Bessam Abdulrazak

Towards useful services for elderly and people with disabilities

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2011, held in Montreal, Canada, in June 2011. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 16 short papers and 8 student papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart home and village; health telematics and healthcare technology; wellbeing, ageing friendly and enabling technology; and medical health telematics and healthcare technology.

A standard ontology for smart spaces

This paper presents a universal ontology for smart environments aiming to overcome the limitations of the existing ontologies. We enrich our ontology by adding new environmental aspects such as the referentiality and environmental change, that can be used to describe domains as well as applications. We show through a case study how our ontology is used and integrated in a self-organising middleware for smart environments.

A context-aware service provision system for smart environments based on the user interaction modalities

Ambient and pervasive technologies provide several ways to assist people with special needs in smart environments. However, the systems complexity and the size of the contextual information of these environments lead to several difficulties in deploying and providing the assistance services. A service provision mechanism which is aware of the environment context can simplify the deployment of assistance services on environment devices, by taking care of the decision processes. Moreover, the integration of the interaction modalities in the decision processes of such mechanisms allows deliveries of services to users based on their capabilities and preferences. In this paper, we present a context-aware service provision system for smart environment, which takes into account a whole set of contextual information: user profiles, device profiles, software profiles and environment topology. In regards to our previous work, this paper focuses on the modeling of the user interaction capabilities, built around the notion of interaction modalities. We also detail the integration of the model to the service provision reasoning process, as well as its implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the functionalities of this system through technical validations and scenarios carried out in a real smart apartment.

Evaluation of PhonAge: An Adapted Smartphone Interface for Elderly People

Smartphones can play a significant role in maintaining decent Quality of Life for elderly people. Key factor to Smartphones usage success among elderly people depends on the accessibility of phone interface. In this paper, we present preliminary evaluation results of our PhonAge, an accessible and adaptable interface for Smartphones that is customized to the elderly profile. The results of the evaluation show adequacy of the interface to elderly needs. The evaluation feedbacks also helped in improving PhonAge interface design.

Enabling a Plug-and-play integration of smart environments

In this paper, we describe our research activity on the integration of technologies in the environment of aging people who would benefit from using adapted systems and accessible environment to compensate, even partly, problems of daily activities. The paper focuses on the concept of a smart house in the box, which is an idea of creating a smart house that needs a minimum engineering expertise, that does not require a significant system integration phase, and which reduce the cost of deployment. The paper describes our method that enables an easy integration and management of assistive space. It discusses the method of an automatic self-integration of devices in the house, including mechanisms of describing/identifying devices, mechanisms of sensing/detecting device and the mechanisms of installing devices. In this paper we also present the integration of the system in the Gator Tech Smart House (GTSH), which is a real house in a retirement complex, created specially to fit the needs of ageing people

Micro Context-Awareness for Autonomic Pervasive Computing

Context-aware software provides adapted services to users or other software components. On the other hand, Autonomic Pervasive Computing uses context to reduce the complexity of pervasive system utilization, management and maintenance. This paper describes two context-awareness models, the macro and micro approaches, that define and integrate contextual views of individual pervasive components micro level and global knowledge of the system macro level, and provides a more detailed overview of a micro Context-aware programming model for open smart space problems. These models are presented and compared with respect to their ability to meet the requirements of the Autonomic Pervasive Computing concept of the four selves.

Towards non-intrusive sleep pattern recognition in elder assistive environment

Quality of sleep is an important attribute of an elder’s health state and its assessment is still a challenge. The sleep pattern is a significant aspect to evaluate the quality of sleep, and how to recognize elder’s sleep pattern is an important issue for elder-care community. With the pressure sensor matrix to monitor the elder’s sleep behavior in bed, this paper presents an unobtrusive sleep postures detection and pattern recognition approaches. Based on the proposed sleep monitoring system, the processing methods of experimental data and the classification algorithms for sleep pattern recognition are also discussed.

Coupling Context Awareness and Multimodality in Smart Homes Concept

Development of smart home technologies dedicated to people with disabilities provides a challenge in determining accurate requirements and needs in dynamic situations. In this paper we describe the integration of context awareness and multimodal functionalities in a smart environment. We outline how to optimize user comfort and capabilities. Considering the wide range of user types and preferences and the dynamic system environment created by constant introduction of new product and new context. By taking the environmental information provided by the environment, user profile and preferences, context awareness promises easier interaction and new possibilities such as predictive tasks automatically and adapting new situations to user interface. Multimodality permits in one hand to facilitate accessibility to a wide range of users, and the other hand to offer innovative control method of complex systems. In this paper we present our approach for coupling context awareness and multimodality concepts.

Review of Challenges, Requirements, and Approaches of Pervasive Computing System Evaluation

Abstract Performance evaluation process identifies direction for future research and development. Tremendous efforts have been invested in the related research; however, no standard or commonly accepted methodology exists for evaluating and driving future research. In this paper, we review challenges, requirements, and approaches for evaluating pervasive computing systems. To position evaluation efforts presented in literature, we assembled a design and evaluation life cycle. This review is conducted to have a clear understanding of available solutions and their limitations in order to help in establishing strategy for designing comprehensive evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Collaborative Peer to Peer Defense Mechanism for DDoS Attacks

Abstract Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are the most common and easiest attacks to propagate over internet. It causes a high degree of destruction to the network and systems resources. The destructive nature of DDoS attacks force security engineers to design defense solutions which can detect and take counter actions to defend against such attacks. In this paper, we investigated the packet flood attacks and presented a collaborative peer to peer defense mechanism. The proposed solution detects the attack at victim edge router and sends the alert messages to its neighboring nodes which allow them to proactively defend themselves. Simulation results shows the e_ciency of the solution with less false positives at victim edge router and less damage to the network due to proactive defense approach.