deployment of successful products. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review of IoT adoption in the field of Ambient Assisted Living systems and Smart Home environments, by describing the most widespread solutions and their main key points, with a specific focus on the features designed to support interoperability. This is currently a matter of interest at a European level, as demonstrated, for example, by the inclusion of interoperability among the requirements that project proposals have to fulfill to be eligible for funding through the AAL Joint Platform calls published in the last year

Low complexity head tracking on portable android devices for real time message composition

For the people who are totally or partially unable to move or control their limbs and cannot rely on verbal communication, it is very important to obtain an interface capable of interpreting their limited voluntary movements, in order to allow communications with friends, relatives and care providers, or to send commands to a system. This paper presents a real time software application for disabled subjects, suffering from both motor and speech impairments, that provides message composition and speech synthesis functionalities based on face detection and head tracking. The proposed application runs on portable devices equipped with Android Operating System, and relies upon the O.S.'s native computer vision primitives, without resorting to any external software library. This way, the available camera sensors are exploited, and the device computational requirements accomplished. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the application in recognizing the user's movements, and the reliability of the message composition and speech synthesis functionalities

Smartphone as unobtrusive sensor for real-time sleep recognition

Sleep is fundamental to health, performance and well-being. Studies demonstrate that, in some countries, sleep disorders are reaching epidemic levels. For this reason, automatic sleep recognition systems can be helpful, on the one hand, to foster self awareness of own habits and, on the other, to implement environment management policies to encourage sleep. In this context, we propose an unobtrusive smartphone application which relies on contextual and usage information to infer sleep habits in real-time. We test selected features using kNearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine classifiers. Moreover, we exploit a 1st-order Markov Chain to improve the algorithm's performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving acceptable results in term of Precision, Recall, and F1-score