Xabier Laiseca

Detection and extracting of emergency knowledge from twitter streams

Increasingly, more important information is being shared through Twitter. New opportunities arise to use this tool to detect emergencies and extract crucial information about the scope and nature of that event. A major challenge for the extraction of emergency event information from Twitter is represented by the unstructured and noisy nature of tweets. Within the SABESS project we propose a combined structural and content based analysis approach. We use social network analysis to identify reliable tweets and content analysis techniques to summarize key emergency facts.

ElderCare: An Interactive TV-based Ambient Assisted Living Platform

This paper describes the architecture and components of an AAL-enabling platform, centred around interactive TV (iTV), which combines OSGi middleware, RFID and NFC in order to ease the day to day of dependant or semi-dependant elderly people (its main focus), their care takers and relatives. The end result is an affordable, unobtrusive, evolvable, usable and easily deployable ICT infrastructure which aims to approach the vision of “AAL for All”. This is, it seeks a more widespread adoption of AAL and a better QoS on caretaking through the combination of common hardware, OSGi dynamic service and mobile-aided care data management.

Flexeo: An Architecture for Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks into the Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks are a hot topic in Ubiquitous Computing for implementing context-awareness scenarios. The connection of sensor nodes to the Internet leads to new ways for remote monitoring of human behavior in real-time. In this paper, we introduce Flexeo: a flexible architecture for implementing monitoring solutions based on wireless sensor networks, with distributed intelligence at different layers. In this way, sensor-populated scenarios may communicate with Internet-based facilities enabling the vision of an Internet of Things.

LinkedQR: improving tourism experience through linked data and QR codes

Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee announced the best practices to publish semantic data through the Web, Linked Data principles have been introduced into a wide variety of application domains. This usage of Linked Data eases the enrichment of offered data in a grade that the semantic data that not applies the Linked Data principles never would achieve. In this paper, we present LinkedQR, a tool to improve the collaboration between QR codes and Linked Data; and a case study based on the tourism sector located into an art gallery.

Distributed Tracking System for Patients with Cognitive Impairments

The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources required to attend elderly people with cognitive disabilities. These requirements, such as medical staff and financial resources, have been multiplied in the last years, and this tendency will continue in the forthcoming ones. In order to reduce these requirements, the introduction of new technologies will be a key aspect. In this paper we propose a test-question-based memory game that collects the answers given by patients and facilitates access to this information to caregivers and relatives.

An Approach to Dynamic Knowledge Extension and Semantic Reasoning in Highly-Mutable Environments

AmI environments are dynamic. They change rapidly and continuously due to the appearance and disappearance of devices, people and changes in their situation. These changes need to be reflected in the context information which is collected and maintained by the Ambient Intelligence applications. In this work we present a semantic infrastructure whose context information can be dynamically enriched and extended by the dynamically discovered objects in the environment, and which enables to reason over it.

Easing the Mobility of Disabled People in Supermarkets Using a Distributed Solution

People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicapped people face many challenges both at home, but especially outside it, where their reduced mobility is a burden. Buying in a supermarket can be sometimes troublesome for them and so as to facilitate this task, a product locator application is proposed. This application runs on heterogeneous personal mobile devices keeping the user private information safe on them, and it locates the desired products over each supermarket’s map.

Infrastructural Support for Ambient Assisted Living

This work describes several infrastructure contributions aimed to simplify the deployment of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments so that elderly people can maximize the time they live independently, through the help of ICT, at their own homes. Three core contributions are reviewed: a) a multi-layered OSGi-based middleware architecture which enables adding new environment monitoring and actuating devices seamlessly, b) an easy-to-use elderly-accessible front-end to comfortably control from a touch screen environment services together with a custom-built alert bracelet to seek assistance anywhere at any time and c) a rule-based engine which allows the configuration of the reactive behaviour of an environment as a set of rules.

Semantic Framework for Social Robot Self-Configuration

Healthcare environments, as many other real world environments, present many changing and unpredictable situations. In order to use a social robot in such an environment, the robot has to be prepared to deal with all the changing situations. This paper presents a robot self-configuration approach to overcome suitably the commented problems. The approach is based on the integration of a semantic framework, where a reasoner can take decisions about the configuration of robot services and resources. An ontology has been designed to model the robot and the relevant context information. Besides rules are used to encode human knowledge and serve as policies for the reasoner. The approach has been successfully implemented in a mobile robot, which showed to be more capable of solving situations not pre-designed.

Semantic based self-configuration approach for social robots in health care environments

Health care environments, as many other real world environments, present many changing and unpredictable situations. In order to use a social robot in such an environment, the robot has to be prepared to deal with all the changing situations. This paper presents a robot self-configuration approach to overcome suitably the commented problems. The approach is based on the integration of a semantic framework, where a reasoner can take decisions about the configuration of robot services and resources. An ontology has been designed to model the robot and the relevant context information. Besides rules are used to encode human knowledge and serve as policies for the reasoner. The approach has been successfully implemented in a mobile robot, which showed to be more capable of solving not pre-designed situations.