Davide La Rosa

GP-m: Mobile middleware infrastructure for Ambient Assisted Living

The problem of providing assistive services to elderly in smart cities is becoming important due to the aging of population in the developed countries. The possibility of using personal devices like smartphones to be assisted also outside the house is a key factor to guarantee the independency of elderly users still remaining connected to his caregivers network. We identified in the development of a suitable mobile middleware one of the main solution to the barrier in the deployment of distributed AAL services. In this scenario, we show the effectiveness of the mobile middleware solution proposed, called GiraffPlus-mobile (GP-m), in terms of integration with the existing pervasive environment, performances and energy saving.

A multisource and multivariate dataset for indoor localization methods based on WLAN and geo-magnetic field fingerprinting

Indoor localization is a key topic for the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research community. In this scenarios, recent advancements in wearable technologies, particularly smartwatches with built-in sensors, and personal devices, such as smartphones, are being seen as the breakthrough for making concrete the envisioned Smart Environment (SE) paradigm. In particular, scenarios devoted to indoor localization represent a key challenge to be addressed. Many works try to solve the indoor localization issue, but the lack of a common dataset or frameworks to compare and evaluate solutions represent a big barrier to be overcome in the field. The unavailability and uncertainty of public datasets hinders the possibility to compare different indoor localization algorithms. This constitutes the main motivation of the proposed dataset described herein. We collected Wi-Fi and geo-magnetic field fingerprints, together with inertial sensor data during two campaigns performed in the same environment. Retrieving sincronized data from a smartwatch and a smartphone worn by users at the purpose of create and present a public available dataset is the goal of this work.

Detecting Socialization Events in Ageing People: The Experience of the DOREMI Project

The detection of socialization events is useful to build indicators about social isolation of people, which is an important indicator in e-health applications. On the other hand, it is rather difficult to achieve with non-invasive solutions. This paper reports about the currently work-in-progress on the technological solution for the detection of socialization events adopted in the DOREMI project.

Sleep behavior assessment via smartwatch and stigmergic receptive fields

Sleep behavior is a key factor in maintaining good physiological and psychological health. A well-known approach to monitor sleep is polysomnography. However, it is costly and intrusive, which may disturb sleep. Consequently, polysomnography is not suitable for sleep behavior analysis. Other approaches are based on actigraphy and sleep diary. Although being a good source of information for sleep quality assessment, sleep diaries can be affected by cognitive bias related to subject’s sleep perception, while actigraphy overestimates sleep periods and night-time disturbance compared to sleep diaries. Machine learning techniques can improve the objectivity and reliability of the observations. However, since signal morphology vary widely between people, conventional machine learning is complex to set up. In this regard, we present an adaptive, reliable, and innovative computational approach to provide per-night assessment of sleep behavior to the end-user. We exploit heartbeat rate and wrist acceleration data, gathered via smartwatch, in order to identify subject’s sleep behavioral pattern. More specifically, heartbeat rate and wrist motion samples are processed via computational stigmergy, a bio-inspired scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. Stigmergy associates each sample to a digital pheromone deposit (mark) defined in a mono-dimensional space and characterized by evaporation over time. As a consequence, samples close in terms of time and intensity are aggregated into functional structures called trails. The stigmergic trails allow to compute the similarity between time series on different temporal scales, to support classification or clustering processes. The overall computing schema includes a parametric optimization for adapting the structural parameters to individual sleep dynamics. The outcome is a similarity between sleep nights of the same subject, to generate clusters of nights with different quality levels. Experimental results are shown for three real-world subjects. The resulting similarity is also compared with the dynamic time warping, a popular similarity measure for time series.

Reliability and human factors in Ambient Assisted Living environments

Malnutrition, sedentariness, and cognitive decline in elderly people represent the target areas addressed by the DOREMI project. It aimed at developing a systemic solution for elderly, able to prolong their functional and cognitive capacity by empowering, stimulating, and unobtrusively monitoring the daily activities according to well-defined “Active Ageing” life-style protocols. Besides the key features of DOREMI in terms of technological and medical protocol solutions, this work is focused on the analysis of the impact of such a solution on the daily life of users and how the users’ behaviour modifies the expected results of the system in a long-term perspective. To this end, we analyse the reliability of the whole system in terms of human factors and their effects on the reliability requirements identified before starting the experimentation in the pilot sites. After giving an overview of the technological solutions we adopted in the project, this paper concentrates on the activities conducted during the two pilot site studies (32 test sites across UK and Italy), the users’ experience of the entire system, and how human factors influenced its overall reliability.

Evaluating the impact of smart technologies on harbor’s logistics via BPMN modeling and simulation

A smart Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables a synchronized interplay of different key factors, aligning infrastructures, consumers, and governmental policy-making needs. In the harbor’s logistics context, smart ICT has been driving a multi-year wave of growth. Although there is a standalone value in the technological innovation of a task, the impact of a new smart technology is unknown without quantitative analysis methods on the end-to-end process. In this paper, we first present a review of the smart ICT for marine container terminals, and then we propose to evaluate the impact of such smart ICT via business process model and notation (BPMN) modeling and simulation. The proposed approach is discussed in a real-world modeling and simulation analysis, made on a pilot terminal of the Port of Leghorn (Italy).

Understanding Human Sleep Behaviour by Machine Learning

Long-term sleep quality assessment is essential to diagnose sleep disorders and to continuously monitor the health status. However, traditional polysomnography techniques are not suitable for long-term monitoring, whereas, methods able to continuously monitor the sleep pattern in an unobtrusive way are needed. In this paper, we present a general purpose sleep monitoring system that can be used for the pressure ulcer risk assessment, to monitor bed exits, and to observe the influence of medication on the sleep behavior. Moreover, we compare several supervised learning algorithms in order to determine the most suitable in this context. Experimental results obtained by comparing the selected supervised algorithms show that we can accurately infer sleep duration, sleep positions, and routines with a completely unobtrusive approach.