Rosario Culmone

Interoperability issues among smart home technological frameworks

Population aging may be seen both as a human success story, the triumph of public health, medical advancements and economic development over diseases and injures, and as one of the most challenging phenomena that society faces in this century. Assistive technology in all its possible implementations (from Telemedicine to Ambient Assisted Living, and Ambient Intelligence) represents an emerging answer to the needs of the new generation of older adults whose desire is to live longer with a higher quality of life. Objective of this paper is to present the results of a public financed action for the development and implementation of an “integration platform” for Ambient Assisted Living that includes features of home automation (energy management, safety, comfort, etc.) and introduces “smart objects”, to monitor activities of daily living and detect any abnormal behavior that may represent a danger, or highlight symptoms of some incipient disease.

AAL domain ontology for event-based human activity recognition

The design of an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims to create better living conditions for the elderly, especially those who choose to live in their own houses, as long as possible. To this objective, AAL systems must mainly monitor the health status of the elderly through the analysis of data gathered via technologies based on sensor devices. Sensors networks produce collections of data of fine-grained nature, regarding general information such as device name, data type, data value, timestamp, but also specific one. The data analysis, due to its granularity and heterogeneity, makes very difficult to infer a clear overall view of the status of the elderly, it demands automatic tools for selecting meaningful data and mapping them in a common conceptual schema. In the last decade, ontologies became widely used tool to describe application domains and to enrich data with its meaning. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based methodology to perform semantic queries on a data repository, where records originated from networks of heterogeneous sources are stored. A semantic query is a pattern matching process that supports the recognition of specific temporal sequences of events that can be extracted from fine-grained data. In our framework a domain ontology are exploited at different levels of abstraction and the reasoning techniques are used to pre-process data for the final temporal analysis. The proposed approach is a deliverable of the ongoing AALISABETH project funded by Region Marche Government; while the software component is integrated into the AALISABETH framework.

Code mobility for pervasive computing

In this paper we isolate and implement the minimal functionalities for an open platform supporting mobile code. The use of the platform is discussed in the context of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. We also present a calculus for modelling mobile applications.

A Constrained ECA Language Supporting Formal Verification of WSNs

Modern wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are composed of spatially distributed low cost nodes that can contain different sensors and actuators. Event condition action (ECA) based languages have been widely proposed in order to program WSANs. Implementing applications by using ECA rules is an error-prone process thus various formal methods have been proposed. In spite of this great variety, formal verification of ECA rules has not been tailored to the context of WSANs. In this paper we present IRON, an ECA language for programming WSANs. IRON allows the automatic verifications of ECA rules. These are used by the IRON run-time platform in order to implement the required behaviour.

An ANT+ Protocol Based Health Care System

In remote health care Body Area Networks (BAN) are very popular but demand low energy consumption due to very constrained resources. For it several protocols, such as ZigBee, BlueTooth, WiFi etc, have been proposed but non has delivered the optimum results. These systems also demand vast interoperability among devices. Recently a propriety protocol ANT+ provides such features and strengthens the goals for Internet of Things (IOT). The authors describe a software architecture which flexibly integrates ANT+ protocol enabled sensors to deliver health care services. The approach is validated on a health care application that integrates heart rate, cadence, distance, foot steps and environmental temperature sensors. Described architecture is modular, flexible, scalable and possess several features.

An Ontology Driven Software Framework for the Healthcare Applications Based on ANT+ Protocol

Programmers are not flexible in integrating devices and sensors for their products due to lack of interoperability between thousands of drivers, ah-hoc APIs and protocols. How to concentrate on the functionality instead of technical details is a major requirement. We propose a development framework which classifies the devices based on their functionality and provides an abstraction layer to escape physical hardware constraints and connectivity issues. We propose the usage of ontologies in order to expose the devices functionality represented by an ontology concept. The problem is addressed in context to the healthcare application domain while using the ANT+ protocol technology.

ResourceHome: An RFID-Based Architecture and a Flexible Model for Ambient Intelligence

In this paper, we propose ResourceHome, an innovative RFID-based framework to locate objects in delimited environments and statically prevent/detect dangerous spatial/temporal configurations, i.e. configurations firing dangerous interactions of properties among objects. Differently from most of RFID-based frameworks for spatial recognition, ResourceHome is equipped with an ontology-based knowledge model for describing two-dimensional environments with fixed and mobile objects, as well as with a suitable First Order logic-based model for statically detecting spatial/temporal configurations of objects firing dangerous interactions.

Dynamic constraint-based invocation of web services

For an automatic invocation of Web services, concrete platforms allow the client-side generation of stubs by means of suitable primitives of programming languages. In this setting, we propose a framework that preserves static and dynamic integrity constraints of invocation parameters. The main ingredients of the framework are: (i) WSDL [16], a Web services description language that describes the interface, the semantics and the protocol for invoking Web services, (ii) CLiX [10], a language for constraints specification in XML that allows the specification of static and dynamic integrity constraints of Web service parameters by means of logic formulas; (iii) reflection mechanisms for managing complex user-defined types. The proposed framework is entirely based on XML-based technologies and allows only provably correct Web services invocations be forwarded by client-side checking CLiX formulas.

Patterns for web applications

This paper presents the preliminary results achieved in introducing a new formalism into the Web business logic layer. New useful and consistent patterns have been defined to support the modelling phase of web applications. The innovation in the use of patterns is extremely important when concepts like solidity, stability and reuse are crucial for the application design. The proposed patterns are graphically modelled using the Unified Modelling Language and formalized using the Object Constraints Language introduced by IBM. The new patterns are suitable for use in a CASE tool, to help developers build web solutions and eliminate inconsistences often present in natural languages.

Symbolic verification of event–condition–action rules in intelligent environments

In this paper we show how state-of-the art SMT-based techniques for software verification can be employed in the verification of event–condition–action rules in intelligent environments. Moreover, we exploit the specific features of intelligent environments to optimise the verification process. We compare our approach with previous work in a detailed evaluation section, showing how it improves both performance and expressivity of the language for event–condition–action rules.