Christos P. Antonopoulos

Robots in Assisted Living Environments as an Unobtrusive, Efficient, Reliable and Modular Solution for Independent Ageing: The RADIO Perspective

Demographic and epidemiologic transitions in Europe have brought a new health care paradigm where life expectancy is increasing as well as the need for long-term care. To meet the resulting challenge, European healthcare systems need to take full advantage of new opportunities offered by technical advancements in ICT. The RADIO project explores a novel approach to user acceptance and unobtrusiveness: an integrated smart home/assistant robot system where health monitoring equipment is an obvious and accepted part of the user’s daily life. By using the smart home/assistant robot as sensing equipment for health monitoring, we mask the functionality of the sensors rather than the sensors themselves. In this manner, sensors do not need to be discrete and distant or masked and cumbersome to install; they do however need to be perceived as a natural component of the smart home/assistant robot functionalities.

The effect of symmetric block ciphers on WSN performance and behavior

Nowadays Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly accepted as a reliable solution to highly demanding and critical application scenarios such as military and medical environments, where security support is an absolute prerequisite. However, supporting security implies the execution of cipher algorithms posing significant overheads on WSN nodes, which suffer from scarce resource availability. Moreover, the system wide overheads imposed by requirements related to network performance and behavior are not adequately addressed in current literature. In that direction, this paper intends to evaluate these effects for critical network parameters. The results presented are based on existing results reported in literature measurements concerning the performance overhead imposed by widely utilized encryption algorithms that have been developed for prominent WSN platforms. To evaluate the measurements, the execution performance of three popular cipher algorithms, has been integrated in Omnet++/MiXiM, a well known and widely utilized WSN network simulator. As part of this work, critical insights are provided concerning the system wide effect of deploying security algorithms which are not taken into account when focusing solely in the security algorithm measurements. Furthermore, important trade-offs are provided both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Computation and communication challenges to deploy robots in assisted living environments

Demographic and epidemiologic transitions have brought forward a new health care paradigm with the presence of both growing elderly population and chronic diseases. Recent technological advances can support elderly people in their domestic environment assuming that several ethical and clinical requirements can be met. This paper presents an architecture that is able to meet these requirements and investigates the technical challenges introduced by our approach.

Resource efficient data compression algorithms for demanding, WSN based biomedical applications

During the last few years, medical research areas of critical importance such as Epilepsy monitoring and study, increasingly utilize wireless sensor network technologies in order to achieve better understanding and significant breakthroughs. However, the limited memory and communication bandwidth offered by WSN platforms comprise a significant shortcoming to such demanding application scenarios. Although, data compression can mitigate such deficiencies there is a lack of objective and comprehensive evaluation of relative approaches and even more on specialized approaches targeting specific demanding applications. The research work presented in this paper focuses on implementing and offering an in-depth experimental study regarding prominent, already existing as well as novel proposed compression algorithms. All algorithms have been implemented in a common Matlab framework. A major contribution of this paper, that differentiates it from similar research efforts, is the employment of real world Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG) datasets comprising the two most demanding Epilepsy modalities. Emphasis is put on WSN applications, thus the respective metrics focus on compression rate and execution latency for the selected datasets. The evaluation results reveal significant performance and behavioral characteristics of the algorithms related to their complexity and the relative negative effect on compression latency as opposed to the increased compression rate. It is noted that the proposed schemes managed to offer considerable advantage especially aiming to achieve the optimum tradeoff between compression rate-latency. Specifically, proposed algorithm managed to combine highly completive level of compression while ensuring minimum latency thus exhibiting real-time capabilities. Additionally, one of the proposed schemes is compared against state-of-the-art general-purpose compression algorithms also exhibiting considerable advantages as far as the compression rate is concerned.

Design and implementation of efficient reconfigurable cipher algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) networks are increasingly utilized in highly demanding scenarios such as medical applications. In such cases hardware designs emerge as a prominent approach to address processing demanding tasks offering significant advantages over respective software based solutions. In such cases reconfiguration capabilities enable the achievement of critical trade-off between adequate performance and resource conservation. In this context the main contribution of this paper is the proposal and performance evaluation of a reconfigurable encryption module with respect to the encryption key size aiming towards WSN utilization. Performance will be presented with respect to encryption process delay, reconfiguration delay and power consumption projecting to energy expenditure.

Mobile Multi-parametric Sensor System for Diagnosis of Epilepsy and Brain Related Disorders

Epilepsy is the commonest serious brain disorder, affecting 1-2% of the general population. Epileptic seizures are usually expressed with a wide range of paroxysmal recurring motor, cognitive, autonomic symptoms and EEG changes. Therefore reliable diagnosis requires state of the art monitoring and communication technologies providing real-time, accurate and continuous brain and body multi-parametric data measurements. The purpose of this paper is to present an adequate mobile system comprising all required sensor types for the everyday life monitoring of patients with epilepsy.

Secure and Efficient WSN Communication Infrastructure

Efficient wireless communication in conjunction with high level security provision concerning highly challenging medical applications is of paramount importance. Such requirements however comprise multifaceted challenges for CyberPhysical systems relying on state of the art WSN communication technologies. In that respect this chapter highlights two critical relative aspects as follows: The first aspect focuses on the sensor devices. Based on identified and presented requirements various security countermeasures are analyzed offering adequate security level while taking into consideration specific requirements such as low resource availability and low cost as well as the fact that sensors are miniaturized devices operating for long time periods. The second aspect addresses security concerning the wireless transmission with respect to performance and resource overhead. This chapter focuses on two different wireless communication technologies, comprising probably the most vulnerable part of a CPS platform. It is noted that the presented information effectively comprise the main outcome following an extensive evaluation based on both simulation as well as real platform measurements conducted in the context of the ARMOR FP7 project. Last but not least, a novel ultra low power hardware encryption module design is presented in order to further enhance the security level provided by the system while minimizing resource wastage.

Integrating Robots and WSN: Communication and Interfacing Aspects

In the context of RADIO project, seamless integration of Robotic platform, heterogenous home automation technologies and diverse back infrastructures comprised an integral challenge to the success of the overall endeavor. This observation gave the involved partners the chance to explore difference technological and design approaches in order to yield the optimum implementation. At the same time, it highlighted the need to follow a structured, multifaceted approach in order to tackle efficiently all requirements. Based on this process, the main objective of this chapter is to present the most important lessons learned as well as emphasize on the key aspects where enhancements and novel contributions were achieved in RADIO. Therefore, in the first section, after the conceptual communication architecture defined in RADIO is presented, critical communication requirements of the RADIO platform are identified focusing on local area ultra-low power communication technologies deployed in the home premises as well as efficient cloud infrastructure utilized. Then the second section highlights the actual state-of-the-art communication technologies explored, deployed, and integrated in the context of RADIO platform emphasizing on bridging and coexistence critical challenges encountered and addressed. Focusing on the integration problem the RADIO Gateway entity represented one of the most important cornerstones for the overall RADIO platform performance effectively comprising a highly complex compound entity, adequately analyzed in Sect. 5.3. Then in Sect. 5.4 important research activities based on BLE communication technology are presented, enabling, on one hand, accurate indoor localization and, on the other hand, extended coverage area capabilities through multi-hop communication. Finally, Sect. 5.5 presents all development and integration effort devoted by RADIO partners to the backend infrastructure. Although, many times, not highlighted adequately, backend infrastructure is a critical part of the overall architecture since it effectively comprises the bases for key services such as, data storage, data processing, data representation, network management, network configuration, etc.

Designing User Interfaces for the Elderly

Age-related impairments influence the way people use computer systems and devices. Research in the HCI and usability domains has offered guidelines and methods that guide the design and the evaluation of applications targeting the steadily growing aging population. This chapter presents the RADIO GUI emphasizing on the interaction and user interface guidelines that guided the design of the End-User GUI for controlling the robot via a multi-touch device. This part of the RADIO system has been evaluated by two usability experts using heuristic evaluation and a set of guidelines for elderly users using applications on multi-touch devices. In addition, the system was evaluated by users executing specific scenarios that were eye-tracked in order to examine recognizability and memorability of icons, as well as readability and understandability of textual content.

IoT and Service Oriented Infrastructures for Flight 4.0.

Flight 4.0 represents a rapidly expanding research domain that brings IoT (Internet of Things) technology in the aviation domain. Based on various engineering domains such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and embedded systems, Flight 4.0 systems are characterized by high degree of heterogeneity regarding various perspectives, such as communication, hardware, and software solutions. Additionally, in order to be well accepted by the end users, it is of paramount importance to exhibit high degree of configurability and flexibility so as to be applicable in diverse application scenarios. Aiming to address such objectives, this chapter attempts to identify the main aspects and tendencies toward a holistic end-to-end communication infrastructure for Flight 4.0 systems. In this context, and serving as a roadmap, the respective architectures should offer a homogeneous support to a wide range of WSN communication technologies and protocols, while being able to support time-constrained monitor, control, and configuration of critical Flight 4.0 infrastructure. In addition, such architectures must emphasize on the use of distributed components that are able to offer enhanced fault tolerance performance, a critical aspect for most modern aviation systems.