Chirabrata Bhaumik

Road condition monitoring and alert application: Using in-vehicle Smartphone as Internet-connected sensor

The proposal describes a road condition monitoring and alert application using the in-vehicle Smartphone as connected sensors, which are connected to an Internet-of-Things platform over the Internet. In addition to providing a generic Internet-of-Things based platform, the proposed solution brings in novel energy-efficient phone-orientation-agnostic accelerometer analytics in phone, reduces the data volume that needs be communicated between phone and the back-end over Internet, brings in multi-user fusion concepts to create authentic road condition maps and addresses privacy concerns for the phone user for sharing the required data.

Mobile healthcare infrastructure for home and small clinic

In this paper, the authors describe the software infrastructure built to provide healthcare solution for home and small clinic scenario using mobile healthcare devices. The paper discusses how the data from the devices have been stored into a generic Internet of Things (IoT) backend and then retrieved using web services to provide an interactive portal which provides patient data in a unified manner. The novelty of the approach lies in the use of a mobile device as a gateway to reach the backend IoT platform, which supports application deployment and then applying it to the health-care vertical. The mobile device has hence been used as a pervasive healthcare gateway that collects data from the medical devices using either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and uploads the data to the back-end server in desired format. Hence the mobile application acts as the edge platform. Several connected healthcare devices like ECG, pulse oxygen meter, body fat analyzer and blood pressure monitor have been used in conjunction with the mobile gateway.

UbiHeld: ubiquitous healthcare monitoring system for elderly and chronic patients

Once the persons identity is established, the most important aspects of ubiquitous healthcare monitoring of elderly and chronic patients are location, activity, physiological and psychological parameters. Since smartphones have become the most pervasive computing platform today, it is only a logical extension to use the same in healthcare domain for bringing ubiquity. Besides smartphone, skeleton based activity detection and localization using depth sensor like Kinect make ubiquitous monitoring effective without compromising privacy to a large extent. Finally sensing mental condition is made possible by analysis of the subjects social network feed. This paper presents an end-to-end healthcare monitoring system code named UbiHeld (Ubiquitous Healthcare for Elderly) using the techniques mentioned above and an IoT (Internet of Things) based back-end platform.

Home Infotainment Platform - A Ubiquitous Access Device for Masses

There is tremendous need for a low-cost Internet-Enabled Platform for developing countries like India that uses TV as the display medium and can connect to Internet using various available connectivity solutions. The paper presents how a generic framework middleware can be used to create a Home Infotainment Platform that can support variety of value-added applications. It also talks about the innovative designs employed to bring about the low-cost solution keeping in mind both the limitations of TV as a display and non-availability of high quality-of-service networks. Finally the social, economic and environmental implications of wide-spread deployment of the proposed solution are outlined.

AcTrak - Unobtrusive Activity Detection and Step Counting Using Smartphones

In this paper we introduce “AcTrak”, a system that provides training-free and orientation-and-placement-independent step-counting and activity recognition on commercial mobile phones, using only 3D accelerometer. The proposed solution uses “step-frequency” as a feature to classify various activities. In order to filter out noise generated due to normal handling of the phone, while the user is otherwise physically stationary, AcTrak is armed with a novel algorithm for step validation termed as Individual Peak Analysis (IPA). IPA uses peak-height and inter-peak interval as features. AcTrak provides realtime step count. It also classifies current activity, and tags each activity with the associated steps, resulting in a detailed analysis of activity recognition. Using our model, a step-count accuracy of 98.9 % is achieved. Further, an accuracy of 95 % is achieved when classifying stationary, walking and running/jogging. When brisk-walking is added to the activity set, still a reasonable level of accuracy is achieved. Since AcTrak is largely orientation and position agnostic, and requires no prior training, this makes our approach truly ubiquitous. Classification of step-based activity is done as walking, brisk-walking and running (includes jogging). So, after a session of workout, the subject can easily self-assess his/her accomplishment.

SmartEvacTrak: A people counting and coarse-level localization solution for efficient evacuation of large buildings

Efficient evacuation of large buildings which seat more than twenty thousand people is a major challenge for building management authorities. Although many enterprise buildings have access control to count those entering various areas, such controls need to be switched off at times of emergency to avoid people getting trapped at a particular location. Hence, counting people during evacuation remains largely manual and error prone. Also, last known location based on access control from business management systems can be erroneous due to issues like tail gating. Accurate people counters like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) often prove costly in large deployments. In this paper we present “SmartEvacTrak”, a low-cost evacuation system which can count people entering and exiting with over 98% accuracy and can also localize people at a coarse level with around 97% accuracy, from results obtained from an evacuation experiment performed on a set of 350+ people randomly exiting a building.

BlueEye: a system for proximity detection using bluetooth on mobile phones

Interesting applications of crowdsensing include measurement of crowdedness at public places and evaluating the extent of social interactions between people, at large gatherings. These require enabling the accurate estimation of proximity between two or more people. Since mobile phones have emerged as the most ubiquitous sensing and computing platform, carried by almost all people close to their body, it is logical to use the same for proximity detection. Further, in order to motivate people to use such application, it is necessary to estimate distances accurately, using only short blocks of sampled signal strengths. In this paper the authors present a mobile based proximity detection system, codenamed BlueEye which is based on Bluetooth. To achieve better distance estimates, BlueEye proposes a new form of path loss model which takes into account the relative orientation of mobile phones. The results show enhanced distance estimates when the separation between devices is less than 8 feet.

Intelligent Social Network of Devices

People participate in social networks today whereas devices do not. Devices can generate a lot of data that can augment information in a social network. This chapter deals with how devices can contribute to a social network used by people. It describes the need for devices to detect user activity and allow other users to interact using that information, thereby creating an immersion of the real and virtual worlds. It discusses the enabling technology and associated problems in making a social network of devices work. Further, it outlines benefits to people participating in an intelligent social network of devices.

An interactive system using digital broadcasting and Quick Response code

This paper presents a novel method of creating synchronized interactive TV applications using Quick Response (QR) code, where QR code is used to tag the broadcasted TV content. The QR code is decoded at the receiver side to communicate with an Internet server for interactivity. The proposed technique can be used for both classical analog TV and digital TV. The method described here can also be applied on presently growing mobile TV and Over-the-Top (OTT) TV. It assumes Internet connectivity on the client. We present interactive TV based distance education as an example of a synchronized application using this system.

A novel on-screen keyboard for hierarchical navigation with reduced number of key strokes

This paper discusses about on-screen keyboard with hierarchical character or symbol organization which are operated by an accompanying remote control to allow navigation with reduced number of key strokes and enhanced user experience for using convergent services like internet browsing, short message service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM) on devices like TV or Set Top Box obviating the need for separate physical keyboard.