Sachio Saiki

Indoor environment sensing service in smart city using autonomous sensor box

To realize indoor environmental sensing, which is a key technology of providing smart services in smart city, with low cost, our research group has proposed a small IoT device named sensor box. In the previous sensor box, however, it is difficult to deploy for the smart city with some problems. In this paper, we propose an indoor environment sensing service using autonomous sensor box to adapt the previous sensor box for the smart city. To confirm the effectiveness of proposed service, we deploy autonomous sensor boxes on practical indoor environments.

VirtualCareGiver: Personalized Smart Elderly Care

Many care robots have received a lot of attention to help elderly people, however existing care robots have difficult to adapt personalization. For instance, some programmers have to customize robot program to meet needs of individual. In this paper, the authors’ goal is design and develop care robot which provides personalization for an individual elderly people with an efficient and reasonable way. Their proposed service consists of three essential components; VirtualCareGiver (VCG), VirtualCarePersonalizer (VCP) and CareTemplate. VCG is a robot agent, which provides a personalization and integration for each elderly people. The VCG is offered care tasks based on care template which VCP generates. VCP provides adaptation for individual elderly on the cloud. The authors also conduct an experimental evaluation to demonstrate the feasibility with actual 11 subjects in a day care center. As a result, both font size and voice volume are especially contributed for the subjects. KEywoRdS Care Robot, CareTemplate, Cloud, Elderly Care, Home Care, Personalization, VirtualCareGiver

Quantitative assessment with using ticket driven development for teaching scrum framework

Developing software by teams which adopted the agile development methodology such as Scrum seems totally natural in industry. On the other hand, students belonging to graduate schools of information science who have some experience on the agile team software development are rare. In the initial education on the Scrum, there exists some challenges. The first one is a concept of self-organization. In the Scrum project, members of the team determine how best to accomplish the tasks by themselves. However, it is challenging for students with less experience on team software development to cultivate the self-organizing team by themselves. The 2nd one is inequality on task assignment. In the Scrum project, each member pulls tasks to perform, and do not wait to be assigned by Project Manager. The assignment behavior may cause inequality on task assignment. As a result, such inequality may also cause inequality on learning opportunities to acquire skills and knowledge on the process and the product. In this paper, we propose quantitative assessment methods for the Scrum project with using TiDD(Ticket Driven Development) for the initial education on the Scrum framework and web application production. We report on our basic PBL(Project-Based Learning) course which involved 49 students. The use of quantitative criteria enabled students and teachers to assess the Scrum projects in the viewpoints of quality, assignment, and delivery of projects.

Design and Implementation of Rule-Based Framework for Context-Aware Services with Web Services

Modern cloud services and machine-to-machine (M2M) systems provide various kinds of data via various Web services. Implementing context-aware services integrating such global data are promising in various applications. However, it has been challenging to manage heterogeneous contexts and services defined in various Web services. To cope with this, we design a framework, called RuCAS, which systematically manages every context-aware service in form of ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rule. We also develop RuCAS platform, which publishes API of RuCAS as Web service. Using the RuCAS platform, users can define their own contexts with various Web services (e.g., information service, sensor services, networked appliances, etc.). Based on the defined contexts, they can create ECA rules to define custom context-aware services. To support users, We also implement a GUI front-end of RuCAS platform, called RuCAS.me. RuCAS.me supports users even if the users are non-expert. A case study in a real home network system demonstrates practical feasibility of RuCAS platform and RuCAS.me. The contribution of this paper is to provide design and implementation details of RuCAS, by which one can fully understand systematic management of context-aware services with Web services.

Generating Personalized Dialogue Towards Daily Counseling System for Home Dementia Care

The dementia counseling is a dementia care that cures physiologically unstable situation of a person with dementia, through receptive and attentive conversations. A person with dementia should receive the counseling as often as possible. However, it is difficult for a limited number of caregivers to spare sufficient time and effort. This motivated us to exploit the virtual agent technology we are developing, for implementing daily dementia counseling system at home. However, our previous system relies on static dialogue scripts. Therefore, it is difficult to realize person-centered conversations that are essential to the dementia counseling. In this paper, we propose a method that dynamically generates personalized dialogues for individual people with dementia. The proposed method extensively uses life history and linked open data (LOD). More specifically, we obtain the life history of a user based on The Center Method, then the system choose appropriate conversation considering the history. During the conversation, the system finds new information in LOD relevant to the response and uses it to develop further conversation. We also implement a prototype to show practical feasibility of the proposed method.

Designing and implementing service framework for virtual agents in home network system

In order to achieve intuitive and easy operations for home network system (HNS), we have previously proposed user interface with virtual agent (called HNS virtual agent user interface, HNS-VAUI). The HNS-VAUI was implemented with MMDAgent toolkit. A user can operate appliances and services interactively through dialog with a virtual agent in a screen. However, the previous prototype heavily depends on MMDAgent, which causes a tight coupling between HNS operations and agent behaviors, and poor capability of using external information. To cope with the problem, this paper proposes a service-oriented framework that allows the HNS-VAUI to provide richer interaction. Specifically, we decompose the tightly-coupled system into two separate services: MMC Service and MSM service. The MMC service concentrates on controlling detailed behaviors of a virtual agent, whereas the MSM service defines logic of HNS operations and dialog with the agent with richer state machines. The two services are loosely coupled to enable more flexible and sophisticated dialog in the HNS-VAUI. The proposed framework is implemented in a real HNS environment. We also conduct a case study with practical service scenarios, to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Recognizing ADLs of one person household based on non-intrusive environmental sensing

Pervasive sensing technologies are promising for increasing one-person households (OPH), where the sensors monitor and assist the resident to maintain healthy life rhythm. Towards the practical use, the recognition of activities of daily living (ADL) is an important step. Many studies of the ADL recognition have been conducted so far, for real-life and human-centric applications such as eldercare and healthcare. However, most existing methods have limitations in deployment cost, privacy exposure, and inconvenience for residents. To cope with the limitations, this paper presents a new indoor ADL recognition system especially for OPH. To minimize the deployment cost as well as the intrusions to user and house, we exploit an IoT-based environment-sensing device, called Autonomous Sensor Box (SensorBox) which can autonomously measure 7 kinds of environment attributes. We apply machine-learning techniques to the collected data, and predicts 7 kinds of ADLs. We conduct an experiment within an actual apartment of a single user. The result shows that the proposed system achieves the average accuracy of ADL recognition with more than 88%, by carefully developing the features of environment attributes.

Capturing Activities of Daily Living for Elderly at Home based on Environment Change and Speech Dialog

The ICT-based elderly monitoring systems attract great attention as a promising technology for home elderly care. However, the conventional systems have limitations of deployment cost and invasiveness, the effort of activity labeling, and a lack of communication. To cope with the limitations, we propose a system that captures activities of daily living (ADL) of the elderly, based on speech dialogue triggered by environment changes. Specifically, we deploy Autonomous Sensor Boxes, developed in our previous study, within a house of the elderly. The boxes gather and send house environmental data to the cloud. Then, the Change Finder algorithm is applied to the time-series data, to detect changes in the house online. On detecting a change, the Virtual Agent (VA) in the house asks the elderly what he/she is doing now. The elderly speaks to the VA, by which an ADL is recorded in the system. The proposed system can capture ADL with non-invasive sensing and create an opportunity for communication.

Implementation and evaluation of BLE proximity detection mechanism for Pass-by Framework

To fix various dependencies of application development using pass-by detection by a mobile device, we propose Pass-by Framework that handles data with standardization. In this study, we evaluate effects of performance of pass-by detection by differences in methods of implementation the sonar of Pass-by Framework. Therefore, we develop pass-by application using Bluetooth Low Energy as a first effort. We then conduct evaluation experiments for confirmation of change pass-by detection behavior depends on the difference of parameters.

A proposal of Cloud-based Home Network System for Multi-Vendor Services

A home network system (HNS) provides value-added services for home users by networking house-hold appliances and sensors. In the conventional architecture, the HNS appliances and services are tightly coupled. It is therefore difficult for users to freely choose their favorite appliances and services. In this paper, we propose a new HNS architecture that accommodates multi-vendor services by extensively using cloud technologies. The new architecture manages individual HNS operations and data as standard services within the cloud. The vendor services must go through the cloud to access the HNS. Thus, loose coupling among the HNS and services can be achieved. As a result, the proposed architecture realizes more flexible HNS beneficial for both users and vendors.