Exploring conflicts in rule-based Sensor Networks

This paper addresses rule conflicts within wireless sensor networks. The work is situatedwithin psychiatric ambulatory assessment settings where patients are monitored in andaround their homes. Detecting behaviours within these settings favours sensor networks,while scalability and resource concerns favour processing data on smart nodes incorporatingrule engines. Such monitoring involves personalisation, thereby becoming important toprogram node rules on the fly. Since rules may originate from distinct sources and changeover time, methods are required to maintain rule consistency. Drawing on lessons fromFeature Interaction, the paper contributes novel approaches for detecting and resolving rule-conflict across sensor networks

The Design and Evaluation of Personalised Ambient Mental Health Monitors

Mobile and environmental sensing technology can be used to assess human behaviour and mental health trajectories outside of laboratories and in ecologically-relevant settings. To achieve maximum benefit, the set of equipment and the monitoring patterns must be personalised to respect individual needs and fit into individual lifestyles. We have developed a sensor network infrastructure for mobile phones and homecare using a rule-oriented programming architecture to monitor the activity signatures of people with Bipolar Disorder (BD). We believe that the use of this rule-based paradigm within the network for a mental health setting to be a contribution of this work. We are evaluating the effectiveness of the technology in an ongoing technical trial with control participants as a precursor to studying the effectiveness of the system for use with people with BD. In this paper, we report the design and development of the monitoring system along with preliminary findings from the technical trial of the system, and discuss future developments

Discovering Homecare Services

Future homecare networks will consist of a very wide range of embedded services and software that will often rely on numerous other components to achieve their tasks. They will rarely operate in a self sufficient manner. The ability to discover and use services is not however a trivial task. Services may provide raw data, such as temperature readings, or higher contextual data, such as user activity and availability. Networks may change over time and may not be subject to a single management regime, implying the need for a great deal of self-reliance for any software component seeking services from elsewhere within the network. This chapter describes work carried out at the University of Stirling to improve service discovery and allow it to operate effectively in networks with a significant turnover in services. Simple syntactical keyword lookups are insufficient, and so semantics are introduced into the discovery process by using ontologies. However ontologies are known to grow and change over time and so maintaining them can be difficult and error-prone. The described approach employs a hierarchical approach that fosters re-use and sharing of ontologies to alleviate some of the more acute problems of building and maintaining large ontologies

Personalised Ambient Monitoring: Supporting Mental Health at Home

Many who suffer from Bipolar Disorder are keen to control their disease with as little external medical intervention as possible. Self help through websites, meetings, and questionnaires are commonly employed approaches. The PAM project has worked to help this process. It has endeavoured to form an ambient system of monitoring to provide objective feedback to bipolar sufferers. Particular effort has been made to allow the system network of sensors to be personalised and ambient, and operate without the need for a centralised resource. So a sensor system that embeds the processing of the sensor data has been developed. It allows the processing to be changed at run-time to allow personalisation and for changes in behaviour over time. This chapter describes the current status of the project; in particular it describes the rule-based system that the project developed, and an initial technical trial and its outcomes. The rule-based approach and the trial description should be of general interest to both technical developers and practitioners. The latter part of the chapter however is aimed more at the technical developer and focuses on the technical outcomes from the trial with a focus on the programmability aspects and addresses consistency issues that arise with such a flexible programming environment

Dynamically Programmable m-Psychiatry System For Self-Management of Bipolar Disorder

A rule-oriented approach to programming mobile psychiatric monitoring systems was designed. Initial simulations of rule processing have tested system personalisation issues and reviewed characteristics of the rule-oriented approach including the degree of task expressiveness and ease of expressing domain knowledge. A technical trial is being prepared to analyse the approach in a non-simulated environment

Telecare Service Challenge: Conflict Detection

Telecare and telehealth system services can be dynamically configured to collect, analyse, store, and adapt to multimodal data about people as they go about their activities of daily life. These services need to be able to personalise to subjects and adapt to changes in lifestyles, environments and technology. Such dynamic adaptability may be well supported by a low-level rule programming approach; however measures may need to be taken to limit the emergence of conflicts between the distributed rulesets owing to differing programmatic assumptions and unexpected changes. Here, we consider types of conflict that might arise when a variety of care devices are brought together and begin to rely on each others' services. This paper describes a distributed rule-based conflict detection approach for use with heterogeneous mobile and home care devices. We propose methods that make it possible to detect certain forms of rule conflict. To do so, we introduce Event Calculus based logic for writing device rules and an analytical framework for conflict detection

Considering Side Effects in Service Interactions in Home Automation - An Online Approach

The feature or service interaction problem within home networks is an established topic for the FI community. Interactions between home appliances, services and their environment have been reported previously. Indeed earlier work by the authors introduced a device centric approach which detects undesirable behaviour between appliances and their effects on the environment. However this previous work did not address side-effects between components of the modelled environment. That is some appliances do not only affect the environment through their main function, but may do so also in other ways. For instance, an air conditioner cools the air as its main function, but also decreases the humidity as a side-effect. Here we extend our earlier approach to handle such side effects effectively and discuss previously unreported results

Experiences modelling and using object-oriented telecommunication service frameworks in SDL

This paper describes experiences in using SDL and its associated tools to create telecommunication services by producing and specialising object-oriented frameworks. The chosen approach recognises the need for the rapid creation of validated telecommunication services. It introduces two stages to service creation. Firstly a software expert produces a service framework, and secondly a telecommunications ‘business consultant' specialises the framework by means of graphical tools to rapidly produce services. Here the focus is given to the underlying technology required. In particular, the advantages and disadvantages of SDL and tools for this purpose are highlighted

A Framework for Mobile Applications based on a structured P2P Overlay

P2P applications are increasingly popular. Unlike traditional client-server applications they do not require central server resources. This makes them less costly to host and maintain. While there have been a large number of P2P applications been developed for PC based systems, there are only very few for mobile appliances, such as mobile phones or networked PDAs, and even fewer which operate successfully on the public mobile data network (GPRS, 3G), rather than WiFi. This is largely due to the difficulties posed by the restrictive data access to mobile devices (NATs, Firewalls by the network operators) and traditionally high charges for data communications. Recently, the latter point has been virtually removed by the introduction of flat-rate data packages by the operators. This paper (and demo) present a framework and applications based on a structured P2P overlay network which can successfully operate on the public data network

Services and Policies for Care at Home

It is argued that various factors including the increasingly ageing population will require more care services to be delivered to users in their own homes. Desirable characteristics of such services are outlined. The Open Services Gateway initiative has been adopted as a widely accepted framework that is particularly suitable for developing home care services. Service discovery in this context is enhanced through ontologies that achieve greater flexibility and precision in service description. A service ontology stack allows common concepts to be extended for new services. The architecture of a policy system for home care is explained. This is used for flexible creation and control of new services. The core policy language and its extension for home care are introduced, and illustrated through typical examples. Future extensions of the approach are discussed