Angelo Costa

A Caregiver Support Platform within the Scope of an Ambient Assisted Living Ecosystem

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) area is in constant evolution, providing new technologies to users and enhancing the level of security and comfort that is ensured by house platforms. The Ambient Assisted Living for All (AAL4ALL) project aims to develop a new AAL concept, supported on a unified ecosystem and certification process that enables a heterogeneous environment. The concepts of Intelligent Environments, Ambient Intelligence, and the foundations of the Ambient Assisted Living are all presented in the framework of this project. In this work, we consider a specific platform developed in the scope of AAL4ALL, called UserAccess. The architecture of the platform and its role within the overall AAL4ALL concept, the implementation of the platform, and the available interfaces are presented. In addition, its feasibility is validated through a series of tests.

Advances and trends for the development of ambient-assisted living platforms

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) try to achieve a future where technology surrounds the users and helps them in their daily lives. In this sense, the urgent need of solutions to cover the rapid increase of the elderly population with chronic diseases led to the increase of projects related with AAL and AmI. During the latest years, several projects have been proposed to tackle different medical problems, some building devices and others services. This paper presents iGenda and its evolution, the UserAccess, with the main objective of developing an AAL platform. It features an analysis of the latest developments and points future directions for the work. These projects display the importance of the interoperability of the platforms, demonstrating a case study for AAL development.

A Persuasive Cognitive Assistant System

In this paper, we present a persuasive recommendation module to be included into the iGenda framework. iGenda is a cognitive assistant that helps care-receivers and caregivers in the management of their agendas. The proposed new module will allow the system to select and recommend to the users the action that potentially best suits to his/her interests. The multi-agent approach followed by the iGenda framework facilitates an easy integration of these new features.

Multispectrum Video for Proactive Response in Intelligent Environments

The exponential increase of home-bound persons that live alone and are in need of continuous monitoring requires new solutions to current problems. Most of these cases present illnesses, such as motor or psychological disabilities, that deprive them of a normal living. Abnormal situations such as forgetfulness or falls are quite common and should be prevented or dealt with. This paper presents a system able to detect dangerous situations at home, such as falls, independently from existing environment conditions. The aim of the proposed system is to proactively offer support to the citizen or to warn the emergency services when needed.

A dynamic user profiling technique in a AmI environment

Currently there are many services that can assist the human being in his decision making. Many of these services provide aid as consistent as possible attending the characteristics and preferences of a user, which compiled results in a persons profile. Without profiles, systems could not provide a coherent aid to a user. In addition we can consider the profiles as the basis of recommendation systems. Paramount with cognitive helping systems, that provide decisions and recommendations these actions can more accurate and user driven. However, the profiles need to be updated over time, as a human being changes of preferences or beliefs, the profiles also need to adapt to dynamic environments. It is introduced a project that applies the Bayesian Networks and Case-Based Reasoning techniques to create and modulate user profiles in a coherent and dynamic way, using stochastic models and high-level event relations and characteristics to devise an accurate suggestion of activities the user can perform, being integrated in an Ambient Assisted Living Project.

Argumentation Schemes for Events Suggestion in an e-Health Platform

In this work, we propose the introduction of persuasion techniques that guide the users into interacting with the Ambient Assisted Living framework iGenda. It is a cognitive assistant that manages active daily living activities, monitors user’s health condition, and creates a social network between users via mobile devices. The objective is to be inserted in a healthcare environment and to provide features like adaptive interfaces, user profiling and machine learning processes that enhance the usage experience. The inclusion of a persuasive architecture (based on argumentation schemes) enables the system to provide recommendations to the users that fit their profile and interests, thus increases the chance of a positive interaction.

Collaborative Group Support in E-Health

In critical areas such as decision making, the Collaborative Work has an uttermost importance. Being a complex problem, the collective decision taking is currently a popular form of taking decisions. In this work we present the VirtualECare project: an intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers (in need of care services). In developed countries, recent census data report a sudden increase in the elderly community together with a decrease of child birth. This is a new reality that needs to be dealt by the health sector, particularly by the public one. In an early stage, this new situation appears mostly as a financial problem. The costs involved in the health care are considerable. Thus, alternative technological solutions that lead to straightforward solutions should be adopted. Recently, a growing interest in combining the advances in information society - computing, telecommunications and presentation - to create Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), has been observed. It is our view that the use of the GDSS in the health care area will pursue the achievement of better results in terms of patients Electronically Clinical Profile (ECP). Additionally, we believe that the best way of managing health appointments is through the use of calendars - one application that can manage both the physicians and patients calendars and consequently their day schedule. Within this area, the approaches used in the VirtualECare and iGenda projects are presented.

A Dynamic Emotional Model for Agent Societies

This paper presents a first approximation of a dynamic emotional model to be employed in agent societies. The proposed model is based on the PAD emotional model and allows the representation of the emotional contagion phenomena of a heterogeneous group of agents which are capable of express emotions. Moreover, the proposal allows the definition of the social emotion of this group of agents. The model is mainly based on three elements: personality, empathy and affinity. These elements allow the characterization of each individual, causing them susceptible to vary in some degree the emotions of other individuals.

A Survey of Cognitive Assistants

Cognitive Assistants is a subset area of Personal Assistants focused on ubiquitous and pervasive platforms and services. They are aimed at elderly people’s needs, habits, and emotions by being dynamic, adaptive, sensitive, and responsive. These advances make cognitive assistants a true candidate of being used in real scenarios and help elderly people at home and outside environments. This survey will discuss the cognitive assistants’ emergence in order to provide a list of new projects being developed on this area. We summarize and enumerate the state-of-the-art projects. Moreover, we discuss how technology support the elderly affected by physical or mental disabilities or chronic diseases.

Emotions detection on an ambient intelligent system using wearable devices

Abstract This paper presents the Emotional Smart Wristband and its integration with the iGenda. The aim is to detect emotional states of a group of entities through the wristband and send the social emotion value to the iGenda so it may change the home environment and notify the caregivers. This project is advantageous to communities of elderly people, like retirement homes, where a harmonious environment is imperative and where the number of inhabitants keeps increasing. The iGenda provides the visual interface and the information center, receiving the information from the Emotional Smart Wristband and tries achieve a specific emotion (such as calm or excitement). Thus, the goal is to provide an affective system that directly interacts with humans by discreetly improving their lifestyle. In this paper, it is described the wristband in depth and the data models, and is provided an evaluation of them performed by real individuals and the validation of this evaluation.