Fabrizio Dominici

Coupling crowdsourcing, earth observations, and E-GNSS in a novel flood emergency service in the cloud

Despite the growing development of space-based systems aimed at monitoring and studying natural hazards, floods continue to harm humankind worldwide, causing enormous human and economic losses. In view of improving the existing Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) we propose FLOODIS: a novel Copernicus downstream service that exploits existing space assets together with crowdsourcing and state-of-the-art cloud computing technologies in order to provide a fast, flexible and scalable flood emergency service. After collecting the requirements from end-users, we define the FLOODIS architecture and implement a FLOODIS prototype. We also study the challenges related to consider real-time data coming from modern social networks like Twitter. Finally, we draft a business case for FLOODIS by analyzing the potential market along with the estimated social benefits brought by the proposed service.

A Cloud-Based Approach to GNSS Augmentation for Navigation Services

The proliferation of services and applications requiring user positioning through a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is driving the need of more accurate and reliable positioning systems, especially for safety-critical applications such as Disaster Alerting. Satellite-Based Augmentation Systems (SBAS) could achieve this goal by compensating for certain disadvantages of GNSS in terms of accuracy, integrity, continuity and availability. In this paper, we propose a novel cloud-based architecture that centrally computes position augmentation and position integrity by using the European SBAS system, i.e., EGNOS/EDAS. We implement our solution in a real test-bed, demonstrating the feasibility of our proposal and obtaining performances that can support real-time applications.

An innovative augmentation middleware for professional applications

The present paper describes an innovative system providing augmentation services following the cloud computing paradigm. Thanks to its flexibility it enables a large number of users to access to enhanced WADGPS functionalities in the navigation domain. Such platform, called augmentation module, relying on EGNOS and EDAS, has been originally conceived to make available integrity services to existent systems through an easy integration that avoid complete redesign of existing services. Such system for the remote Protection Levels computation has been successfully adapted and exploited in two projects funded by European Commission (GOLDEN-ICE and SAFE-PORT). Example of tests and results achieved by means of Augmentation Module will be reported at the end of the paper.

Medical intelligent system for assisted living — Proof of concept

Todays technologies can help reduce inefficiencies and improve the quality of medical care while increasing the patients treatment comfort. A good example is geriatric care. Many seniors live independently and wish to continue living independently as much and as long as possible. Unfortunately the cost for traditional assisted living increases disproportionately in relation to care and monitoring costs. Often patients need to be monitored constantly to reduce risk. Until now, this meant that older people needed to stay longer in the hospital, permanently live in a retirement home or need family help to visit the doctor repeatedly. The intelligent systems are an evolution of the traditional approach of stand-alone medical devices. Applied to the healthcare domain they represent a solution for these problems. This paper aims to present a Proof Of Concept of an Assisted Living system based on powerful, specialized, cloud-connected devices that enable doctors and patients to work together to remotely monitor vital signs, exchange information, communicate, and even alert relatives, all in real time.