An Ontology-based Context-aware System for Smart Homes: E-care@home

Abstract

Smart home environments have a significant potential to provide for long-term monitoring of users with special needs in order to promote the possibility to age at home. Such environments are typically equipped with a number of heterogeneous sensors that monitor both health and environmental parameters. This paper presents a framework called E-care@home, consisting of an IoT infrastructure, which provides information with an unambiguous, shared meaning across IoT devices, end-users, relatives, health and care professionals and organizations. We focus on integrating measurements gathered from heterogeneous sources by using ontologies in order to enable semantic interpretation of events and context awareness. Activities are deduced using an incremental answer set solver for stream reasoning. The paper demonstrates the proposed framework using an instantiation of a smart environment that is able to perform context recognition based on the activities and the events occurring in the home.

Online Guest Detection in a Smart Home Using Pervasive Sensors and Probabilistic Reasoning

“…Pervasive sensing is becoming more efficient and affordable thanks to the rapid development of small low-cost sensors. This paradigm is already used in various of Ambient Intelligence applications [2,9] and offers an ideal setup for an unobtrusive method of counting people in the environment. However, even though these applications require to know the number of occupants in the environment, they usually avoid this problem by assuming a fixed number of occupants and consequently, very little research is available where pervasive sensing is used for person counting.…”

Clinical Process in Blockchain for Patient Security in Home Care

“…This kind of concern has lead in European Union to the enforcement of General Data Protection Regulation that will be effective in all EU countries in May 25 of 2018. In wireless networks like those present in AAL environments special concerns have to be taken has illustrated in [13] and particularly in Smart Environments [15,32,3,2,30] as already predicted by [11,4,12].…”

An Analytics Platform for Integrating and Computing Spatio-Temporal Metrics

“…On the other hand, infrastructure-related enablers are now in place: fully rolled-out communication networks (e.g., 3G and 4G) with resulting ubiquitous internet access, and commercially available, economised cloud-based storage and computing infrastructures [6], provide unprecedented means to build the next-generation of context-aware applications and services, based on multi-user, real-time and high-frequency input streams; real-time data handling, processing and analytics; and real-time, location-and context-based reactiveness [7]. Indeed, we see a breakthrough of such applications in various application fields, such as mobility and transportation (e.g., [8]), health (e.g., [9,10]), tourism (e.g., [11], smart cities (e.g., [12,13]), smart homes (e.g., [14]), gaming (e.g., Pokemon Go [15]), to name but a few.…”

“…A second technological milestone is the rapid evolution and proliferation of powerful mobile hand-held computing devices, a condition sine qua non to run full-fledged, context-aware applications [5].On the other hand, infrastructure-related enablers are now in place: fully rolled-out communication networks (e.g., 3G and 4G) with resulting ubiquitous internet access, and commercially available, economised cloud-based storage and computing infrastructures [6], provide unprecedented means to build the next-generation of context-aware applications and services, based on multi-user, real-time and high-frequency input streams; real-time data handling, processing and analytics; and real-time, location-and context-based reactiveness [7]. Indeed, we see a breakthrough of such applications in various application fields, such as mobility and transportation (e.g., [8]), health (e.g., [9,10]), tourism (e.g., [11], smart cities (e.g., [12,13]), smart homes (e.g., [14]), gaming (e.g., Pokemon Go [15]), to name but a few.Nevertheless, due to their relatively new and evolving supportive technologies, building such applications remains a tedious job. The client-side application needs to deal with and be built around an additional, dynamically changing concern, namely context in general and location specifically, while server-side handling of context data, especially in large-scale multi-user deployments, needs to deal with streaming data, big data issues, real-time analysis and reactiveness.…”