Ubiquitous green computing techniques for high demand applications in smart environments

Ubiquitous sensor network deployments, such as the ones found in Smart cities and Ambient intelligence applications, require constantly increasing high computational demands in order to process data and offer services to users. The nature of these applications imply the usage of data centers. Research has paid much attention to the energy consumption of the sensor nodes in WSNs infrastructures. However, supercomputing facilities are the ones presenting a higher economic and environmental impact due to their very high power consumption. The latter problem, however, has been disregarded in the field of smart environment services. This paper proposes an energy-minimization workload assignment technique, based on heterogeneity and application-awareness, that redistributes low-demand computational tasks from high-performance facilities to idle nodes with low and medium resources in the WSN infrastructure. These non-optimal allocation policies reduce the energy consumed by the whole infrastructure and the total execution time.

Integration of multisensor hybrid reasoners to support personal autonomy in the smart home.

The deployment of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm requires designing and integrating user-centered smart environments to assist people in their daily life activities. This research paper details an integration and validation of multiple heterogeneous sensors with hybrid reasoners that support decision making in order to monitor personal and environmental data at a smart home in a private way. The results innovate on knowledge-based platforms, distributed sensors, connected objects, accessibility and authentication methods to promote independent living for elderly people. TALISMAN+, the AmI framework deployed, integrates four subsystems in the smart home: (i) a mobile biomedical telemonitoring platform to provide elderly patients with continuous disease management; (ii) an integration middleware that allows context capture from heterogeneous sensors to program environment¿s reaction; (iii) a vision system for intelligent monitoring of daily activities in the home; and (iv) an ontologies-based integrated reasoning platform to trigger local actions and manage private information in the smart home. The framework was integrated in two real running environments, the UPM Accessible Digital Home and MetalTIC house, and successfully validated by five experts in home care, elderly people and personal autonomy.

A Bayesian strategy to enhance the performance of indoor localization systems

This work describes the probabilistic modelling af a Bayesian-based mechanism to improve location estimates of an already deployed location system by fusing its outputs with low-cost binary sensors. This mechanism takes advantege of the localization captabilities of different technologies usually present in smart environments deployments. The performance of the proposed algorithm over a real sensor deployment is evaluated using simulated and real experimental data.

NFC based remote control of services for interactive spaces

Ubiquitous computing (one person, many computers) is the third era in the history of computing. It follows the mainframe era (many people, one computer) and the PC era (one person, one computer). Ubiquitous computing empowers people to communicate with services by interacting with their surroundings. Most of these so called smart environments contain sensors sensing users’ actions and try to predict the users’ intentions and necessities based on sensor data. The main drawback of this approach is that the system might perform unexpected or unwanted actions, making the user feel out of control. In this master thesis we propose a different procedure based on Interactive Spaces: instead of predicting users’ intentions based on sensor data, the system reacts to users’ explicit predefined actions. To that end, we present REACHeS, a server platform which enables communication among services, resources and users located in the same environment. With REACHeS, a user controls services and resources by interacting with everyday life objects and using a mobile phone as a mediator between himself/herself, the system and the environment. REACHeS’ interfaces with a user are built upon NFC (Near Field Communication) technology. NFC tags are attached to objects in the environment. A tag stores commands that are sent to services when a user touches the tag with his/her NFC enabled device. The prototypes and usability tests presented in this thesis show the great potential of NFC to build such user interfaces.

How network operators can enhance ambient assisted living applications through next generation networks

Within the technological framework of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), consumers are currently requesting multimedia services with simplicity of use, reliability, security and service availability through mobile and fixed access. Network operators are proposing the Next Generation Networks (NGN) to address the challenges of providing both services and network convergence. Apart from these considerations, there is a need to provide social and healthcare assistance services in order to support the progressive aging in the elderly population. In order to achieve this objective, the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) initiative proposes ICT systems and services to promote autonomy and an independent life among the elderly. This paper describes the design and implementation of a group of services, called “service enablers”, which helps AAL applications to be supported in NGN. The presented enablers are identified to support the teleconsulting applications requirements in an NGN environment, involving the implementation of a virtual waiting room, a virtual whiteboard, a multimedia multiconference and a vital-signs monitoring presence status. A use case is defined and implemented to evaluate the developed enablers' performance.

Generation of human computational models with machine learning

Services in smart environments pursue to increase the quality of people?s lives. The most important issues when developing this kind of environments is testing and validating such services. These tasks usually imply high costs and annoying or unfeasible real-world testing. In such cases, artificial societies may be used to simulate the smart environment (i.e. physical environment, equipment and humans). With this aim, the CHROMUBE methodology guides test engineers when modeling human beings. Such models reproduce behaviors which are highly similar to the real ones. Originally, these models are based on automata whose transitions are governed by random variables. Automaton?s structure and the probability distribution functions of each random variable are determined by a manual test and error process. In this paper, it is presented an alternative extension of this methodology which avoids the said manual process. It is based on learning human behavior patterns automatically from sensor data by using machine learning techniques. The presented approach has been tested on a real scenario, where this extension has given highly accurate human behavior models,

Mobile Indoor Augmented Reality. Exploring applications in hospitality environments.

Augmented reality (AR) is been increasingly used in mobile devices. Most of the available applications are set to work outdoors, mainly due to the availability of a reliable positioning system. Nevertheless, indoor (smart) spaces offer a lot of opportunities of creating new service concepts. In particular, in this paper we explore the applicability of mobile AR to hospitality environments (hotels and similar establishments). From the state-of-the-art of technologies and applications, a portfolio of services has been identified and a prototype using off-the-shelf technologies has been designed. Our objective is to identify the next technological challenges to overcome in order to have suitable underlying infrastructures and innovative services which enhance the traveller?s experience.

Smart Spaces and Smart Objects interoperability Architecture (S3OiA)

The presented work aims to contribute towards the standardization and the interoperability off the Future Internet through an open and scalable architecture design. We present S³OiA as a syntactic/semantic Service-Oriented Architecture that allows the integration of any type of object or device, not mattering their nature, on the Internet of Things. Moreover, the architecture makes possible the use of underlying heterogeneous resources as a substrate for the automatic composition of complex applications through a semantic Triple Space paradigm. Created applications are dynamic and adaptive since they are able to evolve depending on the context where they are executed. The validation scenario of this architecture encompasses areas which are prone to involve human beings in order to promote personal autonomy, such as home-care automation environments and Ambient Assisted Living.

An Internet of Things approach for managing smart services provided by wearable devices.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a fast pace with new devices getting connected all the time. A new emerging group of these devices are the wearable devices, and Wireless Sensor Networks are a good way to integrate them in the IoT concept and bring new experiences to the daily life activities. In this paper we present an everyday life application involving a WSN as the base of a novel context-awareness sports scenario where physiological parameters are measured and sent to the WSN by wearable devices. Applications with several hardware components introduce the problem of heterogeneity in the network. In order to integrate different hardware platforms and to introduce a service-oriented semantic middleware solution into a single application, we propose the use of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a bridge for guaranteeing interoperability and integration of the different environments, thus introducing a semantic added value needed in the world of IoT-based systems. This approach places all the data acquired (e.g., via Internet data access) at application developers disposal, opening the system to new user applications. The user can then access the data through a wide variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, computers) and Operating Systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, etc.).

A knowledge based framework to support active aging at home based environments

Information and Communication Technologies can support Active Aging strategies in a scenario like the Smart Home. This paper details a person centered distributed framework, called TALISMAN+, whose aim is to promote personal autonomy by taking advantage of knowledge based technologies, sensors networks, mobile devices and internet. The proposed solution can support an elderly person to keep living alone at his house without being obliged to move to a residential center. The framework is composed by five subsystems: a reasoning module that is able to take local decisions at home in order to support active aging, a biomedical variables telemonitorisation platform running on a mobile device, a hybrid reasoning middleware aimed to assess cardiovascular risk in a remote way, a private vision based sensor subsystem, and a secure telematics solution that guarantees confidentiality for personal information. TALISMAN+ framework deployment is being evaluated at a real environment like the Accessible Digital Home.

Evaluación del dispositivo Raspberry Pi como elemento de despliegue de servicios en el marco de las Smart Grids

La tendencia actual de las redes de telecomunicaciones conduce a pensar en un futuro basado en el concepto emergente de las Smart Cities¸ que tienen como objetivo el desarrollo urbano basado en un modelo de sostenibilidad que responda a las necesidades crecientes de las ciudades. Dentro de las Smart Cities podemos incluir el concepto de Smart Grid, el cual está referido a sistemas de administración y producción de energía eficientes, que permitan un sistema energético sostenible, y que den cabida a las fuentes de energía renovables. Sistemas de este tipo se muestran a los usuarios como un conjunto de servicios con los que interactuar sin ser tan sólo un mero cliente, sino un agente más del entorno energético. Por otro lado, los sistemas de software distribuidos son cada vez más comunes en una infraestructura de telecomunicaciones cada vez más extensa y con más capacidades. Dentro de este ámbito tecnológico, las arquitecturas orientadas a servicios han crecido exponencialmente sobre todo en el sector empresarial. Con sistemas basados en estas arquitecturas, se pueden ofrecer a empresas y usuarios sistemas software basados en el concepto de servicio. Con la progresión del hardware actual, la miniaturización de los equipos es cada vez mayor, sin renunciar por ello a la potencia que podemos encontrar en sistemas de mayor tamaño. Un ejemplo es el dispositivo Raspberry Pi, que contiene un ordenador plenamente funcional contenido en el tamaño de una cajetilla de tabaco, y con un coste muy reducido. En este proyecto se pretenden aunar los tres conceptos expuestos. De esta forma, se busca utilizar el dispositivo Raspberry Pi como elemento de despliegue integrado en una arquitectura de Smart Grid orientada a servicios. En los trabajos realizados se ha utilizado la propuesta definida por el proyecto de I+D europeo e-GOTHAM, con cuya infraestructura se ha tenido ocasión de realizar diferentes pruebas de las descritas en esta memoria. Aunque esta arquitectura está orientada a la creación de una Smart Grid, lo experimentado en este PFG podría encajar en otro tipo de aplicaciones. Dentro del estudio sobre las soluciones software actuales, se ha trabajado en la evaluación de la posibilidad de instalar un Enterprise Service Bus en el Raspberry Pi y en la optimización de la citada instalación. Una vez conseguida una instalación operativa, se ha desarrollado un controlador de un dispositivo físico (sensor/actuador), denominado Dispositivo Lógico, a modo de prueba de la viabilidad del uso del Raspberry Pi para actuar como elemento en el que instalar aplicaciones en entornos de Smart Grid o Smart Home. El éxito logrado con esta experimentación refuerza la idea de considerar al Raspberry Pi, como un importante elemento a tener en cuenta para el despliegue de servicios de Smart Cities o incluso en otros ámbitos tecnológicos. ABSTRACT. The current trend of telecommunication networks lead to think in a future based on the emerging concept of Smart Cities, whose objective is to ensure the urban development based on a sustainable model to respond the new necessities of the cities. Within the Smart cites we can include the concept of Smart Grid, which is based on management systems and efficient energy production, allowing a sustainable energy producing system, and that includes renewable energy sources. Systems of this type are shown to users as a set of services that allow users to interact with the system not only as a single customer, but also as other energy environment agent. Furthermore, distributed software systems are increasingly common in a telecommunications infrastructure more extensive and with more capabilities. Within this area of technology, service-oriented architectures have grown exponentially especially in the business sector. With systems based on these architectures, can be offered to businesses and users software systems based on the concept of service. With the progression of the actual hardware, the miniaturization of computers is increasing, without sacrificing the power of larger systems. An example is the Raspberry Pi, which contains a fully functional computer contained in the size of a pack of cigarettes, and with a very low cost. This PFG (Proyecto Fin de Grado) tries to combine the three concepts presented. Thus, it is intended to use the Raspberry Pi device as a deployment element integrated into a service oriented Smart Grid architecture. In this PFG, the one proposed in the European R&D e-GOTHAM project has been observed. In addition several tests described herein have been carried out using the infrastructure of that project. Although this architecture is oriented to the creation of a Smart Grid, the experiences reported in this document could fit into other applications. Within the study on current software solutions, it have been working on assessing the possibility of installing an Enterprise Service Bus in the Raspberry Pi and optimizing that facility. Having achieved an operating installation, it has been developed a driver for a physical device (sensor / actuator), called logical device, for testing the feasibility of using the Raspberry Pi to act as an element in which to install applications in Smart Grid and Smart Home Environments. The success of this experiment reinforces the idea of considering the Raspberry Pi as an important element to take into account in the deployment of Smart Cities services or even in other technological fields.

Building an ontology catalogue for smart cities

Apart from providing semantics and reasoning power to data, ontologies enable and facilitate interoperability across heterogeneous systems or environments. A good practice when developing ontologies is to reuse as much knowledge as possible in order to increase interoperability by reducing heterogeneity across models and to reduce development effort. Ontology registries, indexes and catalogues facilitate the task of finding, exploring and reusing ontologies by collecting them from different sources. This paper presents an ontology catalogue for the smart cities and related domains. This catalogue is based on curated metadata and incorporates ontology evaluation features. Such catalogue represents the first approach within this community and it would be highly useful for new ontology developments or for describing and annotating existing ontologies.