Everyday Life Objects Research Articles

Perforated Cardboards: A Support for Embroidery Used for Various Everyday Objects in the Victorian Age

AbstractPerforated cardboards were common and economic supports for embroidery in the Victorian Era. Despite their popularity, they had a brief life and are almost forgotten today. Different types of cardboard were chosen according to the materials and techniques to be applied. This article presents nineteenth century documentary sources on perforated cardboard and its use in various objects of everyday life. The types of cardboard, commercialization, decorative techniques and motifs and applied materials will be discussed.

HABITAT: An IoT Solution for Independent Elderly.

In this work, a flexible and extensive digital platform for Smart Homes is presented, exploiting the most advanced technologies of the Internet of Things, such as Radio Frequency Identification, wearable electronics, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the main novelty of the paper is the system-level description of the platform flexibility allowing the interoperability of different smart devices. This research was developed within the framework of the operative project HABITAT (Home Assistance Based on the Internet of Things for the Autonomy of Everybody), aiming at developing smart devices to support elderly people both in their own houses and in retirement homes, and embedding them in everyday life objects, thus reducing the expenses for healthcare due to the lower need for personal assistance, and providing a better life quality to the elderly users.

Complex reactive event processing for assisted living: The Habitat project case study

While the increasing average age of population is posing new challenges to societies and healthcare systems, the emergence of the Internet of Things research area is generating the hope for automated assisted environments, which could combine the advances in sensors networks with that of runtime monitoring systems, in order to create smart houses able to take care of their older inhabitants and delay the recourse to hospitals and nursing homes. However, although various assisted living systems have been proposed in the last decade, the goal of realizing an effective domestic support system for elderly is still far from reached.In this work, we present a project aiming to re-engineer a set of everyday life objects, equipping them with environmental and wearable sensors, thus to monitor the condition of older people in their domestic residences and provide security while preserving the autonomy and independence of the subjects. The main focus of the paper at hand is on the requirements and solutions implemented to realize the backbone infrastructure of such system as regards both the adopted semantic message routing mechanism and the newly conceived approach to event analysis, which combines Complex Event Processing and a reactive implementation of Event Calculus.

Attribute-Based Access Control for the Swarm With Distributed Policy Management

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing society by enabling everyday life objects with processing and communication. The Swarm is an edge-centric IoT approach in which independent, cross-niche, and heterogeneous devices can cooperate with each other to execute tasks synergistically. Access control is indispensable for the Swarm, as it ensures confidentiality and ownership, and prevents cyber-attacks since only authorized services can communicate. Although many access control models do exist, there is a lack of edge-based and easy-to-use access control systems in the consumer electronics field. This paper presents a distributed attribute-based access control system for the Swarm. It features a distributed policy management GUI that allows users to setup policies for IoT devices in a decentralized way. The proposed system is evaluated according to a set of national institute of standards and technologies quality metrics, and it is also subject to a performance evaluation. Results indicate that the system offers good usability factors and can handle from 10 000 to 6 billion services when considering, respectively, an arbitrary graph density of 20% and a social-based graph density of 0.000034%.

Internet of Things for enabling smart environments: A technology-centric perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a computing paradigm whereby everyday life objects are augmented with computational and wireless communication capabilities, typically through the incorporation of resource-constrained devices including sensors and actuators, which enable their connection to the Internet. The IoT is seen as the key ingredient for the development of smart environments. Nevertheless, the current IoT ecosystem offers many alternative communication solutions with diverse performance characteristics. This situation presents a major challenge to identifying the most suitable IoT communication solution(s) for a particular smart environment. In this paper we consider the distinct requirements of key smart environments, namely the smart home, smart health, smart cities and smart factories, and relate them to current IoT communication solutions. Specifically, we describe the core characteristics of these smart environments and then proceed to provide a comprehensive survey of relevant IoT communication technologies and architectures. We conclude with our reflections on the crucial features of IoT solutions in this setting and a discussion of challenges that remain open for research.

GOOSE: goal oriented orchestration for smart environments

Smart environment scenarios are characterised by the presence of users, with different needs and preferences, and everyday life objects exploited to meet the expectations of users themselves. Connecting objects to the internet and making them accessible from remote is not sufficient to make an environment 'smart' since such ecosystems should also be able to enable context-sensitive actions along with a management of the interaction between objects and users. In this work, we propose GOOSE, a platform which aimed at interpreting users goals expressed in natural language in order to generate, select, and safely enforce a set of plans to be executed to fulfill target goals. After highlighting the main challenges affecting typical machine-to-machine (M2M) communication scenarios, we show how the use of a semantic reasoner can be used to allow the composition of plans consisting of sequences of services to be called on the smart environment objects. Finally, we address the issue of secure communications between platform and objects, and the management of potentially inconsistent goals.

Module as forms of formation of architectural environmental design

The article covers aspects of designing an architectural environment based on the module and modular design. The popularization of the module as a dimensional unit in shaping the design of an architectural environment is conditioned by the simplicity of independent elements, the possibility of their combination, a variety of choices of configurations of the completed spatial object, effective integration into any available space. It has been discovered that the autonomous module serves as the unit for designing a wide range of buildings and structures, as well as elements of the urban interior, creating an interactive urban space that prompts the user to actively interact with the environment, engages in discussion with society and promotes social mobility. It is revealed that the design of the architectural environment, formed on the basis of the module, acts as a self-organized dynamic space, characterized by a wide range of shaped solutions. One of the main ways to expressively design an architectural environment formed on the basis of modularity is a form. The form creates a generalized aesthetic impression and effectively reveals the idea-symbol inherent in the project. It is established that in the modern practice of creating the image of a modular environment, attempts to achieve the aesthetic effect created as a result of imitation of bionic motifs and objects of everyday life, as well as with optical illusions, are increasingly observed. The study revealed that the design of the architectural environment is based on the module has a high aesthetic value, dynamism, interactivity and actively interacts with the society.

The Power of Modern Technologies in the Fiction of Don Delillo

This paper analyses the literary work of an American writer Don DeLillo, who belongs among contemporary American writers. He focuses on the manner in which contemporary human consciousness has been shaped being influenced by consumer and military technologies, media and daily life of information. Modern consumer technologies have a strong impact on men. In DeLillo's fictions, modern technologies are not just simple objects in everyday life of his characters. They are able to shape the consciousness of each human. Telephones, nuclear bombs, computers, television sets and modern appliances present a psychological phenomenon which provides the possibilities for actions, what more, it influences the perception of each human being. In his literary work, Don DeLillo discovers the interaction between human characters and their technological environment. DeLillo's characters find expression through the material forms of the technologies they fetishize, but these material forms simultaneously capture and limit the nature of the kind of transcendence they are able to offer. Technology appears to DeLillo's characters as a kind of human dream, which in turn, influences the kind of dreams and desires they have, and thus also the ones they realize in a technological form. They exist in an interaction between technology and self-definition or self-deception. The diversity of modes that is illustrated in DeLillo's fictions is supplemented by the technologically mediated confluence of his characters and the field of cultural objects in which they appear.

Construction and Education

Do we construct our own world from our experiences? A number of educational jurisdictions in our time have embraced inquiry as the official approach to teaching and learning. Most thought, so far as it was mediated by language and not just grunts and crude gestures, would have been immediate and concrete like Wittgenstein's builders in the first few sections of the Philosophical Investigations, Yet in the lives of our not so distant ancestors much, perhaps most of the things encountered in their everyday lives were not in any direct sense made or constructed. For the objects of everyday life are now not constructed in the old way by family members, by past tribal members remembered, or by ourselves.\n Of course a child finds itself in a world of language in much the way a hawk finds itself in a world of flight.

Cortical summation and attentional modulation of combined chromatic and luminance signals

Cortical networks that process colour and luminance signals are often studied separately, although colour appearance depends on both colour and luminance. In fact, objects in everyday life are very rarely defined by only colour or only luminance, necessitating an investigation into combined processing of these signals. We used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) to investigate (1) cortical summation of luminance and chromatic contrast and (2) attentional modulation of neural activity driven by competing stimuli that differ in chromoluminant content. Our stimuli combined fixed amounts of chromatic contrast from either of the two cone-opponent mechanisms (bluish and yellowish; reddish and greenish) with two different levels of positive luminance contrast. Our experiments found evidence of non-linear processing of combined colour and luminance signals, which most likely originates in V1-V3 neurons tuned to both colour and luminance. Differences between luminance contrast of stimuli were found to be a key determinant for the size of feature-based voluntary attentional effects in SSVEPs, with colours of lower contrast than the colour they were presented with receiving the highest level of attentional modulation. Our results indicate that colour and luminance contrast are processed interdependently, both in terms of perception and in terms of attentional selection, with a potential candidate mediating their link being stimulus appearance, which depends on both chromaticity and luminance.

Maus: Narrating Life through Archiving of Autotopographical Objects

Autotopographical objects play a pivotal role in life narratives, and the graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman is no exception. Based on a close reading and textual analysis of the text, the present study analyses the autotopographical objects in the novel under four categories: photographs, masks, miscellaneous objects of everyday life, and lost autotopographical objects, with a view to expounding the nexus between life narration and autotopographical objects. It was found that autotopographical objects in Maus show how objects enable the life narratives to be constructed and viewed in varied lights, how the autotopographical objects become an embodiment of lives narrated, the significance of the artist's involvement in contextualizing these objects and providing supplementary details, metamorphosis of everyday objects into autotopographical objects in the course of life narration, and the significance and impact of absent autotopographical objects in creating gaps in life narratives while adding layers of meaning through the dynamics of absence and presence.

The Regime of Memory in “The Museum of Innocence”: The Past as an Age of Innocence

In this paper, the regime of memory produced in The Museum of Innocence, a museum created and curated by the author Orhan Pamuk is discussed. The museum was opened in 2012 in Istanbul and it was based on Pamuk’s novel of the same title published in 2008. The intertextual novel-museum and the museum-novel blur the distinctions between fiction and reality, as well as the distinctions between individual and social memories and focus on everyday life and personal objects rather than the “monumental” national history. The regime of memory produced in this museum is discussed in this paper in relation with the process of modernization in Turkey. The understanding of time, space, reality and individual prevailing in the museum are evaluated in order to understand whether the museum produces a creative remembering that problematized the process of remembering or a regime of remembering that is based on absolutizing the past.

The face of the state on the U.S.-Mexico border

In recent years, feminist geopolitics and the turns toward emotional and affective geography have resulted in new perspectives on theories of power, embodiment and subjectivity. Other recent trends have considered non-human objects as important for state theory, insofar as state practice often relies upon the force of objects in everyday life. This article works to bring together object-oriented and emotional geographies for a new perspective on the state. It does so by drawing on another theoretical tradition that has been less familiar for political geography: psychoanalytic theory. Findings from ethnographic research with residents living near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona help illuminate the presence and spectral circulation of what we call the “face of the state” as a psycho-emotional entity in everyday life for these residents. Surveillance objects enter the psyche through the face of the state, insofar as they are imagined and felt as a visual and embodied experience. The force of the object, then, extends beyond its own materiality and into the psycho-social dimensions of life through which state power operates, thereby empowering the border to gaze at the subject population in powerful new ways.

Location‐dependent sensing data collection and processing mechanism in vehicular network

AbstractWith the promotion of the Internet of Things, in which a growing number of objects in everyday life are able to communicate with each other, crowdsensing has attracted public attention. Among different devices, vehicles with various sensors can perform the traffic data collection tasks released by the traffic center, which is helpful for monitoring road conditions. Thus, we use crowdsensing between vehicles to improve the precision of traffic state estimation. We also propose a location‐dependent sensing task assignment mechanism for traffic data collection and a multisource data fusion model for traffic data processing in a vehicular network. First, we establish a mathematical model for the sensing task assignment considering the vehicle's time budget constraint, location, and collection task requirements. We then propose a task assignment algorithm consisting of determining the order for vehicle allocation and scheduling the optimal collection path for each vehicle, which aims to achieve maximum platform utility. Furthermore, we put forward a fusion model, including spatial fusion and temporal fusion, to better process the collected data. We use a power average operator for the spatial fusion and a temporal correlation–based data compression algorithm for the temporal fusion. The obtained simulation results validate the accuracy and correctness of our approach.

Visual and verbal components of Latin chronograms

Language games exist in almost every language and they provide a wide range of techniques. Among them there are сhronograms – words or phrases, in which letters of a different font or/and a color, simultaneously denoting also Roman numerals, form a specific date while composing. Chronograms have several levels of perception and they are characterized by the synthesis of verbal and visual components, that allows to emphasize the date of a particular event and concentrate the attention of a reader on the information focused in the message. The scope of the use of chronograms and, accordingly, their typology are extremely diverse. Chronograms can be found in biographical and historical works, they decorate the title pages of books of various contents, hide on commemorative medals and objects of everyday life, appear through the stone of buildings and sculptural compositions. Chronograms can look like one word, laconic expression or even form several tens and thousands of lines of a poetic work. They enjoyed the greatest popularity in the XVII-XVIII centuries, when the lives of ordinary citizens, not to mention outstanding personalities, became the reason for creating a chronogram. Birth and death, marriage, military victory, solemn visit – any event, serious or mediocre, was reflected in the chronograms. Due to the contents Latin chronograms can be divided into several types as follows: chronograms-events and dates, chronograms-congratulations (on the occasion of birth, death, marriage, ascension to the throne, receiving a priest's rank, the publication of a scientific research or invention etc.); biographical chronograms; zodiac or calendar chronograms; sacred chronograms, chronograms-legends on medals. The most common are chronograms-dates and chronograms-epitaphs.

Reduced Dynamics of the Non-holonomic Whipple Bicycle

Though the bicycle is a familiar object of everyday life, modeling its full nonlinear three-dimensional dynamics in a closed symbolic form is a difficult issue for classical mechanics. In this article, we address this issue without resorting to the usual simplifications on the bicycle kinematics nor its dynamics. To derive this model, we use a general reduction-based approach in the principal fiber bundle of configurations of the three-dimensional bicycle. This includes a geometrically exact model of the contacts between the wheels and the ground, the explicit calculation of the kernel of constraints, along with the dynamics of the system free of any external forces, and its projection onto the kernel of admissible velocities. The approach takes benefits of the intrinsic formulation of geometric mechanics. Along the path toward the final equations, we show that the exact model of the bicycle dynamics requires to cope with a set of non-symmetric constraints with respect to the structural group of its configuration fiber bundle. The final reduced dynamics are simulated on several examples representative of the bicycle. As expected the constraints imposed by the ground contacts, as well as the energy conservation, are satisfied, while the dynamics can be numerically integrated in real time.

Motion Artifact Quantification and Sensor Fusion for Unobtrusive Health Monitoring.

Sensors integrated into objects of everyday life potentially allow unobtrusive health monitoring at home. However, since the coupling of sensors and subject is not as well-defined as compared to a clinical setting, the signal quality is much more variable and can be disturbed significantly by motion artifacts. One way of tackling this challenge is the combined evaluation of multiple channels via sensor fusion. For robust and accurate sensor fusion, analyzing the influence of motion on different modalities is crucial. In this work, a multimodal sensor setup integrated into an armchair is presented that combines capacitively coupled electrocardiography, reflective photoplethysmography, two high-frequency impedance sensors and two types of ballistocardiography sensors. To quantify motion artifacts, a motion protocol performed by healthy volunteers is recorded with a motion capture system, and reference sensors perform cardiorespiratory monitoring. The shape-based signal-to-noise ratio SNR is introduced and used to quantify the effect on motion on different sensing modalities. Based on this analysis, an optimal combination of sensors and fusion methodology is developed and evaluated. Using the proposed approach, beat-to-beat heart-rate is estimated with a coverage of 99.5% and a mean absolute error of 7.9 ms on 425 min of data from seven volunteers in a proof-of-concept measurement scenario.

Dual-task training in older adults: The effect of additional motor tasks on mobility performance

ObjectivesDual-task (DT) performance is common to most activities of daily living and difficulties in DT activities may reduce quality of life in older adults. This study investigated the effect of DT training in a sample of older adults. MethodsSixty older adults (mean=74.4±3.1years) participated in the study. Twenty-two older adults were included in the control (CG), 19 in the single-task (ST) training and 19 in DT training group. ST group received balance and walking training twice a week for16 weeks, while DT training group performed the same training with additional motor tasks. Data were gathered on 6m timed walk (6MTW), timed up and go test (TUG) and four square step test (FSST). DT conditions required participants to complete 6MTW, TUG and FSST, either (i) while carrying a glass of water or (ii) while carrying a ball on a round tray. ResultsA significant Group x Time interaction was found in TUG (F [2,57]=29.5; p<0.01; partial η2=0.51) and in FSST (F [2,57]=23.2; p<0.01; partial η2=0.44). After intervention DT showed better scores in overall TUG (mean difference=1.21s [95% CI, 0.82–1.60]; p<0.05) and FSST (mean difference=2.51s [95% CI, 1.67–3.35]; p<0.01), whereas CG and ST did not exhibit significant changes. ConclusionOur results suggested that 16 weeks of motor DT training, using motor additional tasks as manipulation of common objects of everyday life, could improve mobility in older age.

Primary metaphors: Importance as size and weight in a comparative perspective

ABSTRACTThis is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target-domain concept, “IMPORTANCE IS SIZE” and “IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT,” in English and Chinese. It is suggested that these two primary metaphors are derived from the OBJECT image schema, abstracted from our embodied, sensorimotor experience, especially our visual and tactile perception, in dealing with physical objects in everyday life. The study focuses on size and weight adjectives in both languages and on linguistic evidence in two areas: their lexicalizations of the importance senses as found in the dictionaries, and their roles in the instantiation of the two primary metaphors in natural discourse as found in the corpora. Our further analysis also shows that the primary metaphors can be manifested without explicit use of size and weight words when relevant conceptual frames in the source, evoked by other words or images, are mapped onto the target domain, thus activating the relevant region of our encyclopedic knowledge and triggering off the primary metaphors in our conceptual system. We also construct a hypothetical mapping scheme for primary metaphors based on the OBJECT image schema, in which OBJECT is mapped onto its target via three of its fundamental dimensions: SIZE, WEIGHT, and SOLIDITY. It is hoped that this mapping scheme will benefit future comparative studies of primary metaphors across languages and cultures in a more systematic way.

An experimental comparative study of RSSI-based positioning algorithms for passive RFID localization in smart environments

The rapid adoption of wireless technologies has increased the interest of many laboratories about the field of wireless sensor network or the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology which has emerged as a winning combination for the implementation of an advanced assistance system within smart environments. To fulfill the important mission of a technological assistance, a technique first had to identify the ongoing activities of its user by tracking everyday life objects in real time using, for example, passive RFID tags. To increase the quality of information extracted from the objects localization by properly using the received signal strength indicator, this paper explores Kalman filter, particle filter and few others filtering algorithm that enhances the tracking performance. It also discusses three of the most interesting methods that can be applied for the localization of objects in smart environments without requiring the installation of references tags everywhere. Finally, to increase the value, we include experiments that were conducted within a real smart home infrastructure to review the positive and negative elements of each method.