Davide Calvaresi

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.

A goal-oriented requirements engineering approach for the ambient assisted living domain

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) domain is associated with a large number of stakeholders such as patients, their relatives, caregivers and physicians. This variety introduces a great heterogeneity in system requirements, which sometimes results in conflicting needs that must be considered when developing effective AAL systems. In this work we adopt a Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approach to map out needs and requirements for the AAL domain. Following the requirements mapping, we also propose a preliminary architecture for a home care system (named e-Ward) to assist patients in their domestic environment as if they are in a hospital room.

Agent-Based Systems for Telerehabilitation: Strengths, Limitations and Future Challenges

Telerehabilitation in older adults is most needed in the patient environments, rather than in formal ambulatories or hospitals. Supporting such practices brings significant advantages to patients, their family, formal and informal caregivers, clinicians, and researchers. Several techniques and technologies have been developed aiming at facilitating and enhancing the effectiveness of telerehabilitation. This paper gives a quick overview of the state of the art, investigating video-based, wearable, robotic, distributed, and gamified telerehabilitation solutions. In particular, agent-based solutions are analyzed and discussed addressing strength, limitations, and future challenges. Elaborating on functional requirements expressed by professional physiotherapists and researchers, the need for extending multi-agent systems (MAS) peculiarities at the sensing level in wearable solutions establishes new research challenges.

The challenge of real-time multi-agent systems for enabling IoT and CPS

Techniques originating from the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) areas have extensively been applied to develop intelligent and pervasive systems such as assistive monitoring, feedback in telerehabilitation, energy management, and negotiation. Those application domains particularly include three major characteristics: intelligence, autonomy and real-time behavior. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are one of the major technological paradigms that are used to implement such systems. However, they mainly address the first two characteristics, but miss to comply with strict timing constraints. The timing compliance is crucial for safety-critical applications operating in domains such as healthcare and automotive. The main reasons for this lack of real-time satisfiability in MAS originate from current theories, standards, and technological implementations. In particular, internal agent schedulers, communication middlewares, and negotiation protocols have been identified as co-factors inhibiting the real-time compliance. This paper provides an analysis of such MAS components and pave the road for achieving the MAS compliance with strict timing constraints, thus fostering reliability and predictability.

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.

Multi-Agent Systems' Negotiation Protocols for Cyber-Physical Systems: Results from a Systematic Literature Review.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) require a multitude of components interacting among themselves and with the users to perform automatic actions, usually under unpredictable or uncertain conditions. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have emerged over the years as one of the major technological paradigms regulating interactions and negotiations among autonomous entities running under heterogeneous conditions. As such, MAS have the potential to support CPS in implementing a highly reconfigurable distributed thinking. However, some gaps are still present between MAS’ features and the strict requirements of CPS. The most relevant is the lack of reliability, which is mainly due to specific features characterizing negotiation protocols. This paper presents a systematic literature review of MAS negotiation protocols aiming at providing a comprehensive overview of their strengths and limitations, examining both the assumptions and requirements set during their development. While this work confirms the potential of MAS in regulating the interactions among CPS components, the findings also highlight the absence of real-time compliance in current negotiation protocols. Strongly characterizing CPS, the capability to face strict time constraints could bridge the gap between MAS and CPS.

Local Scheduling in Multi-Agent Systems: Getting Ready for Safety-Critical Scenarios

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been supporting the development of distributed systems performing decentralized thinking and reasoning, automated actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. Despite the scientific literature is plenty of innovative contributions about resource and tasks allocation, the agents still schedule their behaviors and tasks by employing traditional general-purpose scheduling algorithms. By doing so, MAS are unable to enforce the compliance with strict timing constraints. Thus, it is not possible to provide any guarantee about the system behavior in the worst-case scenario. Thereby, as they are, they cannot operate in safety-critical environments. This paper analyzes the agents’ local schedulers provided by the most relevant agent-based frameworks from a cyber-physical systems point of view. Moreover, it maps a set of agents’ behaviors on task models from the real-time literature. Finally, a practical case-study is provided to highlight how such “MAS reliability” can be achieved.

Multi-Agent Systems and Blockchain: Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) technology is widely used for the development of intelligent distributed systems that manage sensitive data (e.g., ambient assisted living, healthcare, energy trading). To foster accountability and trusted interactions, recent trends advocate the use of blockchain technologies (BCT) for MAS. Although most of these approaches have only started exploring the topic, there is an impending need for establishing a research road-map, as well as identifying scientific and technological challenges in this scope. As a first necessary step towards this goal, this paper presents a systematic literature review of studies involving MAS and BCT as reconciling solutions. Aiming at providing a comprehensive overview of their application domains, we analyze motivations, assumptions, requirements, strengths, and limitations presented in the current state of the art. Moreover, discussing the future challenges, we introduce our vision on how MAS and BCT could be combined in different application scenarios.

MAXIM-GPRT: A Simulator of Local Schedulers, Negotiations, and Communication for Multi-Agent Systems in General-Purpose and Real-Time Scenarios

In safety-critical scenarios, the compliance with strict-timing constraints is mandatory. This demo presents a simulator named MAXIM-GPRT enabling the analysis of the behaviors produced by Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) composed of both General-Purpose (GP) and Real-time (RT) algorithms. Therefore, MAXIM-GPRT is crucial to prove that current MAS cannot provide timing guarantees, nor guarantee correct behaviors in the worst case scenario. However, adopting and adapting models and algorithms from RT systems, such a compliance, can be achieved.