Stijn Verstichel

Towards a social and context-aware multi-sensor fall detection and risk assessment platform

For elderly people fall incidents are life-changing events that lead to degradation or even loss of autonomy. Current fall detection systems are not integrated and often associated with undetected falls and/or false alarms. In this paper, a social- and context-aware multi-sensor platform is presented, which integrates information gathered by a plethora of fall detection systems and sensors at the home of the elderly, by using a cloud-based solution, making use of an ontology. Within the ontology, both static and dynamic information is captured to model the situation of a specific patient and his/her (in)formal caregivers. This integrated contextual information allows to automatically and continuously assess the fall risk of the elderly, to more accurately detect falls and identify false alarms and to automatically notify the appropriate caregiver, e.g., based on location or their current task. The main advantage of the proposed platform is that multiple fall detection systems and sensors can be integrated, as they can be easily plugged in, this can be done based on the specific needs of the patient. The combination of several systems and sensors leads to a more reliable system, with better accuracy. The proof of concept was tested with the use of the visualizer, which enables a better way to analyze the data flow within the back-end and with the use of the portable testbed, which is equipped with several different sensors.

Distributed Reasoning for Context-Aware Services through Design of an OWL Meta-Model

A growing number of applications start using semantic Web technologies. The base concept in this technology is the use of ontologies, allowing first-order logic reasoning engines to execute a number of semantic tasks, such as the validation and consistence checking of the underlying ontology. Because applications work in a distributed environment, e.g. the retrieval of sensor values, resulting in ever increasing amounts of data, there is a clear need for this reasoning process to be distributed. Additional concepts to enable this distributed reasoning are therefore needed. In this paper, we present a meta-model based on the same Semantic Technology. To facilitate distributed reasoning, an architecture supporting this meta-model has been developed as well. The paper will show that the proposed solution offers significant improvement in terms of the reasoning process response times.

Distributed Ontology-Based Monitoring on the IBBT WiLab.t Infrastructure

Testbeds as a means to evaluate protocol and software development are gaining importance, not least because of the oftentimes unpredictable influence of environmental behaviour. IBBT, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, recognizes the importance of such testbeds and has therefore invested in WiLab.t, a wireless sensor and mesh testbed. It contains over 200 wireless and programmable nodes. The monitoring and management of such a testbed is very important so as to guarantee a proper functioning and stable environment to be used by researchers. This is however not a trivial task, even more so when in the future, the testbed is expanded with new devices and as such becomes a heterogeneous environment. Therefore, we have developed an ontology-based monitoring approach, which allows hiding the heterogeneity from the monitoring application and enables to process the data in a formal manner. Additionally, it allows adaptation according to characteristics of the local deployment, without the need to re-engineer the entire monitoring application every time alterations are made to the testbed.

WS-Gesture, a gesture-based state-aware control framework

Industry has capitalized on peoples urge for gadgets and innovative appliances. The most popular devices are still entertainment systems, but home automation, e.g. automated heating and lighting control, is gaining more and more interest. To manage the vast amount of remote controls that come with these appliances, universal remote controls were created. These are unfortunately hard to configure and hard to use, due to the numerous buttons. This paper presents the architecture of the WS-Gesture framework. An alternative of interacting with this pervasive environment of devices, inspired by the success of Nintendo Wiis Remote, where the user interacts by means of gestures. To cope with the many different features of the devices, state-awareness is introduced in the system. Depending on which user is controlling a selected device and on the current state of that device, a particular gesture can result in different actions. Communication is based on Device Profile for Web Services, an emerging standard delivering discovery and dynamic selection capabilities. During implementation and evaluation special attention has been payed to accuracy and the responsiveness, very important for the user experience.

OTAGen: A Tunable Ontology Generator for Benchmarking Ontology-Based Agent Collaboration

On the one hand, agent-based software platforms are commonly used these days, while on the other hand Semantic Web technologies are also maturing. It is obvious that the combination of these two technologies can bring added value through the creation of Semantic Agent-based frameworks. However, it is also known that these Semantic Web technologies, and the reasoning on ontologies in particular, can rapidly become resource intensive. In order to get a clear view on this problem, we have developed OTAGen, a highly tunable tool to generate customized ontologies and corresponding queries. The generated ontologies can then be used to evaluate at design-time the performance of the Semantic Agent-based platform as a function of the number of ontologies, users and queries.

On the design of a Train Communication Management platform

A train is a complex and dynamic environment. Coaches couple and decouple many times during the day, the direction of travel changes often, as do the scheduled duties and the corresponding needed passenger information. To support the on-board systems in such a dynamic environment, there is a need for a strong and robust management infrastructure. The train management system. As the development of train management systems evolves towards an IP-based approach, a strong connectivity management platform supporting the train management system is needed. We designed and implemented such a connectivity management platform, maintaining and controlling the configuration of the IP-network in the train, and this platform is detailed in this paper. Also, a service layer on top of the IP-network, providing facilities for a logical addressing scheme and event-based asynchronous communication, is presented. It will be shown in the paper that, by using such a connectivity management platform and overlaying service infrastructure, a lot of repetitive, low level programming is avoided. Moreover, the design details are presented to provide a robust and self-healing connectivity management system

The MASSIF platform: a modular and semantic platform for the development of flexible IoT services

In the Internet of Things (IoT), data-producing entities sense their environment and transmit these observations to a data processing platform for further analysis. Applications can have a notion of context awareness by combining this sensed data, or by processing the combined data. The processes of combining data can consist both of merging the dynamic sensed data, as well as fusing the sensed data with background and historical data. Semantics can aid in this task, as they have proven their use in data integration, knowledge exchange and reasoning. Semantic services performing reasoning on the integrated sensed data, combined with background knowledge, such as profile data, allow extracting useful information and support intelligent decision making. However, advanced reasoning on the combination of this sensed data and background knowledge is still hard to achieve. Furthermore, the collaboration between semantic services allows to reach complex decisions. The dynamic composition of such collaborative workflows that can adapt to the current context, has not received much attention yet. In this paper, we present MASSIF, a data-driven platform for the semantic annotation of and reasoning on IoT data. It allows the integration of multiple modular reasoning services that can collaborate in a flexible manner to facilitate complex decision-making processes. Data-driven workflows are enabled by letting services specify the data they would like to consume. After thorough processing, these services can decide to share their decisions with other consumers. By defining the data these services would like to consume, they can operate on a subset of data, improving reasoning efficiency. Furthermore, each of these services can integrate the consumed data with background knowledge in its own context model, for rapid intelligent decision making. To show the strengths of the platform, two use cases are detailed and thoroughly evaluated.

The Innovation Binder Approach: A Guide Towards a Social-Technical Balanced Pervasive Health System

Pervasive health systems aim to support society with the many challenges our healthcare system is facing today.

The OCareCloudS project: Toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers.

An Eco-friendly Hybrid Urban Computing Network Combining Community-Based Wireless LAN Access and Wireless Sensor Networking

Computer-enhanced smart environments, distributed environmental monitoring, wireless communication, energy conservation and sustainable technologies, ubiquitous access to Internet-located data and services, user mobility and innovation as a tool for service differentiation are all significant contemporary research subjects and societal developments. This position paper presents the design of a hybrid municipal network infrastructure that, to a lesser or greater degree, incorporates aspects from each of these topics by integrating a community-based Wi-Fi access network with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) functionality. The former component provides free wireless Internet connectivity by harvesting the Internet subscriptions of city inhabitants. To minimize session interruptions for mobile clients, this subsystem incorporates technology that achieves (near-)seamless handover between Wi-Fi access points. The WSN component on the other hand renders it feasible to sense physical properties and to realize the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This in turn scaffolds the development of value-added end-user applications that are consumable through the community-powered access network. The WSN subsystem invests substantially in ecological considerations by means of a green distributed reasoning framework and sensor middleware that collaboratively aim to minimize the networks global energy consumption. Via the discussion of two illustrative applications that are currently being developed as part of a concrete smart city deployment, we offer a taste of the myriad of innovative digital services in an extensive spectrum of application domains that is unlocked by the proposed platform.