Alessia D'Andrea

A multimodal pervasive framework for ambient assisted living

The increasing need to access information everywhere and at any time leads us to believe that future user interfaces, through which users interact with pervasive computing systems, must address both device and modality independence. The pervasive computing paradigm sees almost every object in the everyday environment as a system able to communicate with users and other systems in their own languages. The interaction between users and systems is therefore typically multimodal. The main challenge of multimodal interaction, that is also the main topic of this paper, lies in developing a framework that is able to process information derived from whatever input modalities, giving these inputs an appropriate representation and integrating these individual representations into a joint semantic interpretation. A description of this multimodal pervasive framework will be given in this paper, along with some details of its application in Ambient Assisted Living and the usability test that was implemented to validate its effectiveness.

SoN-KInG: a digital eco-system for innovation in professional and business domains

Purpose – An open question in the advanced economies, and in the current crisis even more, is to widely improve knowledge sharing as a driver of innovation and creativity processes. The need of addressing knowledge, creativity and innovation is co-generating new knowledge sharing tools, attempting to create new network linkages among professionals (such as engineers, researchers, professors, architects, creative designers, etc.), among financial/business companies and, between professionals and financial/business companies. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – To achieve this goal, during the Knowledge Intelligence and Innovation for a sustainable Growth (KnowInG) project (2010-2013), the Social Network KnowInG (SoN-KInG) model and framework consisting in a digital eco-system were created. The benefits and the potentialities of the SoN-KInG as knowledge sharing tool both for professionals and businesses are discussed in the paper. Findings – SoN-KInG unifies the innovative...

IBF: An Integrated Business Framework for Virtual Communities

The paper provides an integrated business framework for Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer and Consumer-to-Consumer Virtual Communities. The framework involves internal and external factors. Internal factors that include: market analysis; products/services promotion; development of trust; social influence and Knowledge sharing, differ from the different orientations of the framework, while the external factors involve competitors and technological aspects that, while differing from the framework business orientation, have an important impact on the design and development of the business activities.

ME: Multimodal Environment Based on Web Services Architecture

Information, documents and knowledge for each person and for public and private organizations are fundamental in each activity, and they may be the products or services they provide or supply. The daily activities and decision-making processes are usually based on many different pieces of information, which could be handled on PDAs and mobile devices in general, or stored on laptop computers using a lot of different forms, such as spreadsheets, e-mail messages, Web information obtained as the result of a Google search or a query, and so on. Simulating and managing services and information in catastrophic events and emergencies does not represent an exception. This paper describes the Web Services architecture of the Multimodal collaborative knowledge oriented Environment (ME), a platform designed to manage data, information and services for catastrophic events such as earthquakes, floods and dangerous natural phenomena.

Digital eco-systems: the next generation of business services

The paper provides a framework consisting of three different steps: digital business eco-system creation, monitoring and evaluation. In the creation phase, the analysis of available financial resources has to carried out, the value creation and sharing among the actors of the digital business ecosystem have to be stimulated and strategic decisions have to be chosen. After the creation it essentially embodies an active management where the digital business ecosystem is continuously monitored as well as its healthiness is actively improved. In order to carry out the management of the digital business ecosystem some parameters are important to considered such as: quantifiable parameters, competitive assets and current roles and strategies. Finally the impact of DBE have to be measured in term of productivity, robustness and niche creation.

Multimodal Social Networking for Healthcare Professionals

In this paper a study on Social Networking for healthcare professionals has been carried out. Starting from the results obtained by the study, the paper proposes an innovative Social Networking platform for healthcare professionals for facilitating access and sharing of health care services. The platform allows to use multimodal interaction and multimodal information by involving technologies such as Skype, developed for communication, and in particular for tele-communication. To implement the platform some interviews have been carried out in order to understand the characteristics and services that it has to offer to be efficient. The interviews have been contributed to understand the use that physicians make of Social Networks and the advantages and disadvantages they offer to them. The platform that we are proposing provides physicians a greater opportunity of communication and collaboration. In a virtual space physicians can aggregate observations from their daily practice and then exchange each others’ opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications and treatments.

RFID Technologies in Healthcare Setting: Applications and Future Perspectives

The paper discusses the use of RFID technologies in healthcare setting examining the status of applications and prospective views. The authors have identified two classes of applications of RFID technologies in healthcare setting: people monitoring/management and items/assets management applications. While for the perspective views it is provided their classification in: future scenarios, emerging applications and needs. Moreover, a discussion on components, development, key strengths and critical issues affecting the RFID usage in healthcare setting is given in the paper.

Toward new communication paradigms to enhance cognitive and learning processes

The evolution of technologies is making available new devices that allow designing enriched interaction environments between humans and computers. New technological tools, such as multimodal platforms, can be used to enhance cognitive and learning processes. This paper introduces a new paradigm that includes different characteristics of the human-human communication, such as emotions, aesthetics, presence perception, and semantic communication that, usually, are not considered in the human computer communication. Moreover, it provides a gaming application scenario and the description of an Advanced Multimodal Platform for game-based Learning.

European Citizenship, Identity and Rights: A Survey on Italian Young Students

Developing Europe means, first of all, creating a pervasive feeling of European citizenship, and creating a sense of belonging to a community in all countries of the European Union. This paper focuses on extracting Italian students’ socio-psychological dimension with respect to their perception and feelings regarding European citizenship, and their knowledge of the most relevant rights. The study involves Italian students aged between 18 and 25. A hybrid methodology has been adopted, combining: data extracted from a questionnaire; text from the photo-stories; images of the photo-stories and interviews. The results underline that young people have a sense of belonging to the European community, with the same rights and benefits. Moreover, there is the need to have the same feeling of European citizenship everywhere in Europe. The request for a stronger and more active citizens’ involvement also emerged from the study.

Social Media: The Evolution of e-Health Services

The chapter analyses e-health services provided by different Social Media (collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual games and virtual social worlds and video-chat) and introduces a Hybrid Cloud E-health Services architecture (HCLES) able to provide open, interoperable, scalable, and extensible services for all the e-health activities. It integrates the potentialities of Skype for a direct communication and synchronous data transmission among people with the cloud perspective of Social Media services.