The average age of the world's population is increasing, and life expectancy will increase by an extra 10 years by the year 2050. The growing number of older adults increases the demands on public health systems and the related care costs. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support integrated healthcare services in elderly homecare can make an important contribution to reducing such costs. The SOCIALIZE AAL project aims to create a new reference platform for the elderly by applying technological solutions to simplify their daily activities and the means by which they access dedicated services in order to improve their quality of life. This paper describes the Elderly Monitoring service - an IoT module of the SOCIALIZE platform, whose aim is to collect environmental and physical user data so that they can be supervised by medical and caregiver staffs. The system has been designed to enable easy addition and/or substitution of new services and devices within the environment. To this end, the service implements a framework that enables heterogeneous devices belonging to different domotic systems and protocols to directly share data, thereby implementing an infrastructure suitable for the fulfillment of a real Social IoT (SIoT).

This paper introduces technical solutions devised to support the Deployment Site - Regione Emilia Romagna (DS-RER) of the ACTIVAGE project. The ACTIVAGE project aims at promoting IoT (Internet of Things)-based solutions for Active and Healthy ageing. DS-RER focuses on improving continuity of care for older adults (65+) suffering from aftereffects of a stroke event. A Wireless Sensor Kit based on Wi-Fi connectivity was suitably engineered and realized to monitor behavioral aspects, possibly relevant to health and wellbeing assessment. This includes bed/rests patterns, toilet usage, room presence and many others. Besides hardware design and validation, cloud-based analytics services are introduced, suitable for automatic extraction of relevant information (trends and anomalies) from raw sensor data streams. The approach is general and applicable to a wider range of use cases; however, for readability’s sake, two simple cases are analyzed, related to bed and toilet usage patterns. In particular, a regression framework is introduced, suitable for detecting trends (long and short-term) and labeling anomalies. A methodology for assessing multi-modal daily behavioral profiles is introduced, based on unsupervised clustering techniques. The proposed framework has been successfully deployed at several real-users’ homes, allowing for its functional validation. Clinical effectiveness will be assessed instead through a Randomized Control Trial study, currently being carried out.

Artificial Intelligence in combination with the Internet of Medical Things enables remote healthcare services through networks of environmental and/or personal sensors. We present a remote healthcare service system which collects real-life data through an environmental sensor package, including binary motion, contact, pressure, and proximity sensors, installed at households of elderly people. Its aim is to keep the caregivers informed of subjects’ health-status progressive trajectory, and alert them of health-related anomalies to enable objective on-demand healthcare service delivery at scale. The system was deployed in 19 households inhabited by an elderly person with post-stroke condition in the Emilia–Romagna region in Italy, with maximal and median observation durations of 98 and 55 weeks. Among these households, 17 were multi-occupancy residences, while the other 2 housed elderly patients living alone. Subjects’ daily behavioral diaries were extracted and registered from raw sensor signals, using rule-based data pre-processing and unsupervised algorithms. Personal behavioral habits were identified and compared to typical patterns reported in behavioral science, as a quality-of-life indicator. We consider the activity patterns extracted across all users as a dictionary, and represent each patient’s behavior as a ‘Bag of Words’, based on which patients can be categorized into sub-groups for precision cohort treatment. Longitudinal trends of the behavioral progressive trajectory and sudden abnormalities of a patient were detected and reported to care providers. Due to the sparse sensor setting and the multi-occupancy living condition, the sleep profile was used as the main indicator in our system. Experimental results demonstrate the ability to report on subjects’ daily activity pattern in terms of sleep, outing, visiting, and health-status trajectories, as well as predicting/detecting 75% hospitalization sessions up to 11 days in advance. 65% of the alerts were confirmed to be semantically meaningful by the users. Furthermore, reduced social interaction (outing and visiting), and lower sleep quality could be observed during the COVID-19 lockdown period across the cohort.

The number of smart devices around us grows more and more every day, and with it the need to interface them in order to share data and activate functions. Each day, new scenarios and new applications emerge to make our lives easier in many different contexts. The race towards realizing a true Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has already begun, and by now such reality is at hand. The work presented herein aims to offer a practicable, scalable solution for fulfilling many of the promises of the Internet of Things, even in contexts rendered problematic by the continuing presence of closed proprietary systems, lacking any compatibility with Internet protocols, such as the home automation industry. Starting with a major contribution by our laboratory to the field of interoperability among natively incompatible domotic technologies, a software module has been developed to enable any and all home automation devices to interface and interact via the IPv6 network protocol. Each and every home automation device can thereby interact actively with the surrounding world, as it has been made reachable through its own IPv6 address that identifies it uniquely on the Internet. The proposed system thereby advances users' ability to take full advantage of the benefits offered by the new IoT vision of the world.

Embedded intelligence entails a vision of the Internet of Things oriented to "Ambient Intelligence", which can be defined as the capacity to collect and analyze the digital traces left by people when they interact with the environment and with such "intelligent things". In such a vision, the ultimate aim is to acquire knowledge about everyday life and human behavior. We apply these concepts to the automated home, in which even nowadays devices (sensors and actuators) are already Internet-capable "things" endowed with their own intelligence. This work introduces a semantic knowledge representation for domotics following the principles of the semantic Web (Web 3.0). We have implemented specific ontologies that automatically take account of distributed environmental context information. The first result was to achieve a natural abstraction of different, incompatible devices in order to support interoperability in a consistent technology-independent manner and impart awareness to the domestic environment in which "things" such as furniture and other objects, as well as the rooms themselves, take on computational significance. This goal includes leveraging the development of a comprehensive intelligent ecosystem that, by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, gains knowledge of the occupants' behaviors and habits and can thereby adapt itself to the specific setting and anticipate their needs without direct human intervention. The same modeling process serves as the basis for implementation of an e-health system that can anticipate, and thereby prevent, possible health hazards before emergency situations arise (especially for the sick and elderly).

Introduction The potential of current technologies in smart automation has been largely unexploited. Pervasive computing vision is still far from being achieved, especially with regard to Domotics and home applications. In fact, even though many implementations have started to appear in several contexts, few applications have been made available for the home environment and the general public. This is mainly due to the segmentation of standards and proprietary solutions, which are currently confusing the market with a sparse offer of uninteroperable devices and systems. Although modern houses are equipped with smart technological appliances, still very few of these appliances can be seamlessly connected to each other. Moreover, inter-working capabilities are required beyond house boundaries, towards external services and towards other houses as nodes of a global network. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to find solutions to the problem of interoperability that will be in line with open and widely recognized standards. The result is a computing framework based on open communication standards, capable of abstracting the peculiarities of underlying heterogeneous technologies, and letting them co-exist and interwork, without eliminating their differences. Interoperability can thus be made potentially feasible between any domotic technology, both currently existing, and still to be defined. Currently, domotic technology vendors concentrate on building closed relationships with their customers, and leveraging their economic investments by establishing barriers against new manufacturers entering the market. Examples of current domotic protocols are X10, Konnex, LonWorks, UPnP, HAVi, and Jini supporting various communication standards (Ethernet, FireWire, Bluetooth, ZigBee, IrDA and proprietary buses). We believe that no domotic technology currently has the potential to actually play a leading role. Within this wide and heterogeneous framework, the market logic is to tie consumers to a particular domotic protocol, which then forces them to only purchase conforming devices in order to keep a consistent level of interoperability. In recent years several interesting and innovative solutions have emerged, with a reasonable level of scalability and dependability, providing interoperability among heterogeneous home systems. Twente University has proposed a solution that aims at supporting heterogeneous technologies (including legacy ones) with a "cluster cultures" approach. The architecture outlines a "touch and play" system which, at device registration time, enables a zero-configuration environment for the exchange of credentials among its gateways and to register device services in a hierarchical structure. The architecture provides a high level of security by using cryptographic algorithms. Waseda University have proposed a framework designed to easily enable the integration of legacy middleware and legacy services and clients, with a predefined path for the inclusion of new, future, middleware. This is accomplished mainly through the use of a Virtual Service Gateway. This connects one piece of middleware to another by exploiting a Protocol Conversion Manager, whose task is to convert the different middleware protocols into the specific internal protocol used by the Virtual Service Gateway. Information about the location and functions of services is provided by a Virtual Service Repository. Another interesting project is the "Domotic House Gateway." It implements an event-based mechanism which is used to exchange messages between the single device and the system. These events are internally converted into logical events so as to clearly separate the actual physical issues from the semantics that goes beyond the devices and their role within the house. One level of the architecture implements a rule-based core that can be dynamically adapted either by the system itself or manually through external interfaces. Each device needs a device driver, which is responsible for translating its low level or hardware states and activities into events that can be managed by the system. Another promising approach, in line with our research, is proposed by the Open Building Information Exchange group who are working to create standard XML and Web Services guidelines to facilitate information exchange among mechanical and electrical systems in building automation. One such important European project in this context is Amigo. This project was aimed at Ambient Intelligence features for the networked home environment and the usability of the system was among its main goals and included three major guidelines: user-friendly interfaces, interoperability, and automatic discovery of devices and services. All these projects resolved the interoperability problem with several approaches, all of which are different from what we consider, in our vision, as the optimal solutions. Lastly, we enlist a prototype previously created by our research laboratory. This solution had the limitation of abstracting each device typology with a Web service implementing their specific functionalities. The implementation of a new ad hoc Web service was needed whenever a new category of device needed to be included in the network. In addition, this prototype solved the problem of cooperation by virtualizing devices belonging to each domotic system onto the others. This solution, however, had a drawback: the same device appeared virtually replicated on every single domotic system, thus creating data replications and possible consistency problems.