This paper presents the results from the experimental application of smartwatch sensors to predict occupants' thermal comfort under varying environmental conditions. The goal is to investigate the measurement accuracy of smartwatches when used as thermal comfort sensors to be integrated into Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control loops. Ten participants were exposed to various environmental conditions as well as warm - induced and cold-induced discomfort tests and 13 participants were exposed to a transient-condition while a network of sensors and a smartwatch collected both environmental parameters and heart rate variability (HRV). HRV features were used as input to Machine Learning (ML) classification algorithms to establish whether a user was in discomfort, providing an average accuracy of 92.2 %. ML and Deep Learning regression algorithms were trained to predict the thermal sensation vote (TSV) in a transient environment and the results show that the aggregation of environmental and physiological quantities provide a better TSV prediction in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), 1.2 and 20% respectively, than just the HRV features used for the prediction. In conclusion, this experiment supports the assumption that physiological quantities related to thermal comfort can improve TSV prediction when combined with environmental quantities.

Background: Despite the evidence on the positive role of self-management, the adoption of health coaching strategies for older people is still limited. To address these gaps, recent efforts have been made in the ICT sector in order to develop systems for delivering coaching and overcoming barriers relating to scarcity of resources. The aim of this review is to examine the efficacy of personal health coaching systems for older adults using digital virtual agents. Methods: A systematic review of the literature was conducted in December 2019 analyzing manuscripts from four databases over the last 10 years. Nine papers were included. Results: Despite the low number of studies, there was evidence that technology-integrated interventions can deliver benefits for health over usual care. However, the review raises important questions about how to maintain benefits and permanence of behavior change produced by short-term interventions. Conclusion: These systems offer a potential tool to reduce costs, minimize therapist burden and training, and expand the range of clients who can benefit from them. It is desirable that in the future the number of studies will grow, considering other aspects such as the role of the virtual coaches’ characteristics, social-presence, empathy, usability, and health literacy.

Smart homes play a strategic role for improving life quality of people, enabling to monitor people at home with numerous intelligent devices. Sensors can be installed to provide a continuous assistance without limiting the resident’s daily routine, giving her/him greater comfort, well-being and safety. This paper is based on the development of domestic technological solutions to improve the life quality of citizens and monitor the users and the domestic environment, based on features extracted from the collected data. The proposed smart sensing architecture is based on an integrated sensor network to monitor the user and the environment to derive information about the user’s behavior and her/his health status. The proposed platform includes biomedical, wearable, and unobtrusive sensors for monitoring user’s physiological parameters and home automation sensors to obtain information about her/his environment. The sensor network stores the heterogeneous data both locally and remotely in Cloud, where machine learning algorithms and data mining strategies are used for user behavior identification, classification of user health conditions, classification of the smart home profile, and data analytics to implement services for the community. The proposed solution has been experimentally tested in a pilot study based on the development of both sensors and services for elderly users at home.

This paper proposes a specific domotic sensor network to measure the well-being of elderly people in private home environments through Machine Learning (ML) algorithms trained with daily surveys. The tests have been conducted in 5 apartments lived by 8 older people where the non-obtrusive sensor network is installed. Two ML algorithms are compared, Random Forest (RF) and Regression Tree (RT), such that to verify whether the users’ well-being is encoded in behavioural patterns obtained from the domotic data. These data are used to measure users’ well-being and compared with three reference indices obtained through a daily survey: a physical (Phy), a mental (Mind) and a general health index (Avg). The extracted indices from the daily survey are used to train ML algorithms in the estimation of user’s well-being for users that live alone (single-resident) or with others (multi-resident). Single-house and multi-house procedures are tested, both to extract a user-specific behaviour, and assess whether the model is able to generalise across different users and environments. Results show that the RF algorithm provides better performance than the RT algorithm in predicting the level of well-being with a Mean Absolute Error in the multi-house procedure of 32%, 13% and 17% for the Avg, Mind and Phy indices, respectively.

This work illustrates an innovative localisation sensor network that uses multiple PIR and ultrasonic sensors installed on a mobile social robot to localise occupants in indoor environments. The system presented aims to measure movement direction and distance to reconstruct the movement of a person in an indoor environment by using sensor activation strategies and data processing techniques. The data collected are then analysed using both a supervised (Decision Tree) and an unsupervised (K-Means) machine learning algorithm to extract the direction and distance of occupant movement from the measurement system, respectively. Tests in a controlled environment have been conducted to assess the accuracy of the methodology when multiple PIR and ultrasonic sensor systems are used. In addition, a qualitative evaluation of the system’s ability to reconstruct the movement of the occupant has been performed. The system proposed can reconstruct the direction of an occupant with an accuracy of 70.7% and uncertainty in distance measurement of 6.7%.

This paper presents an innovative multi-resident activity detection sensor network that uses the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signal emitted by tags worn by residents and passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors deployed in the house to locate residents and monitor their activities. This measurement system solves the problem of monitoring older people and measuring their activities in multi-resident scenarios. Metrics are defined to analyze and interpret the collected data to understand daily habits and measure the activity level (AL) of older people. The accuracy of the system in detecting movements and discriminating residents is measured. As the sensor-to-person distance increases, the system decreases its ability to detect small movements, while still being able to detect large ones. The accuracy in discriminating the identity of residents can be improved by up to 96% using the Decision Tree (DT) classifier. The effectiveness of the measurement system is demonstrated in a real multi-resident scenario where two older people are monitored during their daily life. The collected data are processed, obtaining the AL and habits of the older people to assess their behavior.