Gianfranco Pedone

An intelligent platform to provide home care services

The progressive increase in the percentage of old people in all European countries implies an enormous economic and social cost, which can be somehow reduced if Home Care services are improved. The K4Care European project is studying the feasibility of using Information and Communication Technologies to improve the management of Home Care. This paper details the project objectives, the K4Care Home Care model, and the declarative and procedural knowledge needed in Home Care. It also describes the architecture of the agent-based web-accessible K4Care platform, and how the intelligent agents coordinate their actions to provide the basic Home Care services defined in the model.

Knowledge Driven Architecture for Home Care

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in health-care domains are showing a rapid increase, in order to manage complex tasks and adapt gracefully to unexpected events. On the other hand, the lack of well-established agent-oriented engineering methodologies to transform knowledge level descriptions into deployable agent systems slackens MAS development. This paper presents a new methodology in modelling and automatically implementing agents in a home care domain. The representation of the application knowledge together with the codification of health care treatments lead to flexible realization of an agent platform that has the capability to capture new medical knowledge emerging from physicians.

Home Care Personalisation with Individual Intervention Plans

The adoption of general intervention plans (guidelines) according to the particular circumstances of both the patient and the doctors diagnostic is a very challenging task. Although there are some available geriatric guidelines, the usual Home Care patients suffer from a set of co-morbid conditions and diseases that hampers the direct application of standard protocols. The representation, creation and execution of individual intervention plans in a Home Care unit are complex tasks to be accomplished by different kinds of actors. This paper presents an architecture for dealing with the whole Home Care scenario but paying special attention to two issues. The first is the creation of Individual Intervention Plans by merging several clinical guidelines. The second is the accurate description of medical knowledge in order to know which data are contained in every step of the pathway and which actor is able to perform it.

Home Care Individual Intervention Plans in the K4Care Platform

Constructing computerised medical systems that can deal with the complexity of Home Care units is a very challenging task. On the one hand, many kinds of actors intervene in the care processes, making it necessary to adopt a distributed approach. On the other hand, although there are some available geriatric guidelines, the usual Home Care patients suffer from a set of co-morbid conditions and diseases, and that hampers the direct application of standard protocols. This paper describes the design of a Web accessible multi-agent platform that provides the services needed in a Home Care unit, including the definition and execution of fully personalised Individual Intervention Plans.

Wireless Multi-Sensor Networks for Smart Cities: A Prototype System With Statistical Data Analysis

As urbanization proceeds at an astonishing rate, cities have to continuously improve their solutions that affect the safety, health, and overall well-being of their residents. Smart city projects worldwide build on advanced sensor, information, and communication technologies to help dealing with issues like air pollution, waste management, traffic optimization, and energy efficiency. The paper reports about the prototype of a smart city initiative in Budapest, which applies various sensors installed on the public lighting system and a cloud-based analytical module. While the installed wireless multi-sensor network gathers information about a number of stressors, the module integrates and statistically processes the data. The module can handle inconsistent, missing, and noisy data and can extrapolate the measurements in time and space, namely, it can create short-term forecasts and smoothed maps, both accompanied by reliability estimates. The resulting database uses geometric representations and can serve as an information centre for public services.

Model similarity evidence and interoperability affinity in cloud-ready Industry 4.0 technologies

Abstract Cloud computing is revolutionizing IT environments in most fields of economy. Its service-based approach enables collaboration and data exchange on higher level, with better efficiency and parallel decreasing costs. Also manufacturing environments can benefit from cloud technology and better fulfill fast changes in market demands, by applying diverse cloud deployment models and by virtualizing manufacturing processes and assets into services. As cloud becomes the basis of most innovative manufacturing IT systems, its future role in Cyber-physical Production Systems has to be properly investigated, as their interoperability will play a role of vital importance. In this paper, after a brief introduction to cloud criticality and cloud-based manufacturing, the mutual conceptual similarities in modelling distributed industrial services of two of the major standardization frameworks for industrial Internet architectures are presented: the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and the Reference Architectural Model Industrie (RAMI 4.0). It is also introduced how their integration feasibility finds a strong affinity in specifications of the Open Connectivity Unified Architecture, a service-oriented architecture candidate to the standardization of Industrial Internet of Things based manufacturing platforms. Finally, the preliminary architecture of a prototype Smart Factory is presented as a case study.