This work introduces ComfOnt, a semantic framework developed within the context of ambient assisted living, context awareness, and ambient intelligence Italian research projects. ComfOnt leverages knowledge regarding Smart Home inhabitants and their particular needs, the devices deployed inside the domestic environment (appliances, sensors, and actuators), the amount of their energy consumption, and indoor comfort metrics to provide dwellers with customized services. Developed reusing widely adopted ontologies, ComfOnt aims at providing inhabitants with the possibility of having personalized indoor comfort in their living environments and at helping them in scheduling their daily activities requiring appliances; in fact, the proposed semantic framework enables the representation of appliances’ energy consumption and the energy profile of the Smart Home, thus assisting the dwellers in avoiding power cuts and fostering energy savings. ComfOnt serves as a knowledge base for a prototypical application (DECAM) dedicated to Smart Home inhabitants; the architecture and the functionalities of DECAM are here presented.

The aim of this paper is to present an innovative tablet-based application with 360° videos for the motor rehabilitation of frail elderly, Bal-App. This app was developed for iPad and exploits the potentiality of 360° videos to improve balance in frail patients through several exercises with an increasing level of difficulty. The app includes 10 sessions to be played 3 times a week for 3 weeks. The results of the usability study are very encouraging, and patients are very interested in trying this app at home like a guide for the motor rehabilitation. Only few non-substantial adjustments before the clinical trial are planned.

In recent years, telehealthcare systems (TSs) have become more and more widespread, as they can contribute to promoting the continuity of care and managing chronic conditions efficiently. Most TSs and nutrition recommendation systems require much information to return appropriate suggestions. This work proposes an ontology-based TS, namely HeNuALs, aimed at fostering a healthy diet and an active lifestyle in older adults with chronic pathologies. The system is built on the formalization of users’ health conditions, which can be obtained by leveraging existing standards. This allows for modeling different pathologies via reusable knowledge, thus limiting the amount of information needed to retrieve nutritional indications from the system. HeNuALs is composed of (1) an ontological layer that stores patients and their data, food and its characteristics, and physical activity-related data, enabling the inference a series of suggestions based on the effects of foods and exercises on specific health conditions; (2) two applications that allow both the patient and the clinicians to access the data (with different permissions) stored in the ontological layer; and (3) a series of wearable sensors that can be used to monitor physical exercise (provided by the patient application) and to ensure patients’ safety. HeNuALs inferences have been validated considering two different use cases. The system revealed the ability to determine suggestions for healthy, adequate, or unhealthy dishes for a patient with respiratory disease and for a patient with diabetes mellitus. Future work foresees the extension of the HeNuALs knowledge base by exploiting automatic knowledge retrieval approaches and validation of the whole system with target users.

This work presents HoloHome, a Mixed Reality application that aims to provide a new means of interaction to control the Smart Home components while providing continuous support for the inhabitants, including older adults and people with limited mobility and cognitive skills. HoloHome integrates several technological paradigms such as Mixed Reality, Internet of Things, and Ambient Assisted Living to maximize the tailored domestic comfort for the Smart Home’s inhabitants while promoting their comfort, safety, and independence in performing daily activities. It is designed and implemented on Microsoft HoloLens, ensuring the connection of the Mixed Reality environment with the distributed network of domestic sensors through the WiFi-enabled microcontrollers to present an innovative method of interaction with the Smart Home and IoT network. Additionally, HoloHome provides unique services and assistive technologies mainly designed for older adults and people with short-term memory deficits to provide continuous assistance, support, and instruction for household activities. This paper conducts the assessment of HoloHome, where the proposed system's usability, cybersickness, and effectiveness are investigated. The usability of HoloHome is validated on a sample of healthy adults to highlight desirable modifications before further assessments of older adults and people with disabilities. This pilot study demonstrated a good level of perceived usability (71.5%) among healthy adults, leading toward the best possible adjustments prior to proposing the system to the more fragile users.