Now showing 1 - 10 of 70
  • Publication
    Towards Holistic Activity Modeling and Behavioral Analyses
    As the age profile of many societies continues to increase, supporting health, both mental and physical, is of increasing importance if independent living is to be maintained. Sensing and, ultimately, recognizing activities of daily living has been perceived as a prerequisite for detecting tasks that people avoid or find increasingly difficult to perform, as well as being indicators of certain illnesses. To date, extensive research efforts have been made on activity monitoring, recognition and assistance in indoor scenarios, frequently through smart home initiatives. However, the scenarios outside of the home have not received a similar degree of attention from the research community. This paper advocates a need for platforms that enable activity recognition in a range of environments, thus enabling the construction of more complex yet realistic activity models and behavior patterns. The design of a prototype supporting an integrated approach to sensor data capture and activity model construction is proposed. The application domain is that of dementia.
      1085
  • Publication
    Managing diversity in practical ambient assisted living ecosystems
    Though the motivation for developing ambient assisted living (AAL) systems is incontestable, significant challenges exist in realizing the ambience that is essential to the success of such systems. By definition, an AAL system must be omnipresent, tracking occupant activities in the home and identifying those situations where assistance is needed or would be welcomed. Embedded sensors offer an attractive mechanism for realizing ambience as their form factor and harnessing of wireless technologies aid in their seamless integration into pre-existing environments. However, the heterogeneity of the end-user population, their disparate needs and the differing environments in which they inhabit, all pose particular problems regarding sensor integration and management.
      475
  • Publication
    Browsing the Sensor Web : Pervasive Access for Wide-area Wireless Sensor Networks
    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are almost exclusively regarded as data gathering entities. Various sensed data elements are captured and routed back to a central server for processing, visualization and interpretation. However, it can be realistically conjectured that scenarios will increasingly emerge that demand a facility for ad-hoc interaction with individual sensor nodes. Moreover, such interaction will occur in the physical environment in close proximity to where the sensor node is physically located. In this paper, the need for in-situ ad-hoc interaction is motivated. A methodology for facilitating such interaction is presented, and the implementation of a sensor browser is described.
      395
  • Publication
    Implicit interaction : a prerequisite for practical AmI
    Intelligent User Interfaces represent one of the three distinguishing characteristics of AmI environments. Such interfaces are envisaged as mediating between the services available in an arbitrary physical environment and its inhabitants. To be effective, such interfaces must operate in both proactive and passive contexts, implicitly and explicitly anticipating and responding to user requests. In either case, an awareness of the prevailing situation is essential – a process that demands a judicious combination of data and decision fusion, as well as collaborative and centralized decision making. Given the constraints of AmI environments realizing a distributed lightweight computational infrastructure augmented with a need to address user needs in a timely manner poses significant challenges. In this paper, various issues essential to enabling seamless, intuitive and instinctive interaction in AmI environments are explored.
      408
  • Publication
    Ambience & collaboration embedded agents in a human-centered world
    Supporting people in the pursuit of their everyday activities is a laudable objective and one which researchers in various disciplines including computing, actively seek to accomplish. The dynamic nature of the end-user community, the environments in which they operate, and the multiplicity of tasks in which they engage in, all seem to conspire against the desired objective of providing services to the end-user community in a transparent, intuitive and context -aware fashion. Indeed, this inherent complexity raises fundamental problems for software engineers as they frequently lack the tools to effectively model the various scenarios that dynamic user behaviour give rise to. This difficulty is not limited to exotic applications or services; rather, it is characteristic of situations where a number of factors must be identified, interpreted, and reconciled such that an accurate model of the prevailing situation at a given moment in time can be constructed. Only in this way, can services be delivered that take into account the prevailing human, social, environmental and technological conditions. Constructing such services calls for a software solution that exhibits, amongst others, diffusion, autonomy, cooperation and intelligence. In this paper, the potential of embedded agents for realising such solutions is explored.
      448
  • Publication
    Visualization in sporting contexts : the team scenario
    Wearable sensor systems require an interactive and communicative interface for the user to interpret data in a meaningful way. The development of adaptive personalization features in a visualization tool for such systems can convey a more meaningful picture to the user of the system. In this paper, a visualization tool called Visualization in Team Scenarios (VTS), which can be used by a coach to monitor an athlete’s physiological parameters, is presented. The VTS has been implemented with a wearable sensor system that can monitor players’ performance in a game in a seamless and transparent manner. Using the VTS, a coach is able to analyze the physiological data of athletes generated using select wearable sensors, and subsequently analyse the results to personalize training schedules thus improving the performance of the players.
      15367
  • Publication
    Sensor Web Interaction
    Ubiquitous sensing fuses the concepts of intelligent systems with ubiquitous computing in the development of novel sensor web applications, whereby the interaction of multiple disparate autonomous artefacts is a key requirement. In this paper, we present SIXTH, which is a middleware infrastructure for Ubiquitous Sensing that facilitates, and supports, the development and deployment of Sensor Web applications. SIXTH has been designed to be extensible, with provisions for user definable data retention policies, custom sensor data representations, and custom sensor node representations, whilst still providing a rich set of default behaviours. Within SIXTH, support is provided for the development and interaction of applications that incorporate both physical and cyber (virtual server side) sensors. With a view to supporting intelligent, in network, interaction policies, whereby sensor nodes must negotiate and coordinate their behaviour, the system has been designed to operate in conjunction with Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). AFME is a minimised footprint intelligent agent platform designed for resource constrained devices. It is based on the standard Agent Factory platform, which was developed for desktop machines, and is representative of a class of agent systems, which are referred to as Agent Oriented Programming frameworks. The paper discusses a ubiquitous mapping application that was developed using the middleware.
      1096Scopus© Citations 28
  • Publication
    Facilitating ubiquitous interaction using intelligent agents
    Facilitating intuitive interaction is a prerequisite for the ubiquitous computing paradigm in all its manifestations. How to achieve such interaction in practice remains an open question. Such interfaces must be perceived as being intuitive across a variety of contexts, including those of the hosting devices. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the device population raises significant challenges. While individual devices and the interaction modalities supported by, each satisfy the requirements of individual domains, integrating diverse devices such that the user experiences is perceived as consistent and intuitive is problematic. This chapter discusses and illustrates how intelligent agents may be harnessed for integrating a range of diverse interface and interaction modalities such that the ubiquitous user interface concept may be validated.
      1103Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Mobile multimedia : reflecting on dynamic service provision
    Delivering multimedia services to roaming subscribers raises significant challenges for content providers. There are a number of reasons for this; however, the principal difficulties arise from the inherent differences between the nature of mobile computing usage, and that of its static counterpart. The harnessing of appropriate contextual elements pertaining to a mobile subscriber at any given time offers significant opportunities for enhancing and customising service delivery. Dynamic content provision is a case in point. The versatile nature of the mobile subscriber offers opportunities for the delivery of content that is most appropriate to the subscriber's prevailing context, and hence is most likely to be welcomed. To succeed in this endeavour requires an innate understanding of the technologies, the mobile usage paradigm and the application domain in question, such that conflicting demands may be reconciled to the subscriber's benefit. In this paper, multimedia-augmented service provision for mobile subscribers is considered in light of the avail- ability of contextual information. In particular, context-aware precaching is advocated as a means of maximising the possibilities for delivering context- aware services to mobile subscribers in scenarios of dynamic contexts.
      690Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Service fusion in mobile contexts
    Service provision for mobile users poses several challenges for those managing enterprise information systems. Some of these are ubiquitous, for example, privacy and security. Others give rise to integration and interoperability issues. The agent paradigm, though offering potential in fixed networked scenarios, has not been seriously considered as a mechanism for incorporating mobile clients, primarily to their computational intractability on mobile devices. However, recent developments in agent and mobile computing technologies – both from a hardware and software perspective, have rendered the mobile phone a viable platform for agents. One implication of this is that agents now offer a viable platform for service delivery to mobile users. This chapter reflects on some of the pertinent issues necessary for this, including Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). The discussion is illuminated with a systematic description of EasyLife – a framework that harnesses the agent paradigm to construct and deliver services to mobile users.
      520Scopus© Citations 1