Seiki Tokunaga

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

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.

Towards personalized and context-aware reminder service for people with dementia

A number of reminder systems have been developed to help elderly people with dementia. However, the existing reminder systems lack the awareness of human context, the sympathetic human-machine interaction, and the flexibility of personal adaptation. To cope with the limitations, we are currently studying a new reminder service for people with dementia. Specifically, we exploit a BLE-based indoor positioning system to capture the current location and context of the patient. We then use a virtual agent system for rich interactions. Finally, we develop a schedule management system for personalized reminders. To integrate these heterogeneous systems, we re-design and deploy the systems as three services with Web-API: Location Service, Agent Service, and Schedule Service. These services are loosely integrated by Coordinator Service, based on the service-oriented architecture, In this paper, we first present the system architecture, and then discuss the key idea to implement the services. We also demonstrate “reminder at the entrance” as a practical scenario of the proposed services. In order to evaluate the Agent Service, which is a key component of proposed service, we have conducted the a preliminary experiment with 17 people with dementia.

Empirical study on effects of script minification and HTTP compression for traffic reduction

Code-on-demand is an architectural style that a client dynamically downloads a raw script file and executes it on the client-side. This style causes a problem of network traffic because a raw script is not always compiled or minified in advance. Formatting rules, such as indents, line breaks and comments for ensuring human readability, are not necessary to the execution. In order to save wasteful data transfer, it is necessary to minify or optimize the script on the entirety of the Web. In this paper, we explore the potential for JavaScript size reduction with focus on the two reduction approaches: script minification and HTTP compression. The main two research questions are: RQ1: How many percent of websites have reduction potential? RQ2: How much JavaScript size can be reduced on the Web? Our results show that about 40% of total size of JavaScript files used on the top 500 websites can be potentially reduced by a script minification. Moreover, the current JavaScript data traffic is saving over 50% by HTTP compression. If every website was configured to use HTTP compression, we can achieve a reduction rate of 5% to 20%.

A Cloud-Based Architecture for Home Network System

Managing a home server within individual house is a major obstacle to practical use of home network system (HNS). Delegating the home server to a cloud is a promising approach. However, the conventional multitenant SaaS-based solution has the following risks among different households: security/privacy violation, failure propagation and insufficient resource demand. In this paper, we propose a novel cloud-based architecture for the home network system that achieves security isolation, fault isolation and resource isolation. Specifically, we first create a virtual home server for every household using IaaS. On top of every virtual home server, we then create additional virtual machines, each of which contains a single service or application. Finally, using dynamic scaling, we allocate resources needed for individual virtual home servers. Based on the idea, we construct the proposed architecture by three layers: HNS Lite, House Cloud and Service Provider.

Implementation and evaluation of consumer-oriented lifelog service using daily receipts

In this paper, we design and implement a consumer-oriented service platform called ReceiptLogService to store and use their receipt log by consumers. ReceiptLogService assumes receipt data as a lifelog. The receipt lifelog may provide gaining awareness of economic for consumers. We also develop a social network Web application called ReciLog that extensively uses the ReceiptLogService platform. ReciLog extensively supports every end user to review daily life from financial and living aspects. We then conducted an experimental evaluation of the ReciLog with actual subjects. The experimental results showed that it was interesting and useful for end users to review and share the receipt log.

Deploying service integration agent for personalized smart elderly care

In recently years, many care robots have received a lot of attention to help elderly people. However existing care robots have difficult to adopt personalization. For instance, some programmers have to customize robot program to meet needs of each elderly. Even if a care robot which has a feature of machine learning, it takes a long time to learn a preference for each elderly. In this paper, our goal is to deploy a smart care service integration agent that provides a personalization and integration for each elderly people. Our proposed service consists of three essential components, Virtual Care Giver (VCG), Virtual Care Personalizer (VCP) and Care Template. VCG is a robot agent, where executes care tasks in each home. The VCG is offered care tasks based on care template which Virtual Care Personalizer (VCP) generates. Virtual Care Personalizer (VCP) manages and generates personalization of care tasks the on cloud. Moreover, we deploy Care Template on the cloud which enables to provide the basic care tasks. To demonstrate the feasibility, we consider three kinds of usecase scenarios for two persona people.

Integrating heterogeneous locating services for efficient development of location-based services

This paper proposes a unified locating service, KULOCS, which horizontally integrates the heterogeneous locating services. Focusing on technology-independent elements [when], [where] and [who] in location queries, KULOCS integrates data and operations of the existing locating services. In the data integration, we propose a method where the time representation, the locations, the namespace are consolidated by Unix time, the location labels and the alias table, respectively. Based on possible combinations of the three elements, we then derive API for the operation integration. In this paper, we also implement KULOCS as a Java Web service and integrate two locating services: GPS-based outdoor locating service and BLE-based indoor locating service. On top of the implementation, we develop application services: Umbrella Reminder Service and Stay Areas Visualization Service. Experimental evaluation shows the practical feasibility by comparing cases with or without KULOCS. Since KULOCS works as a seamless façade to the underlying locating services, the users and applications consume location information easily and efficiently, without knowing concrete services actually locating target objects.

Design and implementation of service framework for presence sensing in home network system

To achieve efficient presence sensing within home network system (HNS), an inexpensive and elastic system that can be shared by various HNS applications is required. This paper presents Presence Sensor Service Framework, which can uniformly manage presence information in various places using various types of sensors. The framework consists of Presence Sensor Device (PSD), Presence Sensor Terminal (PST) and Presence Sensor Aggregator (PSA). A PST monitors PSDs to detect any changes of presence, and notifies a PSA of the changes. Upon the notifications from PSTs, the PSA estimates human presence around each PSD. The estimation process is deployed as Presence Sensor Service (PSS), which is used by various HNS applications. The proposed framework can dynamically add or change sensing places within a HNS by adding PST and PSD as needed. It can also integrate presences in multiple HNSs by deploying PSA on an external cloud. In this paper, we implement a prototype of the proposed framework by using Phidgets sensors and Java Web service. Moreover, we develop a presence visualization application to conduct a preliminary evaluation.

On estimating quality of elderly monitoring service based on sensor reliability

AbstractRemote monitoring service for elderly people is an effective method to support elderly people with safe. In this paper, we tackle to reveal the relationships between quality of elderly monitoring service and sensor reliability in remote monitoring service. To achieve the above goal, we propose four step methods, generalization by three-actor model, designing the algorithms of the three-actor and simulation of RMS. Moreover, we construct the elderly model based on the statistics report. Our most important contribution shows that the guideline, which shows the references between sensor accuracy and reliability of RMS. This guideline will provide benefit for RMS service provider and end-user.