Julia Kantorovitch

Towards the future smart products systems design

Pervasive computing refers to a seamless and invisible computing environment in which ubiquitous and connected computing devices gather information about the environment. Such computer-enabled artefacts represent a new category of smart products where objects are aware of their surroundings and cable of supporting users in various tasks. However, the complex and dynamic domain of smart products is demanding for the developers, who have to deal with the requirements of context awareness. In this demonstration, we present Simulation Environment, a simulation approach that facilitates the developing of contextual applications relied on future smart product systems. Simulation Environment supports semantic modeling of context information and provides means to generate context change events and simulate sensor values. The integration with different middleware solutions provides well defined interfaces for client applications to register as listeners for the context events.

Ontology Based Service Modelling for Composability in Smart Home Environments

The ontology-based semantic approaches are gradually gaining momentum in ambient intelligent environments such as smart homes, smart cars, intelligent offices, etc. In spite of the significant research work carried out in the ontology design and application field, several issues remain unresolved. The ontologies mainly focus on specific context information features. The capabilities of services from different functional domains are rarely addressed and are not aligned with context ontologies. No attempt has been made to integrate the existing ontologies, facilitating their future extension with emerging new technologies for networks, devices, software architectures and platforms. Moreover, the application developer support facilitating better understanding of semantic technologies is still in its infancy. The research work presented in this paper tackles the aforementioned issues.

An assistive household robot – doing more than just cleaning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create new ideas for assistive technology products at home, especially products utilizing robotic consumer appliances available in the homes of elderly people. The work was founded on a reported increase in household robots as well as an ageing population in the industrialized world. Design/methodology/approach – Technology should be something that is perceived as belonging to our own world that fits our daily practices. Earlier studies show that in addition to cleaning functions, new household robots could change home routines and peoples relationship to them. Taking the previous studies as a starting point, the paper proposes a vacuum cleaner robot as a platform for developing pervasive safety services and describe implementation of a conceptual prototype which brings the feeling of safety to an older person and their relatives by assisting in case of accidents. Moreover, the results are presented of an empirical evaluation of the prototype with end-users. Find...

Ontology driven data mining and information visualization for the networked home

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden knowledge from data. As more data is gathered, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. Visualization is central to data mining. Information visualization is the process of turning abstract data into a visual shape easily understood by the user, making it possible for him/her to generate new knowledge about the relations between the data. Ontologies represent a shared meaning of a domain and they can be used to describe almost any kind of domain concepts explicitly including their terms, attributes, values and relationships facilitating the communication between people and application systems. Leveraging the power of semantic technologies, ontology based data mining and recent trends in information visualization, this work presents the approach towards the management of multi-dimensional often temporal heterogeneous home data.

Designing Situation Awareness - Addressing the Needs of Medical Emergency Response.

The effective support of Situation Awareness (SA) is the core of many applications. In this paper, we report a progress on the research towards the complementing of the existing studies with new knowledge, on engineering of SA in particular keeping in mind a complex multi-stakeholder context of existing and future knowledge intensive intelligent environments. A medical emergency response use case is used as an instantiation example to evaluate our engineering thoughts.

Knowledge Extraction and Annotation Tools to Support Creativity at the Initial Stage of Product Design: Requirements and Assessment

The initial stage of the conceptual product design requires creativity and is characterized by an intensive knowledge exploration process. To this purpose annotated resources have to be available, a need which introduces requirements on knowledge extraction tools. In this paper, we assess the current state of this technology vis-a-vis the demands identified to support the work of designers.

Knowledge management support for conceptual product design

The initial stage of the conceptual product design process is a highly creative and intensive knowledge-exploration intensive process. Sources of information utilized by design teams span local databases to internet collections and online magazines. Finding the relevant information is a challenge for a single product design team as the amount of information available continues to increase. In this demonstration we present the semantic tool which assist product designers with various knowledge management tasks during information discovery towards the formulation of new product concept.

Smart vacuum cleaner for your elderly relative

Consequences of advancing in years include declining health and mobility, leading to increased risk of injury due to accidents, especially at home. People currently use very basic passive or reactive methods concerning accidents such as panic or watch-strap buttons. More intelligent and proactive safety products leveraging the recent advances in pervasive computing, services and communication are not yet part of the home. The objective of this research is to introduce active safety products on the example of vacuum cleaner that are functionally enhanced by networked services towards personal safety and comfort.

MuistiKoti - Towards Better Awareness of the Technological Solutions Designed for People with Alzheimer's Disease

Interactive visualization is closely related to the concept of user education as the possibility to communicate with the visualized information helps us to understand the data better. At present, there exist numerous of technical solutions designed for people with Alzheimers disease to make their everyday life easier at home. However, the lack of awareness among relatives and caretakers diminishes the utilization of these technologies. The MuistiKoti web application addresses the needs of aging adults suffering from Alzheimer disease and their relatives and caregivers looking for technology and supportive and educational knowledge.

Interactive Home Supervision Application Think Visually

The advances in distributed sensing and wireless communication enable pervasive home applications which are quit information-rich. Hereby the integrated access and management of heterogeneous information becomes an increasingly important research topic. Moreover recent popularity and advances in visual aids (Google maps, 3D computer graphics, PS games, etc.) call for the more attractively intuitive user interfaces to manage home data. This work describes the ontology based home management approach which facilitates integration, interactive visualization and necessary sharing of heterogeneous home data.