Adelmo De Santis

Interoperability issues among smart home technological frameworks

Population aging may be seen both as a human success story, the triumph of public health, medical advancements and economic development over diseases and injures, and as one of the most challenging phenomena that society faces in this century. Assistive technology in all its possible implementations (from Telemedicine to Ambient Assisted Living, and Ambient Intelligence) represents an emerging answer to the needs of the new generation of older adults whose desire is to live longer with a higher quality of life. Objective of this paper is to present the results of a public financed action for the development and implementation of an “integration platform” for Ambient Assisted Living that includes features of home automation (energy management, safety, comfort, etc.) and introduces “smart objects”, to monitor activities of daily living and detect any abnormal behavior that may represent a danger, or highlight symptoms of some incipient disease.

Multimodal Interaction in a Elderly-Friendly Smart Home: A Case Study

This paper discusses different and multimodal user-system interfaces proposed in the framework of a smart home designed to support the independent living of elderly and frail users. It is shown how different technologies and solutions may be complemented and integrated to provide effective interaction both for routine activities of daily living and anomalous situations.

Comparison of RGB-D Mapping Solutions for Application to Food Intake Monitoring

Food intake behaviours are strictly correlated to health, especially for elderly people. Dietary habits monitoring is one of the most challenging activity for researchers in AAL scenario. RGB-D sensors, such as Kinect, provide multiple useful data to perform behavioural analysis in an unobtrusive way. Unfortunately, when using the Kinect sensor, depth and RGB data are not available with the same point of view, and a mapping algorithm is required in order to associate a 3D point to the same pixel in both the RGB and depth frames. In this paper, some techniques for RGB-D mapping of Kinect sensor data are compared, and a proposed implementation is described. Some experimental results in specific conditions are finally provided.

A simple object for elderly vitality monitoring: The smart insole

In the framework of Ambient Assisted Living solutions, it is very important to monitor the degree of vitality of elderly users in their daily activities, for example to evaluate if the user is spending too much time in a static condition, or not. In fact this could denote an anomalous trend, possibly related to cognitive or physical conditions worsening. For such a kind of monitoring to be effective, the sensor technology shall be the less intrusive as possible, and not require any specific action by the user. To this aim, the paper presents a smart insole equipped with force sensors, that is able to classify different dynamic states (sitting, walking, standing,...) and transmit related data to a supervising system. Preliminary experimental results show the feasibility of the approach, and the effectiveness of the insole in correctly detecting and classifying the users activities.

Unobtrusive Monitoring of Physical Activity in AAL - A Simple Wearable Device Designed for Older Adults

Many solutions and projects proposed within the Ambient Assisted Living research area, aim at monitoring the degree of vitality of elderly users in their daily activities, and in their home environment, to possibly avoid or strongly limit the need for clinical evaluations. In fact, the information on the subject’s vitality, manifested through his/her activity profile, may be used to evaluate possible anomalous trends, related to cognitive or physical decay. For such a kind of analysis to be realistically affordable, the monitoring device shall be unobtrusive, and transparent to the user. With the aim of striving for the simplest and most reliable design compatible with the aforementioned requirements, this paper presents a wearable device equipped with a sensing insole hosting force sensors, and the related electronics for signal processing and data transmission. The device locally classifies different dynamic states (sitting, walking, standing) and transmits the corresponding information to a supervising system. Preliminary experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the approach, in correctly detecting and classifying the user’s activities.

Self-Adaptive and Lightweight Real-Time Sleep Recognition With Smartphone

It is widely recognized that sleep is a basic phys- iological process having fundamental effects on human health, performance and well-being. Such evidence stimulates the re- search of solutions to foster self-awareness of personal sleeping habits, and correct living environment management policies to encourage sleep. In this context, the use of mobile technologies powered with automatic sleep recognition capabilities can be helpful, and ubiquitous computing devices like smartphones can be leveraged as proxies to unobtrusively analyse the human behaviour. To this aim, we propose a real-time sleep recognition methodology relied on a smartphone equipped with a mobile app that exploits contextual and usage information to infer sleep habits. During an initial training stage, the selected features are processed by k-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine classifiers, to select the best performing one. Moreover, a 1st-order Markov Chain is applied to improve the recognition performance. Experimental results, both offline in a Matlab environment, and online through a fully functional Android app, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving acceptable results in term of Precision, Recall, and F1-score.

A prototype system for mm-wave channel characterization: Issues and results

The deployment of new applications that can expand the mobile systems market is closely related to the availability of very high transmission capacity. Several researches are then developed to achieve this result, introducing as an example new modulation schemes or innovative channel coding technologies. With the aim to use a range of radio frequencies at present not crowded, and thus interference-free, able at the same time to make available a high bandwidth capacity, other researches are considering the possibility of transmitting at carrier frequencies of 60 GHz and beyond. The aim of this paper is to present a prototype for mm-Wave channel measurements, at 76 GHz, in order to derive a propagation model to be applied in different environmental conditions.

Supporting Caregivers in Nursing Homes for Alzheimer’s Disease Patients: A Technological Approach to Overnight Supervision

The reduction of public expenditure and investments in health care provisioning calls for new, sustainable models to transform the increasing aging population and dementia-related diseases incidence from global challenges into new opportunities. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies play a vital role, to both promote aging in place and home management of Patients with Dementia, and to provide new tools and solutions to facilitate the working conditions of the care staff in nursing homes, which remain an essential facility when cognitive-impaired patients cannot live at home anymore. Night staff in nursing homes are a vulnerable group, receiving less supervision and support than day staff, but with high levels of responsibility. Additionally, nighttime attendance of patients affected by dementia may be difficult, because of their incremented neuropsychiatric symptoms. This paper describes an integrated system for the night monitoring of patients with dementia in nursing homes, based on a product originally conceived for domestic use, but re-designed to provide support to nurses, by means of a set of sensors located in each patient’s room, and suitable software applications to detect dangerous events and raise automatic alerts delivered to the nurses through mobile devices. The results obtained from the first experimental installation of the monitoring system proved the effectiveness of the proposed solution to support nurses during the night supervision of patients, and suggested suitable modifications and additional features to increase the nurses’ compliance.