Ambient Assisted Living Applications Research Articles

Field test of innovative digital technical assistance systems in the outpatient and inpatient care

Abstract The tecLA project developed a modular system for the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that enables older people to have simple, intuitive access to medical and technical assistance systems. A commercially available AAL application portal has been subjected to acceptance tests and optimizations and has proven itself in field tests. Furthermore, when comparing the self-assessment values to cognitive measures before and after the intervention, a clear trend towards more positive values in the post-test was recorded. It was also shown that the use of the system has very positive effects on communication behavior and cognitive selfassessment. The nurses and doctors can follow the vital signs online in the patient's file and evaluate them immediately.

Securing IoT Applications with Smart Objects: Framework and a Socially Assistive Robots Case Study

The expanded deployment of smart objects in IoT applications is pushing existing IoT platform architectures and their security functionalities to their limits. Indeed, smart objects exhibit semi-autonomous behaviours, are not centrally controlled all the time and therefore need more dynamic approaches in protecting them against vulnerabilities and security incidents. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for securing the latest generation of IoT applications that involve smart objects, while illustrating its application in securing an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system that comprises socially assistive robots. The framework’s innovative aspects lie in the use of predictive analytics for anticipating the behaviour of smart objects, including abnormalities in their security behaviour. The importance of anticipating such abnormalities is validated, demonstrated and discussed in the context of the AAL application.

Sensor virtualization Middleware design for Ambient Assisted Living based on the Priority packet processing

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is leading towards a new and more advanced paradigm that is Internet of Everything (IoE). Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which aims to support elderly and physically challenged persons, is based on sensor networks. WSNs are mostly installed for a particular single application. Though, future of WSNs hides in WSN virtualization, which supports multiple applications. The aggregation of the sensor network resources in the form of software or hardware are supported by WSN virtualization. In Virtualizing WSN, the role of middleware layer is of supreme importance. However, a middleware layer faces overhead challenges of high processing time, delay, and the power consumption. The major challenge faced by AAL application in the paradigm of WSN virtualization is the delay caused by the aggregation of the sensed data. In this research paper efforts have been made to design a priority based multi-threading middleware design for sensor virtualization. The proposed middleware resides at the sensor node as well as the gateway that reduces the delay caused by the sensor virtualization. The proposed middleware design has been implemented and tested on the AAL testbed.

A novel reference model for ambient assisted living systems’ architectures

AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) is lacking a RM (Reference Model) to serve as an abstraction of the domain. Therefore, to help implement new architectures established on the prior experiences of the designer’s expertise and former competences, in this paper, we propose a novel approach of an AAL RM. Our objective is to handle the resolution of conflicts that appear between the developers, and give an overview of the basis for implementing concrete software architectures for different families of AAL applications. Our proposed RM is a standardized clarification for developers to apply in the process of the design and implementation. We illuminate the AAL domain fundamental dimensions and we established a formal RM with an infrastructure that could survive the domain’s progression. To achieve integrated system-of-systems composed of systems, subsystems and components, our RM describes a standard and regulated structure to be established. High-level elements, essential properties and characteristics that must appear in the application’s design are described and illustrated in this work.

Real-Time Distributed Architecture for Remote Acoustic Elderly Monitoring in Residential-Scale Ambient Assisted Living Scenarios.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has become a powerful alternative to improving the life quality of elderly and partially dependent people in their own living environments. In this regard, tele-care and remote surveillance AAL applications have emerged as a hot research topic in this domain. These services aim to infer the patients’ status by means of centralized architectures that collect data from a set of sensors deployed in their living environment. However, when the size of the scenario and number of patients to be monitored increase (e.g., residential areas, retirement homes), these systems typically struggle at processing all associated data and providing a reasonable output in real time. The purpose of this paper is to present a fog-inspired distributed architecture to collect, analyze and identify up to nine acoustic events that represent abnormal behavior or dangerous health conditions in large-scale scenarios. Specifically, the proposed platform collects data from a set of wireless acoustic sensors and runs an automatic two-stage audio event classification process to decide whether or not to trigger an alarm. Conducted experiments over a labeled dataset of 7116 s based on the priorities of the Fundació Ave Maria health experts have obtained an overall accuracy of 94.6%.

Listening to the ones who care: exploring the perceptions of informal caregivers towards ambient assisted living applications

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies have received increased attention from government, industry and research. Informal caregivers will be directly affected by the use of these technologies and are likely to be key influencers in the adoption decision of older adults. However, so far the informal caregivers’ perceptions, concerns and needs have been mostly overlooked in AAL research. To address these shortcomings, two studies were conducted. Study I consisted of 20 in-depth interviews with informal caregivers to investigate their perception of various AAL applications. In Study II these findings were validated with regard to our own prototype application called SONOPA. The second study included couples of informal caregivers and care receivers to compare both user groups. Although informal caregivers had a more positive attitude than care receivers and appreciated the opportunities of AAL technologies (e.g., increased safety, peace of mind); they also had several concern such as invading the care receiver’s privacy, the lack of human touch, and the care receiver’s technology experience. To address these concerns, informal caregivers should be more involved when developing AAL applications.

Adaptive and technology-independent architecture for fault-tolerant distributed AAL solutions

Today's architectures for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) must cope with a variety of challenges like flawless sensor integration and time synchronization (e.g. for sensor data fusion) while abstracting from the underlying technologies at the same time. Furthermore, an architecture for AAL must be capable to manage distributed application scenarios in order to support elderly people in all situations of their everyday life. This encompasses not just life at home but in particular the mobility of elderly people (e.g. when going for a walk or having sports) as well. Within this paper we will introduce a novel architecture for distributed AAL solutions whose design follows a modern Microservices approach by providing small core services instead of a monolithic application framework. The architecture comprises core services for sensor integration, and service discovery while supporting several communication models (periodic, sporadic, streaming). We extend the state-of-the-art by introducing a fault-tolerance model for our architecture on the basis of a fault-hypothesis describing the fault-containment regions (FCRs) with their respective failure modes and failure rates in order to support safety-critical AAL applications.

An Internet of Things platform architecture for supporting ambient assisted living environments.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the logical further development of today's Internet, enabling a huge amount of devices to communicate, compute, sense and act. IoT sensors placed in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments, enable the context awareness and allow the support of the elderly in their daily routines, ultimately allowing an independent and safe lifestyle. The vast amount of data that are generated and exchanged between the IoT nodes require innovative context modeling approaches that go beyond currently used models. Current paper presents and evaluates an open interoperable platform architecture in order to utilize the technical characteristics of IoT and handle the large amount of generated data, as a solution to the technical requirements of AAL applications.

An Indoor Positioning System Based on Wearables for Ambient-Assisted Living.

The urban population is growing at such a rate that by 2050 it is estimated that 84% of the world’s population will live in cities, with flats being the most common living place. Moreover, WiFi technology is present in most developed country urban areas, with a quick growth in developing countries. New Ambient-Assisted Living applications will be developed in the near future having user positioning as ground technology: elderly tele-care, energy consumption, security and the like are strongly based on indoor positioning information. We present an indoor positioning system for wearable devices based on WiFi fingerprinting. Smart-watch wearable devices are used to acquire the WiFi strength signals of the surrounding Wireless Access Points used to build an ensemble of Machine Learning classification algorithms. Once built, the ensemble algorithm is used to locate a user based on the WiFi strength signals provided by the wearable device. Experimental results for five different urban flats are reported, showing that the system is robust and reliable enough for locating a user at room level into his/her home. Another interesting characteristic of the presented system is that it does not require deployment of any infrastructure, and it is unobtrusive, the only device required for it to work is a smart-watch.

Heuristic virtual machine allocation for multi-tier Ambient Assisted Living applications in a cloud data center

Cloud computing provides the essential infrastructure for multi-tier Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications that facilitate people's lives. Resource provisioning is a critically important problem for AAL applications in cloud data centers (CDCs). This paper focuses on modeling and analysis of multi-tier AAL applications, and aims to optimize resource provisioning while meeting requests' response time constraint. This paper models a multi-tier AAL application as a hybrid multi-tier queueing model consisting of an M/M/c queueing model and multiple M/M/1 queueing models. Then, virtual machine (VM) allocation is formulated as a constrained optimization problem in a CDC, and is further solved with the proposed heuristic VM allocation algorithm (HVMA). The results demonstrate that the proposed model and algorithm can effectively achieve dynamic resource provisioning while meeting the performance constraint.

Human Motion Energy Harvesting for AAL Applications

Research and development into the topic of ambient assisted living has led to an increasing range of devices that facilitate a person's life. The issue of the power supply of these modern mobile systems however has not been solved satisfactorily yet. In this paper a flat inductive multi-coil harvester for integration into the shoe sole is presented. The device is designed for ambient assisted living (AAL) applications and particularly to power a self-lacing shoe. The harvester exploits the horizontal swing motion of the foot to generate energy. Stacks of opposing magnets move through a number of equally spaced coils to induce a voltage. The requirement of a flat structure which can be integrated into the shoe sole is met by a reduced form factor of the magnet stack. In order to exploit the full width of the shoe sole, supporting structures are used to parallelize the harvester and therefore increase the number of active elements, i.e. magnets and coils. The development and characterization of different harvester variations is presented with the best tested design generating an average power of up to 2.14 mW at a compact device size of 75 × 41.5 × 15 mm3 including housing.

Communication architecture for AAL. Supporting patient care by health care providers in AAL-enhanced living quarters.

This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Using Data from Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Homes in Electronic Health Records". Concepts of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) support a long-term health monitoring and further medical and other services for multi-morbid patients with chronic diseases. In Germany many AAL and telemedical applications exist. Synergy effects by common agreements for essential application components and standards are not achieved. It is necessary to define a communication architecture which is based on common definitions of communication scenarios, application components and communication standards. The development of a communication architecture requires different steps. To gain a reference model for the problem area different AAL and telemedicine projects were compared and relevant data elements were generalized. The derived reference model defines standardized communication links. As a result the authors present an approach towards a reference architecture for AAL-communication. The focus of the architecture lays on the communication layer. The necessary application components are identified and a communication based on standards and their extensions is highlighted. The exchange of patient individual events supported by an event classification model, raw and aggregated data from the personal home area over a telemedicine center to health care providers is possible.

Scheduling data transmissions in wireless sensor networks used for position tracking

In wireless sensor networks developed for ambient assisted living (AAL) applications, power supply is one of the most challenging problems. In the case when measurements have low cost; a method is proposed for decreasing the time of communication by handling the measured data locally. In AAL applications the position tracking of a person is an essential task. Position tracking with motion sensors requires high number of messages and most of them are caused by local movements. Our suggestion is to eliminate these messages. The method is based on Hidden Markov Model of the motions of an observed person. The model provides information based on the estimated global state of the system, which is the position of the person in the space of interest. This state can be forwarded to the nodes so they locally perform the filtering to save valuable energy by not transmitting messages which are not relevant.

An experimental characterization of reservoir computing in ambient assisted living applications

In this paper, we present an introduction and critical experimental evaluation of a reservoir computing (RC) approach for ambient assisted living (AAL) applications. Such an empirical analysis jointly addresses the issues of efficiency, by analyzing different system configurations toward the embedding into computationally constrained wireless sensor devices, and of efficacy, by analyzing the predictive performance on real-world applications. First, the approach is assessed on a validation scheme where training, validation and test data are sampled in homogeneous ambient conditions, i.e., from the same set of rooms. Then, it is introduced an external test set involving a new setting, i.e., a novel ambient, which was not available in the first phase of model training and validation. The specific test-bed considered in the paper allows us to investigate the capability of the RC approach to discriminate among user movement trajectories from received signal strength indicator sensor signals. This capability can be exploited in various AAL applications targeted at learning user indoor habits, such as in the proposed indoor movement forecasting task. Such a joint analysis of the efficiency/efficacy trade-off provides novel insight in the concrete successful exploitation of RC for AAL tasks and for their distributed implementation into wireless sensor networks.

A Laboratory for AAL Applications

For development, demonstration and testing of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications a research laboratory was set up. It consists of three rooms, where the central room provides four areas (kitchen, living room, eating, sleeping) and is furnished in a way similar to real home settings. The concept and methodological approaches are described and discussed. First experiences from usage of the laboratory in the framework of concrete AAL projects are described.

Development and evaluation of SOA-based AAL services in real-life environments: A case study and lessons learned

IntroThe proper use of ICT services can support seniors in living independently longer. While such services are starting to emerge, current proprietary solutions are often expensive, covering only isolated parts of seniors’ needs, and lack support for sharing information between services and between users. For developers, the challenge is that it is complex and time consuming to develop high quality, interoperable services, and new techniques are needed to simplify the development and reduce the development costs.This paper provides the complete view of the experiences gained in the MPOWER project with respect to using model-driven development (MDD) techniques for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system development in the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) domain. MethodTo address this challenge, the approach of the European research project MPOWER (2006–2009) was to investigate and record the user needs, define a set of reusable software services based on these needs, and then implement pilot systems using these services. Further, a model-driven toolchain covering key development phases was developed to support software developers through this process. Evaluations were conducted both on the technical artefacts (methodology and tools), and on end user experience from using the pilot systems in trial sites. ResultsThe outcome of the work on the user needs is a knowledge base recorded as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model. This comprehensive model describes actors, use cases, and features derived from these. The model further includes the design of a set of software services, including full trace information back to the features and use cases motivating their design. Based on the model, the services were implemented for use in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) systems, and are publicly available as open source software. The services were successfully used in the realization of two pilot applications. There is therefore a direct and traceable link from the user needs of the elderly, through the service design knowledge base, to the service and pilot implementations.The evaluation of the SOA approach on the developers in the project revealed that SOA is useful with respect to job performance and quality. Furthermore, they think SOA is easy to use and support development of AAL applications. An important finding is that the developers clearly report that they intend to use SOA in the future, but not for all type of projects. With respect to using model-driven development in web services design and implementation, the developers reported that it was useful. However, it is important that the code generated from the models is correct if the full potential of MDD should be achieved.The pilots and their evaluation in the trial sites showed that the services of the platform are sufficient to create suitable systems for end users in the domain. ConclusionsA SOA platform with a set of reusable domain services is a suitable foundation for more rapid development and tailoring of assisted living systems covering reoccurring needs among elderly users. It is feasible to realize a tool-chain for model-driven development of SOA applications in the AAL domain, and such a tool-chain can be accepted and found useful by software developers.

Living longer independently – a healthcare interoperability perspective

Population ageing is driving the development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies. AAL solutions enhance the quality of life of older people, bringing the benefits of new technologies to their daily environment. Current healthcare IT and standards are working together to provide the building blocks needed to develop interconnected, interoperable, open AAL applications.