Christos Kouroupetroglou

IoT-Enhanced User Experience for Smart Water and Energy Management

The two articles in this special section represent ongoing Internet of Things applications in the context of Europe trying to make solutions usable to people in daily times.

A Real-time Linked Dataspace for the Internet of Things: Enabling “Pay-As-You-Go” Data Management in Smart Environments

Abstract As smart environments move from a research vision to concrete manifestations in real-world enabled by the Internet of Things, they are encountering a number of very practical challenges in data management in terms of the flexibility needed to bring together contextual and real-time data, the interface between new digital infrastructures and existing information systems, and how to easily share data between stakeholders in the environment. Therefore, data management approaches for smart environments need to support flexibility, dynamicity, incremental change, while keeping costs to a minimum. A Dataspace is an emerging approach to data management that has proved fruitful for personal information and scientific data management. However, their use within smart environments and for real-time data remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a Real-time Linked Dataspace (RLD) as an enabling platform for data management within smart environments. This paper identifies common data management requirements for smart energy and water environments, details the RLD architecture and the key support services and their tiered support levels, and a principled approach to “Pay-As-You-Go” data management. The paper presents a dataspace query service for real-time data streams and entities to enable unified entity-centric queries across live and historical stream data. The RLD was validated in 5 real-world pilot smart environments following the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) Loop to build real-time analytics, decisions support, and smart apps for energy and water management. The pilots demonstrate that the RLD enables incremental pay-as-you-go data management with support services that simplify the development of applications and analytics for smart environments. Finally, the paper discusses experiences, lessons learnt, and future directions.

Can robots improve the quality of life in people with dementia

Dementia refers to a group of neuro-degenerative disorders that cause significant impairments to quality of life and difficulties performing activities of daily living. This symposium brings together representatives from four independent international research teams from Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. The speakers bring together perspectives from psychology, computer science, engineering, and nursing, to share the latest research on how robotic technologies may be able to assist people with dementia. The first speaker presents a survey of system requirements to assist a person with early stage of dementia to stay at home, followed by development and testing of service scenarios implemented on a robot. The second speaker focuses on robots that provide cognitive stimulation for people with dementia, and presents results from tests in real world settings with older patients. The third speaker focuses on how companion robots may help relieve the problem of social isolation in people with dementia, with results from a pre-post study on loneliness and quality of life. The last speaker describes a narrative memory companion to assist people with dementia to remember people and events. Together these four separate projects showcase how robots are being developed to assist with different aspects of dementia, and demonstrates results concerning their acceptability and impact when interacting with people.

Water Analytics and Management with Real-Time Linked Dataspaces

The research leading to these results has received funding under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme from ICT grant agreement WATERNOMICS no. 619660. It is supported in part by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number SFI/12/RC/2289.

Interacting with Dementia: The MARIO Approach

MARIO is a companion robot that aims to help people with dementia (PWD) to battle isolation and loneliness by enabling them to stay socially active by providing a number of applications focused on hobbies (music, movies, etc), staying engaged with communities (reading headlines, reading local twitter feeds etc.) and staying connected with family and friends (telephoning them, reading their news from twitter, etc.). This paper presents the results from the initial trials of MARIO interacting with PWD involving a limited set of applications. It confirms some of the challenges hypothesized at the outset of the study and provides guidelines for future development work.

The perceptions of people with dementia on robot companions and their potential to reduce loneliness and isolation

European Union Horizons 2020- the Framework Programme for Reaserch and Innovation (2014-2020) under grant agreement 643808 Project MARIO

Future technology oriented scenarios on e-accessibility

This paper presents a set of future scenarios as a part of our study which explores and analyzes the relationships between the emerging ICT landscape in the European societal and economic context, and the development and provision of e-Accessibility, within a perspective of 10 years. Part of our study is the development and validation of various scenarios regarding the impact of new technologies in accessibility. This paper presents some draft scenarios that were produced by combining technologies referred by experts as crucial for the future of eAccessibility.