Design for the active ageing and autonomy: The role of industrial design in the development of the Habitat IoT project

The increasing emergence of social and healthcare costs due to constant ageing trends of the world population requires to find new solutions to support and prolong peopleâ\u80\u99s independence within the everyday living environments. A research pool among Italian universities, industries and public agencies for the management of services to the person is developing a project called Habitat, aiming at elaborating and testing a platform based on the Internet of Things, thence enabling to create supportive and reconfigurable environments by implementing, improving or re-designing some of the objects of everyday use. The research methodology will be that of the User Centred Design, while the design tool for giving solutions to the end-usersâ\u80\u99 needs is the Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This article wants to investigate the role of design research within the Habitat project, and it will focus on the definition of the characteristics and contributions of design methods applied to a research project aimed at developing useful innovation for real users by a multidisciplinary team

A Modular Pill Dispenser Supporting Therapies at Home

Modern technologies support people’s life in multiple contexts like the assistive one. The pervasiveness of the so-called “Smart Objects”, related to the Internet of Things technologies, is boosting this in many ways. The support for old people to take the daily tablets through an automatic device is an example. This work presents the prototype of a modular pill dispenser customized by end users according to their specific therapy needs. The prototype is a physical and modular set of pillboxes each containing the pills to be assumed in a therapy. The presented scenario at a specific time, set by the user, one or more pillboxes blink to alert the patient that is pill time. If for a given time interval the patient do not take the pill a sound notification is activated and plays for a given duration. If still nothing happens then a notification is sent to the caregiver’s smartphone. The behavior of the pill dispenser is defined by the end user and can be modified any time. One peculiarity of the pill dispenser is that the number of physical boxes are decided by the user and can change any time to best fit the specific therapy. The final goal of this work is to push not professional users, in particular older people, to take advantages of new technologies to improve their life

AI4SAFE-IoT: an AI-powered secure architecture for edge layer of Internet of things

© 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature. With the increasing use of the Internet of things (IoT) in diverse domains, security concerns and IoT threats are constantly rising. The computational and memory limitations of IoT devices have resulted in emerging vulnerabilities in most IoT-run environments. Due to the low processing ability, IoT devices are often not capable of running complex defensive mechanisms. Lack of an architecture for a safer IoT environment is referred to as the most important barrier in developing a secure IoT system. In this paper, we propose a secure architecture for IoT edge layer infrastructure, called AI4SAFE-IoT. This architecture is built upon AI-powered security modules at the edge layer for protecting IoT infrastructure. Cyber threat attribution, intelligent web application firewall, cyber threat hunting, and cyber threat intelligence are the main modules proposed in our architecture. The proposed modules detect, attribute, and further identify the stage of an attack life cycle based on the Cyber Kill Chain model. In the proposed architecture, we define each security module and show its functionality against different threats in real-world applications. Moreover, due to the integration of AI security modules in a different layer of AI4SAFE-IoT, each threat in the edge layer will be handled by its corresponding security module delivered by a service. We compared the proposed architecture with the existing models and discussed our architecture independence of the underlying IoT layer and its comparatively low overhead according to delivering security as service for the edge layer of IoT architecture instead of embed implementation. Overall, we evaluated our proposed architecture based on the IoT service management score. The proposed architecture obtained 84.7 out of 100 which is the highest score among peer IoT edge layer security architectures