Lorenzo Monti

Social Location Awareness: A Prototype of Altruistic IoT

This paper presents a prototype system, designed and developed exploiting the Internet of Things paradigm and its related technologies with altruistic purposes. In fact, the system here described involves the iBeacon technology and BLE-capable smart phones, put to good use to provide an altruistic Internet of Things (IoT) platform. In particular, we implemented a mobile application, for iOS and Android platforms, with the goal of letting the users identify and localize their personal objects, equipped with a beacon. The innovative aspect of this possession tracking system is that the smartphone application creates a social network of users, suitable in order to identify the geographical coordinates of the beacons (and so of the related personal objects) out of the owner user range, in a transparent fashion for the users involved in such a social network.

Discovering the City: Crowdsourcing and Personalized Urban Paths Across Cultural Heritage

Travel planners and mobile applications related to cultural heritage can play an interesting role in the development of smart cities, when they are integrated each other, engaging the user in touristic and entertainment activities, letting him/her be a source of cultural resources. This paper focuses on a microservices-based architecture, defined with the aim of providing support in computing personalized urban paths across cultural heritage places and in sharing multimedia resources about points of interest. A prototype of mobile application has been implemented on the basis of such architecture, showing the feasibility of the proposed approach thanks to personas and related scenarios.

Gamifying cultural experiences across the urban environment

New media and devices are offering huge possibilities for the enhancement and the enrichment of heritage experiences, improving the users’ involvement. In particular, tourists equipped with their mobile devices are invading cultural attractions, sharing pictures and comments (together with hashtags and geo-localized positions) on social networks. These represent an unofficial source of data, which can be integrated with the official ones provided by GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) and cultural heritage institutions, enriching them. At the same time, travel planners and mobile applications related to cultural heritage can play an interesting role in the development of smart cities, when they are integrated each other, engaging the user in touristic and entertainment activities, letting him/her be a source of cultural resources.This work focuses on equipping users (citizens and tourists) with a system providing support in computing personalized urban paths across cultural heritage places (monuments, palaces, museums, and other points of interest (POIs) related to cultural heritage in the urban environment) and in sharing multimedia resources about POIs, by exploiting gamification elements with the aim of engaging citizens and tourists. A mobile application prototype has been implemented, showing the feasibility of the proposed approach and exploiting crowdsourcing activities as a source of information for cultural places and works of art.

Fitting like a GlovePi: A wearable device for deaf-blind people

The paper presents the design and implementation of a low cost and open source assistive system exploiting a wearable device in order to support deaf-blind people in communication using the Malossi alphabet. More specifically, the system, that we called GlovePi, is composed by three main low cost components, such as: (i) a gardener glove; (ii) a Raspberry Pi; (iii) a MPR121 capacitive touch sensor module with expansion board. The MPR121 module works as bridge between the Raspberry Pi and the sensors in the glove, allowing the data transfer. Instead, the Raspberry Pi works as a hotspot wifi and as a server to transfer data to the client, an android application. In this way, the deaf-blind user can use the glove to deliver messages to other users, using the Malossi alphabet. The characters (and phrases) in this way created, will be sent to the android application and displayed or listen. Evaluation tests have been performed to measure the performance on the basis of false positive and false negative, obtaining interesting results in supporting to the feasibility of the here described approach.

Digital Invasions Within Cultural Heritage: Social Media and Crowdsourcing

The wide diffusion of mobile devices and of digital technologies are dramatically changing the usage scenarios in different contexts. One of them is cultural heritage, where new media are offering huge possibilities for the enhancement and the enrichment of heritage experience, improving the users’ involvement. In particular, tourists equipped with their mobile devices are invading cultural attractions, sharing pictures and comments (together with hashtags and geo-localized positions) on social networks. These represent a source of data, which can be integrated with the official ones provided by GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) and cultural heritage institutions, enriching them. In this paper, we explore how social networks and crowdsourcing activities can be exploited as a source of information for cultural places and pieces of art.

Smart Mobility and Sensing: Case Studies Based on a Bike Information Gathering Architecture

Mapping services and travel planner applications are experiencing a great success in supporting people while they plan a route or while they move across the city, playing a key role in the smart mobility scenario. Nevertheless, they are based on the same algorithms, on the same elements (in terms of time, distance, means of transports, etc.), providing a limited set of personalization. To fill this gap, we propose PUMA, a Personal Urban Mobility Assistant that aims to let the user add different factors of personalization, such as sustainability, street and personal safety, wellness and health, etc. In this paper we focus on the use of smart bikes (equipped with specific sensors) as means of transports and as a mean to collect data about the urban environment. We describe a cloud based architecture, personas and travel scenario to prove the feasibility of our approach.