Daniel Cesarini

Exploring the ambient assisted living domain: a systematic review

AbstractAmbient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to people primarily in their natural environment. Over the past decade, the AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace in various directions. The stakeholders of AAL are not only limited to patients, but also include their relatives, social services, health workers, and care agencies. In fact, AAL aims at increasing the life quality of patients, their relatives and the health care providers with a holistic approach. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the AAL domain, presenting a systematic analysis of over 10 years of relevant literature focusing on the stakeholders’ needs, bridging the gap of existing reviews which focused on technologies. The findings of this review clearly show that until now the AAL domain neglects the view of the entire AAL ecosystem. Furthermore, the proposed solutions seem to be tailored more on the basis of the available existing technologies, rather than supporting the various stakeholders’ needs. Another major lack that this review is pointing out is a missing adequate evaluation of the various solutions. Finally, it seems that, as the domain of AAL is pretty new, it is still in its incubation phase. Thus, this review calls for moving the AAL domain to a more mature phase with respect to the research approaches.

Non-intrusive Patient Monitoring for Supporting General Practitioners in Following Diseases Evolution

Current patient follow-up practices held by General Practitioners (GPs) are often unstructured. Due to the high number of patients and time limitations, data collection and trend analysis is often performed only for a small number of critical patients. An increasing demand is coming from the physician community for having a set of supporting tools for reducing the time needed to process patient data and speed-up the diagnosis process. Furthermore, the possibility of monitoring patient activities at home would provide less biased and more significant data. Unfortunately, however, current solutions are not able to collect reliable data without the intervention of formal caregivers. This paper proposes an improved version of some medically-backed techniques in an unobtrusive platform to monitor patients at home. Data are automatically collected and analyzed to provide GPs with the current status of the monitored patients and their health trend, contributing in a more precise and reliable decision making.

Simplifying Tele-rehabilitation Devices for Their Practical Use in Non-clinical Environments

The lack of success of tele-monitoring systems in non-clinical environments is mainly due to the difficulty experienced by common users to deal with them. In particular, for achieving a correct operation, the user is required to take care of a number of annoying details, such as wearing them correctly, putting them in operation, using them in a proper way, and transferring the acquired data to the medical center. In spite of the many technological advances concerning miniaturization, energy consumption reduction, and the availability of mobile devices, many things are still missing to make these technologies simple enough to be really usable by a broad population, and in particular by elderly people. To bridge this gap between users and devices, a smart software layer could automatically manage configuration, calibration, and data transfer without requiring the intervention of a formal caregiver. This paper describes the key features that should be implemented to simplify the needed initial calibration phase of sensing systems and to support the patient with a multimodal feedback throughout the execution of the exercises. A simple mobile application is also presented as a demonstrator of the advantages of the proposed solution.

Real-Time Analysis and Design of a Dual Protocol Support for Bluetooth LE Devices

Modern distributed embedded systems frequently involve wireless communication nodes where messages have to be delivered within given timing constraints. This goal can be achieved by adopting a suitable real-time communication protocol. In addition, connecting such systems with mobile devices is also desirable for performing configuration, monitoring, and maintenance activities. The Bluetooth low energy (BLE) protocol would be an attractive solution for this purpose, because it is supported by consumer devices, such as tablets and smart phones, for implementing personal area networks with reduced energy consumption. Unfortunately, however, it cannot guarantee a bounded delay for managing real-time traffic. Modern BLE radio transceivers allow partitioning the network bandwidth between the BLE protocol and another user-defined protocol running on top of the raw radio. This paper exploits this feature to provide an analysis and a design methodology to guarantee the feasibility of a real-time custom protocol that shares the radio with the BLE. Experimental results on a Nordic reference platform show the feasibility of the dual-protocol approach and its capability to support a custom real-time protocol on the raw radio with a bounded overhead.

Dual-protocol support for Bluetooth LE devices

Low energy consumption is one of the primary issues that have to be addressed in body area networks to prevent frequent battery recharges in the nodes. Such networks are being increasingly used to acquire sensory data that need to be processed in real-time. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol is an attractive solution for implementing personal area networks with reduced energy consumption, also because it is supported by consumer devices such as tablets and smart phones; however, it cannot guarantee a bounded delay for managing real-time traffic. This paper overcomes such a limitation by presenting a bandwidth sharing mechanism that allows partitioning the available network bandwidth between the BLE and another user-defined protocol built on top of the raw radio transceiver. Experimental results are also reported to characterize the timing behavior of the dual protocol on a specific platform.

Using stochastic activity networks to study the energy feasibility of automatic weather stations

Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) are systems equipped with a number of environmental sensors and communication interfaces used to monitor harsh environments, such as glaciers and deserts. Designing such systems is challenging, since designers have to maximize the amount of sampled and transmitted data while considering the energy needs of the system that, in most cases, is powered by rechargeable batteries and exploits energy harvesting, e.g., solar cells and wind turbines. To support designers of AWSs in the definition of the software tasks and of the hardware configuration of the AWS we designed and implemented an energy-aware simulator of such systems. The simulator relies on the Stochastic Activity Networks (SANs) formalism and has been developed using the Mobius tool. In this paper we first show how we used the SAN formalism to model the various components of an AWS, we then report results from an experiment carried out to validate the simulator against a real-world AWS and we finally show some examples of usage of the proposed simulator.

Are we synchronized? Measure synchrony in team sports using a network of wireless accelerometers

Movements synchronism is a key parameter for team sports. To determine whether human movements in rowing are synchronous or not, we developed a system that acquires signals through accelerometers and compares those signals using correlation. System components are tuned to reduce the delay between the time at which the action occurs and the one the system produces the output. We present an application to help training synchronized movements and use it to test the system with elite rowing athletes. The system generates the output within 500 ms from the moment of the movement.

Experimental Validation of Energy Harvesting-System Availability Improvement Through Battery Heating

Operation of wireless sensor nodes or battery powered embedded systems in cold and harsh environments requires careful battery selection and management. In this paper, we first provide a general model of an energy harvesting sensor system and the respective energy flows. We then present a maximum power point tracking solar harvesting system according to that model. The system is coupled with rechargeable Li-ion batteries and equipped with a battery heating mechanism. The significant signals of that system are monitored to have a deeper insight into the energy distribution. Real-world experiments demonstrate benefits of battery heating during high irradiation periods at temperatures below safe charging conditions. The presented case study for a cold winter day shows that the additional energy, which can be stored thanks to battery heating would more than double the autonomy of the sensor system.