Ambient assisted living deployment aims to empower people living with dementia (AnAbEL)

Ambient Assisted Living aims to support the wellbeing of people with special needs by offering assistive solutions. Those systems focused on dementia claim to increase the autonomy of people living with dementia by monitoring their activities. Thus, topics such as Activity Recognition related to dementia and specific solutions such as reminders and tracking users by Global Positioning System offer great advances that seek users' safety and to preserve their healthier lifestyle. However, these solutions address secondary parties by providing useful activities logs or alerts but excluding the main interested user: the person living with dementia. Although primary users are taken into consideration at some design stages by using user-centred design frameworks, final products tend not to fully address the user's needs. This paper presents an Ambient Intelligent system aimed to reduce this limitation by developing a final solution more strongly focused on enhancing a healthy lifestyle by empowering the user's autonomy. Through continued activities monitoring in real-time, the system can provide reminders to the users by coaching them to keep healthy routines. Continuous monitoring also provides a complete user's behaviour tracking and the context-awareness logic used involves the caregivers through alerts when necessary to ensure the user's safety. This article describes the process followed to develop the system aimed to cover the previous concerns and the practical feedback from health professionals over the system deployment working in a real environment

Combined Relativistic and static analysis for all Delta B=2 operators

We analyse matrix elements of Delta B=2 operators by combining QCD results with the ones obtained in the static limit of HQET. The matching of all the QCD operators to HQET is made at NLO order. To do that we have to include the anomalous dimension matrix up to two loops, both in QCD and HQET, and the one loop matching for all the Delta B=2 operators. The matrix elements of these operators are relevant for the prediction of the B-\bar B mixing, B_s meson width difference and supersymmetric effects in Delta B=2 transitions.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure. Lattice2001(heavyquark

AnAbEL: Towards empowering people living with dementia in ambient assisted living

Ambient assisted living aims to support the well-being of people with special needs by offering assistive solutions. Systems focused on dementia increase the autonomy of people living with dementia by monitoring their activities. Topics such as activity recognition and specific solutions such as reminders and tracking users by Global Positioning System offer great advances in user safety and help them preserve a healthier lifestyle. However, these solutions are often addressed to secondary parties, providing them activity logs or alerts, but excluding the main user, the person living with dementia. Although the primary users are taken into consideration at some design stages using user-centred design frameworks, the final products tend to not fully address user needs. This paper presents an ambient intelligent system aimed at reducing this limitation by providing reminders and advice to the person living with dementia in the first instance. The system still involves caregivers if unusual or unhealthy behaviour continues. The solution is deployed in order to be validated by professionals from London city boroughs who work in housing and dementia related services, with an emphasis on enhancing healthy lifestyles by empowering the user in the early stages of dementia with autonomy. Through continued activity monitoring in real-time, the system can provide reminders and warnings to users to keep healthy routines. Continuous monitoring provides user behaviour tracking, and the context-aware logic used involves caregivers through alerts when necessary to ensure user safety. This article describes the process followed in developing the system, and covers previous concerns and practical feedback from health professionals over the deployment of the system in a real environment. Our approach also includes a novelty indoor localization system to distinguish users and allows a more specific delivery of services in multi-occupancy scenarios

Calculation of the continuum--lattice HQET matching for the complete basis of four--fermion operators: reanalysis of the B0B^{0}-Bˉ0\bar{B}^{0} mixing

In this work, we find the expressions of continuum HQET four-fermion operators in terms of lattice operators in perturbation theory. To do so, we calculate the one--loop continuum--lattice HQET matching for the complete basis of $\Delta B=2$ and $\Delta B=0$ operators (excluding penguin diagrams), extending and completing previous studies. We have also corrected some errors in previous evaluations of the matching for the operator $O_{LL}$. Our results are relevant to the lattice computation of the values of unknown hadronic matrix elements which enter in many very important theoretical predictions in $B$--meson phenomenology: $B^{0}$-$\bar{B}^{0}$ mixing, $\tau_{B}$ and $\tau_{B_{s}}$ lifetimes, SUSY effects in $\Delta B=2$ transitions and the $B_{s}$ width difference $\Delta \Gamma_{B_{s}}$. We have reanalyzed our lattice data for the $B_{B}$ parameter of the $B^{0}$-$\bar{B}^{0}$ mixing on 600 lattices of size $24^{3}\times 40$ at $\beta=6.0$ computed with the SW-Clover and HQET lattice actions. We have used the correct lattice--continuum matching factors and boosted perturbation theory with tadpole improved heavy--light operators to reduce the systematic error in the evaluation of the renormalization constants. Our best estimate of the renormalization scale independent $B$--parameter is $\hat{B}_{B} = 1.29 \pm 0.08 \pm 0.06$, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic coming from the uncertainty in the determination of the renormalization constants. Our result is in good agreement with previous results obtained by extrapolating Wilson data. As a byproduct, we also obtain the complete one--loop anomalous dimension matrix for four--fermion operators in the HQET.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figure. Revised version including the referee's comments. Some references have been also added. Accepted to be published in Nucl.Phys.B. No result change

Assessing vulnerabilities in IoT-based ambient assisted living systems

Ambient Assisted Living systems aim at providing automated support to humans with special needs. Smart Homes equipped with Internet of Things infrastructure supporting the development of Ambient Intelligence which can look after humans is being widely investigated worldwide. As any IT based system, these have strengths and also weaknesses. One dimension of these systems developers want to strengthen is security, eliminating or at least reducing as much as possible potential threats. The motivation is clear, as these systems gather sensitive information about the health of an individual there is potential for harm if that information is accessed and used by the wrong person. This chapter starts by providing an analysis of stakeholders in this area. Then explains the IoT infrastructure used as a testbed for the main security analysis methods and tools. Finally it explains a process to assess the likelihood of certain vulnerabilities in the system. This process is mainly focused on the design stage of a system. It can be iteratively combined with development to inform a developing team which system architectures may be safer and worth given development priority

Dampening prey cycle overrides the impact of climate change on predator population dynamics : a long-term demographic study on tawny owls

Funded by ERA-Net BiodivERsA NERC. Grant Numbers: NE/E010660/1, NE/F021402/1, NE/G002045/1Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Context-aware systems architecture (CaSA)

Context-aware systems are becoming increasingly mainstream as more and more technology allows real-time collection of daily life data and it is more and more affordable to provide useful services to citizens in various situations of need. However, developers in this field are not well supported. Naturally we have inherited a number of methods and tools from past software engineering efforts to create previous computing systems. However the most recent generation of systems dominated by sensing supported context-awareness integrating a variety of data sources and with a higher expectation of personalized services delivered at the right time, place and in the right form, are not well supported. Developers need more guidance and support to pinpoint those valuable contexts and to work out ways of detecting them and activating the right services associated with these contexts. Our community has reported on various systems they created however not much is emerging in a way of a methodology, a standard, a transferable body of advice and guidance which can help teams next time they need to develop a new system. In this article we explain a couple of complementary methodologies which we have tried and tested through development of different context-aware projects. We argue these are of practical usefulness and provide an initial valid point of discussion for our community to create evolved versions of these which can be tested more widely to identify good practice in the area

Achieving multi-user capabilities through an indoor positioning system based on BLE beacons

The multiple user challenge is one of the issues that need to be addressed in order to facilitate the adoption of intelligent environments in everyday activities. The development of multi-user capabilities in smart homes is closely related to the creation of effective indoor positioning systems. This research work reports on the development and evaluation of an indoor positioning system that allows multi-user management in a smart home environment. The design of the BLE based system is presented, as well as its implementation and evaluation in the Smart Spaces Lab at Middlesex University. The validation of the system is shown as a case study in which it is used to develop multi-user capabilities in two context-aware systems of the laboratory. Video demonstrations are provided to illustrate the multi-user capabilities that were developed in the validation