Dario Salvi

EvAAL: Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking

Owing to the complexity of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and platforms, the evaluation of AAL solutions is a complex task that will challenge researchers for years to come. However, the analysis and comparison of proposed solutions is paramount to enable us to assess research results in this area. We have thus organized an international contest called EvAAL: Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking. Its aims are to raise interest within the research and developer communities in the multidisciplinary research fields enabling AAL, and to create benchmarks for the evaluation and comparison of AAL systems.

Evaluation of localization and activity recognition systems for ambient assisted living: The experience of the 2012 EvAAL competition

EvAAL is an annual international competition that addresses the “grand” challenge of evaluation and comparison of Ambient Assisted Living AAL systems and platforms, with the final goal to assess the autonomy, independent living and quality of life that AAL systems may grant to their end users. The 2012 Edition was focused on two pillars of AAL: Indoor localization and activity recognition. Results from both competitions suggest that there is still space for other editions not only to improve accuracy of such systems, but also their user acceptance and interoperability. This paper describes the organization and results of the 2012 edition.

Integration of heterogeneous biomedical sensors into an ISO/IEEE 11073 compliant application

Current trends in healthcare technology include mobile-based applications. Relevant advances in the integration of vital signs monitoring devices with mobile platforms are widely reported nowadays. In this context, conceiving and designing an interoperable application is essential due to the growing necessity of integrating a huge and heterogeneous amount of biomedical data, coming from a wide range of devices and sensors. In this paper the key research issues associated with such integration are presented as well as a specific proposal to solve these problems. It is based on a middleware architecture for the integration of biomedical sensors with mobile devices, derived from the ISO/IEEE 11073 standards family. The application has been developed in the framework of an EU-funded R&D project called METABO.

A Survey of Mobile Phone Sensing, Self-reporting and Social Sharing for Pervasive Healthcare

The current institution-based model for healthcare service delivery faces enormous challenges posed by an aging population and the prevalence of chronic diseases. For this reason, pervasive healthcare, i.e., the provision of healthcare services to individuals anytime anywhere, has become a major focus for the research community. In this paper, we map out the current state of pervasive healthcare research by presenting an overview of three emerging areas in personalized health monitoring, namely: 1) mobile phone sensing via in-built or external sensors, 2) self-reporting for manually captured health information, such as symptoms and behaviors, and 3) social sharing of health information within the individuals community. Systems deployed in a real-life setting as well as proofs-of-concept for achieving pervasive health are presented, in order to identify shortcomings and increase our understanding of the requirements for the next generation of pervasive healthcare systems addressing these three areas.

EvAAL, Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking, the Experience of the 1st Competition

As Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) emerges as a need for our ageing societies, many barriers are still in place against its wide adoption. One of the main issues related to the creation of an AAL market is the lack of consensus around well established technologies which should effectively cover real needs of the population. EvAAL (Evaluating AAL Systems Through Competitive Benchmarking) is a newborn initiative aimed at evaluating solutions related to Ambient Assisted Living by organizing annual international competitions. Its main objectives are the creation of a community of stakeholders around AAL and the creation of metrics and benchmarks for both innovative prototypes and commercial solutions. EvAAL focuses not only on comparison of algorithms or specific hardware issues, but also of user acceptance, deployment and installation effort, integrability, etc. In its first versions, the competition is focusing on specific technical aspects of AAL but aims, in the near future, at joining heterogeneous ”ambient” technologies in a common evaluation framework. In July 2011, the first EvAAL competition took place in Valencia, Spain, on Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL. This paper describes how EvAAL is designed, its principles and how it is internally organized, and goes though an evaluation of this structure though the experience gained during the first competition.

The UniversAAL Platform for AAL (Ambient Assisted Living)

Abstract This article describes the UniversAAL platform, an open platform intended to facilitate the development, distribution, and deployment of technological solutions for Ambient assisted living (AAL). The platform is intended to benefit end users (i.e., assisted persons, their families, and caregivers), authorities with responsibility for AAL, and organizations involved in the development and deployment of AAL services. It consists of an extensive set of resources (some are software and some are models/architectures) aimed at these different groups. The resources are classified into three main groups: runtime support, development support, and community support. The article presents the benefits that can be expected from the widespread adoption of the platform. The article also describes progress on prototype implementations of some of the software resources, and the results of initial evaluations of the platform. The work is partially based on results from earlier European Union-funded research projects in the area.

A framework for evaluating Ambient Assisted Living technologies and the experience of the universAAL project

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aim at supporting elderly and disabled people in their environment, with affordable, easy to use and meaningful ICT tools. Given the complexity of AAL, software platforms are needed to abstract and reuse typical functionalities. To this purpose, the universAAL project was established to create an open platform that provides a standardized approach making it technically feasible and economically viable to develop AAL solutions. In order to make AAL technologies widely accepted, high quality must be guaranteed, but measuring quality in AAL is difficult because of the variety of stakeholders, the wide set of needs addressed and the heterogeneity of the employed technologies. This paper proposes a methodological framework for evaluating AAL solutions with the aim of prioritizing evaluation needs, customizing assessment techniques and producing value for the project. The framework is based on empirical methods and on scientific-like theory building mixed with the standard ISO/IEC 25000 for software quality. It can be applied for both technical and non-technical (end-user) evaluations. To support the framework, the results of its application in universAAL are shown, i.e., how it was used at different stages of the project for assessing the results, for taking decisions and for building scientific knowledge.

Heart Failure Monitoring System Based on Wearable and Information Technologies

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading source of death in the western world and in particular, in Europe CVD cause 45% of all deaths. Besides, heart failure (HF), the paradigm of CVD, affects mainly people older than 65. Facing this reality, the European Union funded MyHeart Project, whose mission is empowering citizens to fight CVD by means of a preventive lifestyle and an early diagnosis. This paper presents an innovative integrated solution for the assessment of heart failure: HF management (HFM). HFM is a heart failure disease management system that makes use of innovative approaches, based on information technologies (IT) and wearable technologies, for the continuous assessment of HF progression and cardiovascular risk stratification. By integrating patient data from different sources with special emphasis in the information obtained from extensive ECG processing the system assesses the patients cardiac condition. Rather than just merely evaluating the cardiovascular status, HFM is designed to motivate patients to acquire an active role in their health management and to help them to improve their cardiac condition by promoting physical exercise

Experience in Evaluating AAL Solutions in Living Labs

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is a complex field, where different technologies are integrated to offer solutions for the benefit of different stakeholders. Several evaluation techniques are commonly applied that tackle specific aspects of AAL; however, holistic evaluation approaches are lacking when addressing the needs of both developers and end-users. Living labs have been often used as real-life test and experimentation environments for co-designing AAL technologies and validating them with relevant stakeholders. During the last five years, we have been evaluating AAL systems and services in the framework of various research projects. This paper presents the lessons learned in this experience and proposes a set of harmonized guidelines to conduct evaluations in living labs.

A system to promote self-behaviors of patients with coronary heart disease

Personalized health devices are the novel paradigm to reduce healthcare costs and to improve the quality of health services. At the same time, health interventions and promotion of self behaviors generate benefits to healthcare and allow citizens to be more involved in their own health management. This paper describes the process followed in HeartCycle project to design education and coaching services to promote self-behaviors in a closed loop monitoring system for patients with coronary heart diseases that suffered a myocardial infarction.