Alessandro Fiore

Augmented Reality for Allowing Time Navigation in Cultural Tourism Experiences: A Case Study

In the past few years, mobile phones have become an increasingly attractive platform for augmented reality. This paper describes the development of an interactive visualization system based on Augmented Reality Technologies and the integration into a tourist mobile application for Android. The basic idea is to allow the time navigation of cultural points of interest by means of Augmented Reality. The real scene is enhanced by ancient images to increase the cultural experience of the tourist, who can realistically come back in the past.

An IoT-Aware Architecture for Collecting and Managing Data Related to Elderly Behavior

The world population will be made up of a growing number of elderly people in the near future. Aged people are characterized by some physical and cognitive diseases, like mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and frailty, that, if not timely diagnosed, could turn into more severe diseases, like Alzheimer disease, thus implying high costs for treatments and cares. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) can be adopted to create frameworks for monitoring elderly behavior which, alongside normal clinical procedures, can help geriatricians to early detect behavioral changes related to such pathologies and to provide customized interventions. As part of the City4Age project, this work describes a novel approach for collecting and managing data about elderly behavior during their normal activities. The data capturing layer is an unobtrusive and low-cost sensing infrastructure abstracting the heterogeneity of physical devices, while the data management layer easily manages the huge quantity of sensed data, giving them semantic meaning and fostering data shareability. This work provides a functional validation of the proposed architecture and introduces how the data it manages can be used by the whole City4Age platform to early identify risks related to MCI/frailty and promptly intervene.

WoX: Model-Driven Development of Web of Things Applications

Abstract Nodes of the Internet of Things (IoT) are heterogeneous: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Near Field Communication (NFC), Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN), Konnex (KNX), just to name the most popular. IoT clients are heterogeneous too: mobile apps, laptops, enterprise applications, business processes instances, not to mention that even IoT nodes can be clients for other nodes. In this many-to-many relationship scenario, developing a seamless IoT system is arduous even for a specialized developer. All the more so, enable non-technical people to autonomously define innovative IoT-based scenarios is far from being trivial. This calls for the definition of a common design model shared by all the IoT stakeholder: device manufacturers, developers, stakeholders, business entities, end users. The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm has brought the IoT a step closer to the people perception, because it allows treating a networked thing as a Web resource. Nevertheless, sharing a common application layer protocol on top of the physical “things” does not guarantee that IoT application will be fast-developed, robust and easily evolvable. REST APIs definition for the IoT objects is left to the individual developer. Technological needs may vary along the application lifecycle. Stakeholders are often interested in virtual or aggregated environment features, rather than the single networked thing. To overcome these open issues, we think that it is needed an additional abstraction level between the WoT and the application layer. This should be model-driven – in order this to be adequately agreed by all the IoT stakeholders – and topic-based – because of the event-driven nature of the IoT. In this work we propose Web of Topics (WoX), a Cloud platform for the Internet of (every)Thing (IoE). WoX APIs allows companies and organisations to realise robust and high-maintainable IoT-based services, while minimising deployment costs and the time-to-market. Its model-driven approach guarantees a great end-user experience and a seamless integration among the heterogeneous IoT entities. In this book chapter we present the WoX model and the concrete architecture supporting it. As a proof of concept, in this work we also show how we implemented an original IoT scenarios using the WoX concepts, APIs and architecture: the airport short-stay parking service.

Exploiting an IoT local middleware for the orchestration of mobile device sensors to detect outdoor and indoor user positioning

Thanks to the proliferation of mobile technologies that enable devices to use the network for providing (publish) or requiring (subscribe) information according to specific applications aims, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered as the biggest challenge that the industry is currently facing. During the last years several application domains for IoT have emerged and among these the Smart Cities. In effect, the IoT is redrawing the Smart Cities in a promising way from the technological, economic, and social perspectives. This represents the background of the work described in the present paper that deals with an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mobile system able to detect outdoor and indoor user positioning, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Our system exploits an IoT middleware, called WoX (Web of Topics) and its local counterpart L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics). Thanks to its model-driven approach, it is able to allow the communication between mobile applications and a set of heterogeneous sensors, orchestrating access services and communication protocols in a very abstract way.

Deploying Mobile Middleware for the Monitoring of Elderly People with the Internet of Things: A Case Study

The ageing population and related diseases represent some of the most relevant challenges in the healthcare domain. All that will lead to an increasing demand of innovative solutions in order to guarantee a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. In fact, many researchers are studying the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the e-health field. In this paper we report a case study where a locale middleware for portable devices has been used to facilitate the development of IoT mobile application in this respect, allowing the communication among different on board sensing technologies. The mobile middleware is built on top of the WoX (Web of Topics) platform and quickly permits the deployment of innovation services thanks to its abstraction and user centric model. A validation test bed involving 31 elderly people living in Lecce (Italy) has been carried out for the monitoring of their activities, mainly those connected to positioning and motility both in indoor and outdoor scenarios. Our approach has demonstrated a practical way to replace obtrusive monitoring technique (typical of caregivers) with unobtrusive ones, in order to obtain proactive intervention strategies for a smart city.

A HCE-Based Authentication Approach for Multi-platform Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities useful to control people’s daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to monitor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction between digital world and real world. Most NFC-enabled mobile devices exploit the smart card features as a whole: e.g., they can be used as contactless payment and authentication systems. Nevertheless at present heterogeneity in mobile and IoT technologies does not permit to fully express potentialities of mobile devices as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card approach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authentication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its independence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univocally identifying user identity, tracing its actions in the meanwhile. As proof of concept, a real case has been implemented: an Android/iOS mobile application to control a car central locking system by NFC.

Mobile-IDM: A Design Method for Modeling the New Interaction Style of Mobile Applications

Mobile applications apps offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars e.g., gestures, context-aware events, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. The research panorama only proposes a few design methods for apps, which are mainly released as extensions of existing ones. This, in addition to the short lifecycle that characterizes apps, leads to the risk of inappropriate modeling techniques being adopted. To bridge this gap, we propose a new design method, named Mobile-IDM, to model the interaction between the user and the app from a logical point of view. As it is based upon IDM and Rich-IDM, from which it inherits its design semantics, Mobile-IDM exploits the dialog metaphor to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers to obtain good usability of the interaction. We demonstrate through a case study the simplicity and other advantages of our approach.

A different perspective in building tools to collect and share educational resources

Until now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. Standard metadata for learning objects have been provided and large databases have been deployed both from academia, and private organizations following mainly a content-centric approach. Vice-versa, a pedagogy-centric approach to the collection and sharing of learning resources still remains under-investigated. In this paper, we provide a different perspective on repositories for education, having as a central point the “educational experience”, i.e. a detailed and structured case study by which teachers and researchers in the educational field can understand where, when and how the digital material was used, and what educational benefits were obtained. We describe a framework by which educational experiences conducted in real classes of all levels of schooling can be gathered and shared. We provide readers with an empirical validation and a numerical evaluation of the approach.

An Innovative Educational Format Based on a Mixed Reality Environment: A Case Study and Benefit Evaluation

We are in the midst of an information revolution, in which emerging technologies are creating new products and services that are redefining many aspects of our lives. The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the educational context has allowed leading researchers and practitioners to find new ways of performing learning processes. It is evident that students are naturally attracted by activities that incorporate technology. In this work we propose an innovative competition-based educational format, known as “TIWE Linguistico,” that exploits a Mixed Reality (MR) environment in order to encourage the learning of English as a foreign language. The “TIWE Linguistico” has been used experimentally in an Italian high school and the benefits obtained have been validated by exploiting the FEE (Features Extractions) method.

An EPC-based middleware enabling reusable and flexible mixed reality educational experiences

The world of education is changing substantially to satisfy new needs requested both from teachers and students. A very important role in this changing process is played by emerging hi-technologies, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), and auto-identification (Auto-ID) solutions (e.g. QR code, RFID, NFC). Several attempts to renovate traditional classrooms to enable Mixed Reality (MR) educational experiences are already reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they often lack a middleware able to ease the smart classroom management. This failure is due to poor flexibility in the means of easiness of new technologies configuration and educational methods configurations. In this paper, we present an educational MR middleware based on the EPCglobal standard. The proposed middleware is easy in Auto-ID and CVE technologies configuration; furthermore, it is able to support a competition among different classes of students or schools, by leveraging the EPC Information Services for extracting times and scores. We report also on an experience we made configuring the proposed middleware for a MR educational format called “TIWE Linguistico,” highlighting main benefits obtained considering an Italian high school for strengthening the English language mastery.