An indoor positioning system using Bluetooth Low Energy

In this paper, we present a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based indoor positioning system developed for monitoring the daily living pattern of old people (e.g. people living with dementia) or individuals with disabilities. The proposed sensing system is composed of multiple sensors that are installed in different locations in a home environment. The specific location of the user in the building has been pre-recorded into the proposed sensing system that captures the raw Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) from the BLE beacon that is attached on the user. Two methods are proposed to determine the indoor location and the tracking of the users: a trilateration-based method and fingerprinting-based method. Experiments have been carried out in different home environments to verify the proposed system and methods. The results show that our system is able to accurately track the user location in home environments and can track the living patterns of the user which, in turn, may be used to infer the health status of the user. Our results also show that the positions of the BLE beacons on the user and different quality of BLE beacons do not affect the tracking accuracy

Night optimised care technology for users needing assisted lifestyles

There is growing interest in the development of ambient assisted living services to increase the quality of life of the increasing proportion of the older population. We report on the Night Optimised Care Technology for UseRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles project, which provides specialised night time support to people at early stages of dementia. This article explains the technical infrastructure, the intelligent software behind the decision-making driving the system, the software development process followed, the interfaces used to interact with the user, and the findings and lessons of our user-centred approach

Situational-Context for Virtually Modeling the Elderly

The generalized aging of the population is incrementing the pressure over, frequently overextended, healthcare systems. This situations is even worse in underdeveloped, sparsely populated regions like Extremadura in Spain or Alentejo in Portugal. In this paper we propose an initial approach to use the Situational-Context, a technique to seamlessly adapt Internet of Things systems to the needs and preferences of their users, for virtually modeling the elderly. These models could be used to enhance the elderly experience when using those kind of systems without raising the need for technical skills. The proposed virtual models will also be the basis for further eldercare innovations in sparsely populated regions

Participatory research to design a novel system to support the night-time needs of people with dementia; NOCTURNAL

Strategies to support people living with dementia are broad in scope, proposing both pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions as part of the care pathway. Assistive technologies form part of this offering as both stand-alone devices to support particular tasks and the more complex offering of the “smart home” to underpin ambient assisted living. This paper presents a technology-based system, which expands on the smart home architecture, orientated to support people with daily living. The system, NOCTURNAL, was developed by working directly with people who had dementia, and their carers using qualitative research methods. The research focused primarily on the nighttime needs of people living with dementia in real home settings. Eight people with dementia had the final prototype system installed for a three month evaluation at home. Disturbed sleep patterns, night-time wandering were a focus of this research not only in terms of detection by commercially available technology but also exploring if automated music, light and visual personalized photographs would be soothing to participants during the hours of darkness. The NOCTURNAL platform and associated services was informed by strong user engagement of people with dementia and the service providers who care for them. NOCTURNAL emerged as a holistic service offering a personalised therapeutic aspect with interactive capabilities

BioClojure: A functional library for the manipulation of biological sequences

Motivation: BioClojure is an open-source library for the manipulation of biological sequence data written in the language Clojure. BioClojure aims to provide a functional framework for the processing of biological sequence data that provides simple mechanisms for concurrency and lazy evaluation of large data sets. Results: BioClojure provides parsers and accessors for a range of biological sequence formats, including UniProtXML, Genbank XML, fasta and fastq. In addition it provides wrappers for key analysis programs, including BLAST, SignalP, TMHMM and InterProScan, and parsers for analyzing their output. All interfaces leverage Clojure\u27s functional style and emphasize laziness and composability, so that BioClojure, and user-defined, functions can be chained into simple pipelines that are thread-safe and seamlessly integrate lazy evaluation. Availability: BioClojure is distributed under the Lesser GPL (LGPL) and the source code is freely available from GitHub (https://github.com/s312569/clj-biosequence). Contact: [email protected]