A Ubiquitous Care-Support Service based on Agent-oriented Multiple-Context Coordination

Abstract

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;" align="left"><span class="text"><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 8.5pt;">This paper presents a gentle system for supervising care-support services that fulfill users' actual requirements based on their physical locations and statuses of system components in ubiquitous computing environments. To address issues of traditional supervisory systems based only on location information and the situation of one side of the watching site or the watched site, we consider all the detailed situations (contexts) of associated entities such as devices, software, networks, and users, in both sides, in addition to the users' physical locations. We propose a ubiquitous supervision system called uEyes to realize this. We introduce an autonomous decision making ability and cooperative behavior to each entity in uEyes, based on agentbased computing technologies. Using advanced features of the entities, live video streaming systems for watching over people can be constructed autonomously according to the multiple contexts of the entities, on both sides in runtime. We implemented a prototype system of uEyes for watching over elderly people, and performed some experiments based on several scenarios. For instance, we assumed a scenario in which a son, who is caring for his ailing father, needs to see his father's facial color and expression with high-quality video. For that purpose, a live video streaming system involving a high-resolution camera and a display device was autonomously configured in run-time. We confirmed that supervision services that fulfill detailed users' requirements can be provided effectively.</span></span><span style="font-family: ";Arial";,";sans-serif";; font-size: 8.5pt;"></span></p

A design of cognitive agents for recognizing real space &#x2014; towards symbiotic computing &#x2014;

“…If the application is adequately intelligent, it can provide suitable service for the user at the suitable moment without expressing users' intervention request, using ubiquitous devices, web service and network infrastructures. To develop such intelligent applications, models of society and persons which are acquired by social functions and perceptual functions which transform data from ubiquitous devices and web pages into various kinds of awareness should support the applications [16] [17].…”

“…Our project has developed several kinds of social applications. Such as, a support system for watching over commuting children, a support system for caring aged people [16] to study the social functions and perceptual functions. These applications are useful for caring people to achieve the restricted objectives in a ubiquitous environment.…”

“…For example, in an application of a ubiquitous caresupport service" [16], if a SAP recognizes an aged mother lying down inside a kitchen of her house for a length of a time in the daytime using the model which stores time-series of gesture-awareness and positionawareness acquired from the SAP's sensor networks, the SAP will consider that it should send the alarm to her family.…”

“…We proposed a concept of Symbiotic Computing [6], designed an architecture of Symbiotic Application [15], and prototyped application systems based on the architecture [16] [1 7].…”

LiNS: A Library Navigation System Using Sensors and Smartphones

“…Aware Home [3] produces an environment that is capable of collecting information about itself and activities of its inhabitants. In [4], context information is used to build a watch system for elderly people. Middleware for contextawareness have been also developed, e.g.…”