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| Application of wireless technologies in the smart home is dealt with by pointing out advantages and limitations of available approaches for the solution of heterogeneous and coexisting problems related to the distributed monitoring of the home and the inhabitants. Some hot challenges facing the exploitation of noninvasive wireless devices for user behavior monitoring are then addressed and the application fields of smart power management and elderly people monitoring are chosen as representative cases where the estimation of user activities improves the potential of location-aware services in the smart home. The problem of user localization is considered with great care to minimize the invasiveness of the monitoring system. Wireless architectures are reviewed and discussed as flexible and transparent tools toward the paradigm of a totally automatic/autonomic environment. With respect to available state-of-the-art solutions, our proposed architecture is based also on existing wireless devices and exploits, in an opportunistic way, the characteristics of wireless signals to estimate the presence, the movements, and the behaviors of inhabitants, reducing the system complexity and costs. Selected and representative examples from real implementations are pre-sented to give some insight on state-of-the-art solutions also envisaging possible future trends.

[1] Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have shown many attractive features in a lot of real-world applications that motivate their rapid and wide diffusion. One of the most challenging topics when dealing with WSNs is the localization and tracking of objects from measurements collected by the nodes themselves. Once distributed in a region without the knowledge of their positions, the nodes actively take part in the localization of the network as well as to the detection and monitoring of the presence and movements of targets lying within the sensed area. This paper reviews state-of-the-art systems and approaches developed for WSN-based localization and tracking of active as well as passive targets. The main focus is on systems that exploit the strength of the received signal, always available at the WSN nodes, without ad hoc or additional hardware. Recent strategies for WSNbased imaging are discussed as well.

International audienc

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This letter presents the design of a planar antenna for U W B applications with a bandwidth of 5.5 GHz over 3.7 to 9.2 GHz and return loss values lower than −10 dB. The antenna geometry is described in terms of a spline-based representation whose control parameters, together with other geometrical descriptive quantities, are determined through a suitable Particle Swarm optimizer (P SO) in order to fit the U W B requirements. Representative results of both numerical and experimental validations are reported in order to assess the performance of the prototype as well as to give some preliminary indications on the reliability and effectiveness of the whole synthesis approach.