The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

The objective of this work is to detect Alzheimer’s disease using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. For this, we use a three-dimensional densenet-121 architecture. With the use of only freely available tools, we obtain good results: a deep neural network showing metrics of 87% accuracy, 87% sensitivity (micro-average), 88% specificity (micro-average), and 92% AUROC (micro-average) for the task of classifying five different classes (disease stages). The use of tools available for free means that this work can be replicated in developing countries.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), various interconnected objects can be used to improve the collection and the process of vital signs with partially or fully automatized methods in smart hospital environment. The vital signs data are used to evaluate patient health status using heuristic approaches, such as the early warning scoring (EWS) approach. Several applications have been proposed based on the early warning scores approach to improve the recognition of patients at risk of deterioration. However, there is a lack of efficient tools that enable a personalized monitoring depending on the patient situations. This paper explores the publish-subscribe pattern to provide a self-adaptative early warning score system in smart hospital context. We propose an adaptative configuration of the vital sings monitoring process depending on the patient health status variation and the medical staff decisions.

In recent years, many technologies were racing to deliver the best service for human being. Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies made birth to the notion of smart infrastructures such as smart grid, smart factories or smart hospitals. These infrastructures rely on interconnected smart devices collecting real-time data in order to improve existing procedures and systems capabilities. A critical issue in smart infrastructures is the information protection which may be more valuable than physical assets. Therefore, it is extremely important to detect and deter any attacks or breath to the network system for information theft. One of these attacks is the rank attack that is carried out by an intruder node in order to attract legitimate traffic to it, then steal personal data of different persons (both patients and staffs in hospitals). In this paper, we propose an anomaly based rank attack detection system against an IoT network using Support Vector Machines. As a use case, we are interested in the healthcare sector and in particular in smart hospitals which are multifaceted with many challenges such as service resilience, assets interoperability and sensitive information protection. The proposed intrusion detection system (IDS) is implemented and evaluated using Conticki Cooja simulator. Results show a high detection accuracy and low false positive rates.

Nowadays, remote healthcare monitoring systems (RHMS) are attracting patients, doctors and caregivers. RHMS reduces the number of unessential hospitalizations by providing the required healthcare services for patients at home. Furthermore, continuous health monitoring using RHMS is a hopeful solution for elderly people suffering from chronic diseases. RHMS is in general three tiers architecture where the first tier uses intelligent wearable sensors to gather physiological signs. The majority of wearable sensors constructors commercialized sensing devices with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication interfaces, which lead to the development of diverse RHMS deploying BLE communication interfaces for physiological patient data gathering. In this paper, we introduce the basic concepts related to RHMS design and development. Besides that, we focus our investigation on the BLE communication protocol used in the healthcare context and its configuration to sense several physiological data. Also, we highlight the different steps enabling reading sensed data on mobile application.

The architectures of software systems are becoming more complex, large, and dynamic. The design of these architectures allows architects to master building complex software systems. But, their informal description, may give rise to ambiguity, their understanding becomes more and more difficult and leads to the incorrect implementation of these software systems. There are many solutions allowing software architecture design. In this paper, we use software design patterns as a solution. This is due to their reusable software elements. Our principal objective is to propose other alternatives to the informal visual description of software architectures. In past work, we have studied Service Oriented Architectures. We used SOA design patterns with standard formal notations. This work is a continuation to the past one. We apply our approach on design patterns for the Internet of Things. We introduce a refinement-based approach for modeling IoT design patterns. It takes advantage of graphical modeling and formal method. It is organized around two main axes. The first axis is to provide modeling solutions in conformance with the UML standard language. The second axis covers the general specification of design pattern models with the Event-B method. As a result, we propose a design support tool for IoT architectures based on IoT design patterns. It allows modeling of correct-by-design software systems.

Hypo-vigilance detection is becoming an important active research areas in the biomedical signal processing field. For this purpose, electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most common modalities in drowsiness and awakeness detection. In this context, we propose a new EEG classification method for detecting fatigue state. Our method makes use of a and awakeness detection. In this context, we propose a new EEG classification method for detecting fatigue state. Our method makes use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. We define an experimental protocol using the Emotiv EPOC+ headset. After that, we evaluate our proposed method on a recorded and annotated dataset. The reported results demonstrate high detection accuracy (93%) and indicate that the proposed method is an efficient alternative for hypo-vigilance detection as compared with other methods.

Ballistocardiogram signals describe the mechanical activity of the heart. It can be measured by an intelligent mattress in a totally unobtrusive way during periods of rest in bed or sitting on a chair. The BCG signals are highly vulnerable to artefacts such as noise and movement making useful information like respiratory activities difficult to extract. The purpose of this study is to investigate a classification method to distinguish between seven types of respiratory activities such as normal breathing, cough and hold breath. We propose a feature selection method based on a spectral analysis namely spectral flatness measure (SFM) and spectral centroid (SC). The classification is carried out using the nearest neighbor classifier. The proposed method is able to discriminate between the seven classes with the accuracy of 94% which shows its usefulness in context of Telemedicine.

Using Reflectance Confocal Microscopy (RCM) for lentigo diagnosis is today considered essential. Indeed, RCM allows fast data acquisition with a high spatial resolution of the skin. In this paper, we use a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform RCM image classification in order to detect lentigo. The proposed method relies on an InceptionV3 architecture combined with data augmentation and transfer learning. The method is validated on RCM data and shows very efficient detection performance with more than 98% of accuracy.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a health-threatening condition, which is a violation of the heart rhythm that can lead to heart-related complications. Remarkable interest has been given to ECG signals analysis for AF detection in an early stage. In this context, we propose an artificial neural network ANN application to classify ECG signals into three classes, the first presents Normal Sinus Rhythm NSR, the second depicts abnormal signal with Atrial Fibrillation (AF) and the third shows noisy ECG signals. Accordingly, we achieve 93.1% accuracy classification results, 95.1% of sensitivity, 90.5% of specificity and 98%. Furthermore, we yield a value of zero error and a low value of cross entropy, which prove the robustness of the proposed ANN model architecture. Thus, we outperform the state of the art by achieving high accuracy classification without pre-processing step and without high level of feature extraction, and then we enable clinicians to determine automatically the class of each patient ECG signal.

In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised method for the parcellation of the Corpus Callosum (CC) from MRI images. Since there are no visible landmarks within the structure that explicit its parcels, non-geometric CC parcellation is a challenging task especially that almost of proposed methods are geometric or data-based. In fact, in order to subdivide the CC from brain sagittal MRI scans, we adopt the probabilistic neural network as a clustering technique. Then, we use a cluster validity measure based on the maximum entropy (Vmep) to obtain the optimal number of classes. After that, we obtain the isolated CC that we parcel automatically using SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) as superpixel segmentation technique. The obtained results on two challenging public datasets prove the performance of the proposed method against geometric methods from the state of the art. Indeed, as best as we know, it is the first work that investigates the validation of a CC parcellation method on ground-truth datasets using many objective metrics.

Smart environments and technology used for elder care, increases independent living time and cuts long-term care costs. A key requirement for these systems consists in detecting and informing about abnormal behavior in users’routines. In this paper, our objective is to automatically observe the elderly behavior over time and detect anomalies that may occur on the long term. Therefore, we propose a learning method to formalize a normal behavior pattern for each elderly people related to his Activities of Daily Living (ADL). We also adopt a temporal similarity score between activities that allows to detect behavior changes over time. In change behavior period we focus on each activity to detect anomalies. A use case with real datasets are promising.

Aging often involves a significant change in roles and social positions. The greatest health risk for seniors is the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle that causes isolation, depression, and many diseases. However, convincing an older adult to regularly do physical activities is not generally a simple mission.This paper proposes a personalized and contextualized persuasion system to promote physical activities for older adults. In fact, our approach considers the personal and health profile of the older adult. It also considers different context parameters (context-awareness). This intelligence is guaranteed thanks to the use of the semantic modeling and reasoning, which from different types of information would be able to decide the best moment to trigger notifications from our persuasive system to the participating older adults.

We present the grounding approach, deployment and preliminary validation of the elementary devised model of physical well-being in urban environments, summarizing the heterogeneous personal Big Data (on physical activity/exercise, walking, cardio-respiratory fitness, quality of sleep and related lifestyle and health habits and status, continuously collected for over a year mainly through wearable IoT devices and survey instruments in 7 global testbed cities) into 5 composite domain indicators/indexes convenient for interpretation and use in predictive public health and preventive interventions. The approach is based on systematized comprehensive domain knowledge implemented through range/threshold-based rules from institutional and study recommendations, combined with statistical methods, and will serve as a representative and performance benchmark for evolution and evaluation of more complex and advanced well-being models for the aimed predictive analytics (incorporating machine learning methods) in subsequent development underway.

A simulation tool that supports developers to build scenarios automatically in multiple simulation platforms is proposed. As an essential part of this simulator, this study proposed an activity schedule generator to mimic the daily life of elderly people living alone. This generator outperforms existing methods of activity schedule planning in three aspects: 1) it is adaptive to the layout of a simulated smart house; 2) there is no unspecified time in the timeline of generated schedules; and 3) it generates stable, but not tedious schedules for a number of days. A real-time location data generator is proposed to convert generated schedules to simulated real-time location data of the resident, and a proposed interface converts these simulated location data to simulated records of virtual passive infrared (PIR) sensors, which can be used to optimize placement of PIR sensors in a smart house.

Wrist-based fall detection system provides a very comfortable and multi-modal healthcare solution, especially for elderly risking falls. However, the wrist location presents a very challenging and unstable spot to distinguish falls among other daily activities. In this paper, we propose a Supervised Dictionary Learning approach for wrist-based fall detection. Three Dictionary learning algorithms for classification are invoked in this study, namely SRC, FDDL, and LRSDL. To extract the best descriptive representation of the signal data we followed different preprocessing scenarios based on accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. A considerable overall performance was obtained by the SRC algorithms reaching respectively 99.8%, 100%, and 96.6% of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity using raw data provided by a triaxial accelerometer, accordingly overthrowing previously proposed methods for wrist placement.

The average of global life expectancy at birth was 72 years in 2016 [1], however, the global healthy life expectancy at birth was only 63.3 years in the same year, 2016 [2]. Living a long life is not any more as challenging as assuring active and associated life [25]. We propose in this paper an IoT based holistic remote health monitoring system for chronically ill and elderly patients. It supports smart clinical decision help and prediction. The patient heterogeneous vital signs and contexts gathered from wore and surrounding sensors are semantically simplified and modeled via a validated ontology composed by FOAF (Friend of a Friend), SSN (Semantic Sensors Network)/SOSA (Sensor, Observation, Sample and Actuator) and ICNP (International Classification Nursing Practices) ontologies. The reasoner engine is based on a scalable set of inference rules cohesively integrated with a ML (Machine Learning) algorithm to ensure predictive analytic and preventive personalized health services. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed system.

The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the use of a mobile health smartphone application (app) to improve the mental health of youth between the ages of 14–25 years, with symptoms of anxiety/depression. This project includes 115 youth who are accessing outpatient mental health services at one of three hospitals and two community agencies. The youth and care providers are using eHealth technology to enhance care. The technology uses mobile questionnaires to help promote self-assessment and track changes to support the plan of care. The technology also allows secure virtual treatment visits that youth can participate in through mobile devices. This longitudinal study uses participatory action research with mixed methods. The majority of participants identified themselves as Caucasian (66.9%). Expectedly, the demographics revealed that Anxiety Disorders and Mood Disorders were highly prevalent within the sample (71.9% and 67.5% respectively). Findings from the qualitative summary established that both staff and youth found the software and platform beneficial.

The rapid proliferation and miniaturization of the wireless and embedded devices has led to the invasion of the Internet of Things in many domains and has reached the healthcare sector to form what is called the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) . The growing number of the applications in the Internet of Healthcare Things as well as the overwhelming number of heterogeneous medical devices that should interact in this network has put the researchers and developers in front of lot of challenges: How to facilitate the implementation of the various healthcare applications? And how to ease the integration of new devices and make their interoperation a transparent task for the developers? To fulfill these requirements, lot of middleware have been proposed. In this paper we provide a complete study on the existing middleware for IoHT and specify their applications, we propose a taxonomy for them and we present their main advantages and drawbacks.

According to Knight, uncertainty signifies deviations from the expected states, which prevent us from the use of any probability for the determination of a result for a given action or decision [1]. This paper describes the phenomenon of uncertainty in the face of technological megatrends and challenges associated with them. The article focuses on the analysis of the uncertainty in one of the most important technology trends – the Internet of Things (IoT) – on the example of Healthcare. The right decisions are not always equivalent to good results. Sometimes, the decision taken in accordance with general rules brings worse results than the one who breaks them. Such a situation is possible as a result of the uncertainty accompanying the predictions of the future. In this article the concept of the IoT is treated as a big, complex, dynamic system with specific characteristics, dimensions. structures and behaviors. The aim of the article is to analyze the factors that may determine the uncertainty and ambiguity of such systems in the context of the development of Healthcare, and recommendations are made for future research directions.

Currently, the Internet has become a service hosting infrastructure through its interconnection of a very large number of heterogeneous objects, thus offering users several types of services implemented by different sectors. Although these services make people’s lives easier and provide them with a means of communication between their real and virtual worlds, they risk being a path of intrusion into their private lives, or in some cases an easy target for malicious individuals aiming to endanger human life. To avoid this, we have designed a secure e-health platform based on IoT that serves to monitor patients’ medical profiles remotely by collecting their medical records while ensuring their confidentiality and integrity.

Healthcare is among the sectors showing efforts in adopting cloud computing to its services considering the provided cost reduction and healthcare process efficiency. However, outsourcing patient’s sensitive data increases the concerns regarding security, privacy, and integrity of healthcare data. Therefore, there is a need for building a trust relationship between patients and e-health systems. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework, called Hybrid and Secure Data Sharing Architecture (HSDSA), to secure data storage in e-health systems. Our approach improves security in healthcare by maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data and preventing threats. In fact, in the upload phase, Multi-cloud environment is used to store Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) encrypted medical records. We adopt a Shamir’s secret sharing approach for the distribution of shares to different independent cloud providers. In the retrieval phase, the reconstruction operation is based on the (t, n) strategy. To check the requester identity and to prove the hash possession, we used a zero-knowledge cryptography algorithm, namely the Schnorr algorithm. The patient has a total control over the generation and management of the decryption keys using Diffie-Hellman algorithm without relying on a trusted authority.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) represents a network of implantable or wearable medical devices that continuously collect medical data about the patient’s health status. These data are heavy, sensitive and require high level of security. With the emergence of blockchain technology, researchers are focusing on using blockchain strategies to bring security to healthcare applications. However, such integration is very difficult and challenging due to the different requirements in these two technologies. We present in this paper a technical review of existing solutions applying blockchain technology on IoMT. We analyze these studies, discuss the proposed architectures and how they managed the integration challenges. The open issues regarding the application of blockchain over IoMT are also specified.

Blockchain technology has been emerged in the last decade and has gained a lot of interests from several sectors such as finance, government, energy, health, etc. This paper gives a broad ranging survey of the application of blockchain in healthcare domain. In fact, the ongoing research in this area is evolving rapidly. Therefore, we have identified several use cases in the state of art applying the blockchain technology, for instance for sharing electronic medical records, for remote patient monitoring, for drug supply chain, etc. We have focused also on identifying limitations of studied approaches and finally we have discussed some open research issues and the areas of future research.

Blockchain is a rich and attractive domain for researchers since it is independent of “third party” such as Bank or government. This “open” phenomenon does not respect all the security criteria such as private data protection and confidentiality; hence, we cannot trust this approach despite its contributions. Blockchain technology has gained considerable progress in recent years in fields such as e-health. The medical data contains personal and sensitive information that must be preserved. The current Blockchain systems suffer from serious practical limitations, e.g. poor performance, high-energy consumption and lack of confidentiality. On the other hand, Trust Execution Environment TEE is imperfect; it is based on the centralization of data. To avoid data centralization and its limitations, an approach based on collecting the necessary data from distributed database is presented in this paper. Our goals are to protect the user’s privacy and to execute it in TEE combined with Multi-party computation MPC. We proof by security analysis that our new solution meets the fundamental criteria of security such as confidentiality and privacy.

The majority of the Internet-of-things (IoT)-based health monitoring systems adopt ontologies to represent and interoperate the huge quantity of data collected. Classical ontologies cannot appropriately treat imprecise and ambiguous knowledge. The integration of Fuzzy logic theory with ontology can effectively resolve knowledge problems with uncertainty. It considerably raises the accuracy and the precision of healthcare decisions. This paper presents a fuzzy-ontology based system using the internet of things and aims to ensure continues monitoring of diabetic patients. It mainly describes the ontology-based model and the semantic fuzzy decision-making mechanism. The system is evaluated using semantic querying. The results indicate its feasibility for effective remote continuous monitoring for diabetes.

Heart disease is considered as one of the major causes of death throughout the world. It cannot be easily predicted by the medical practitioners as it is a difficult task which demands expertise and higher knowledge for prediction. Currently, the recent development in medical supportive technologies based on data mining, machine learning plays an important role in predicting cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach to predict cardiovascular disease using different machine learning techniques such as Logistic Regression (LR), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoostM1), Multi-Objective Evolutionary Fuzzy Classifier (MOEFC), Fuzzy Unordered Rule Induction (FURIA), Genetic Fuzzy System-LogitBoost (GFS-LB) and Fuzzy Hybrid Genetic Based Machine Learning (FH-GBML). For this purpose, the accuracy and results of each classifier have been compared, with the best classifier chosen for a more accurate cardiovascular prediction. With this objective, we use two free software (Weka and Keel).

Nowadays, ubiquitous computing and mobile applications are controlling all our life’s aspects, from social media and entertainment to the very basic needs like commerce, learning, government, and health. These systems have the ability to self-adapt to meet changes in their execution environment and the user’s context. In the healthcare domain, information systems have proven their efficiency, not only by organizing and managing patients’ data and information but also by helping doctors and medical experts in diagnosing disease and taking precluding procedure to avoid serious conditions. In chronic diseases, telemonitoring systems provide a way to monitor the patient’s state and biomarkers within their usual life’s routine. In this article, we are combining the healthcare telemonitoring systems with the context awareness and self-adaptation paradigm to provide a self-adaptive framework architecture for COPD patients.

The annotation practice is an almost daily activity; it is used by healthcare professionals (PHC) to analyze, collaborate, share knowledge and communicate, between them, information present in the healthcare record of patients. These annotations are created in a healthcare cycle that consists of: diagnosis, treatment, advice, follow-up and observation. Due to an exponential increase in the number of medical annotation systems that are used by different categories of health professionals, we are faced with a problem of lack of organization of medical annotation systems developed on the basis of formal criteria. As a result, we have a fragmented image of these annotations tools which make the mission of choice of an annotation system by a PHC, in a well-defined context (biology, radiology…) and according to their needs to the functionalities offered by these tools, are difficult. In this article we present a classification of thirty annotation tools developed by industry and academia based on 5 generic criteria. We conclude this survey paper with model proposition.

The goal of this work is to make a contribution to the development of computationally efficient multirate Electrocardiogram (ECG) automated detectors of arrhythmia. It utilizes an intelligent combination of multirate denoising plus wavelet decomposition for an effective realization of the ECG wireless implants. The decomposed signal subband features are mined and in next step these are utilized by the mature k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier for arrhythmia diagnosis. The multirate nature substantially reduces the processing activity of the system and thus allows a dramatic decrease in energy consumption compared to traditional counterparts. The performance of the system is estimated also in terms of the classification performance. Obtained results reveal an overall 22.5-fold compression gain and 4-folds processing outperformance over the traditional equals while securing 93.2% highest classification accuracy and specificity of 0.956. Findings confirm that the proposed solution could potentially be embedded in contemporary automatic and mobile cardiac diseases diagnosis systems.

Several methods of brain image registration have been proposed in order to overcome the requirement of clinicians. In this paper, we assess the performance of a hybrid method for brain image registration against the most used standard registration tools. Most traditional registration tools use different methods for mono- and multi-modal registration, whereas the hybrid registration method is providing both mono and multi-modal brain registration of PET, MRI and CT images. To determine the appropriate registration method, we used two challenging brain image datasets as well as two evaluation metrics. Results show that the hybrid method outperforms all other standard registration tools and has achieved promising accuracy for MRI/X brain image registration.

In response to the researchers need in the bio-medical domain, we opted for automating the bibliographic research stage. In this context, several classification models of supervised machine learning are used. Namely the SVM, Random Forest, Decision Tree, KNN, and Gradient Boosting. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study between experimental results of full article classification and abstract classification approaches. Furthermore, we evaluate our results by using evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. We observe that the abstract approach outperforms the full article approach in terms of learning time and efficiency.

High frequency oscillations (HFO) from, MEG (magnetoencephalography) and intracerebral EEG are considered as effective tools to identify cognitive status and several cortical disorders especially in epilepsy diagnosis. The aim of our study is to evaluate stationary wavelet transform (SWT) technique performance in efficient reconstruction of pure epileptic high frequency oscillations, reputed as biomarkers of epileptogenic zones: generators of inter ictal epileptic discharges, and offhand seizures.We applied SWT on simulated and real database to detect non-contaminated HFO by spiky element. For simulated data, we computed the GOF of reconstruction that reaches for all studied constraint (relative amplitude, frequency, SNR and overlap) a promising results. For real data we used time frequency domain to evaluate SWT robustness of HFO reconstruction. We proved that SWT is an efficient filtering technique for separation HFO from spiky events. Our results would have an important impact on the definition of epileptogenic zones.

Recent research focus more and more on IoT systems and their applications in order to make people life easier and controllable. The main aim is to expand IoT applications and services into various domains while ensuring communication and automated exchange between them. Recent research handles many issues related to IoT especially implementation, modeling, and deployment. However, many challenges need more deep and thorough analysis especially in terms of flexible modeling, extensible implementation, with respect to the privacy issue. This work focuses principally on modeling IoT systems dedicated to smart healthcare case. We attempt to address the emergency service by initiating a modeling mechanism for Healthcare Management System (HMS) by using UML diagrams, and propose an appropriate access control in order to reinforce it. Then, we ensure the correctness of the developed HMS by relying on the verification and validation based on a formal analysis that showed significant results by using Alloy tool.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the critical subjects of research in health and human machine interaction fields in recent years. Algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), Decision Tree (DT) and many other algorithms were previously implemented to serve this common goal but most of the traditional Machine learning proposed solutions were not satisfying in term of accuracy and real time testing process. For that, a human activities analysis and recognition system with an embedded trained ANN model on Raspberry PI for an online testing process is proposed in this work. This paper includes a comparative study between the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), using signals produced by the accelerometer and gyroscope, embedded within the BlueNRG-Tile sensor. After evaluate algorithms performance in terms of accuracy and precision which reached an accuracy of 82% for ANN and 99% for RNN, obtained ANN model was implemented in a Raspberry PI for real-time predictions. Results show that the system provides a real-time human activity recognition with an accuracy of 86%.

Being able to recognize human activities is essential for several applications such as health monitoring, fall detection, context-aware mobile applications. In this work, we perform the recognition of the human activity based on the combined Weighted SVM and HMM by taking advantage of the relative strengths of these two classification paradigms. One significant advantage in WSVMs is that, they deal the problem of imbalanced data but his drawback is that, they are inherently static classifiers - they do not implicitly model temporal evolution of data. HMMs have the advantage of being able to handle dynamic data with certain assumptions about stationary and independence. The experiment results on real datasets show that the proposed method possess the better robustness and distinction.

Navigation is an important human task that needs the human sense of vision. In this context, recent technologies developments provide technical assistance to support the visually impaired in their daily tasks and improve their quality of life. In this paper, we present a mobile assistive application called “GuiderMoi” that retrieves information about directions using color targets and identifies the next orientation for the visually impaired. In order to avoid the failure in detection and the inaccurate tracking caused by the mobile camera, the proposed method based on the CamShift algorithm aims to introduce better location and identification of color targets. Tests were conduct in natural indoor scene. The results depending on the distance and the angle of view, defined the accurate values to have a highest rate of target recognition. This work has perspectives for this such as implicating the augmented reality and the intelligent navigation based on machine learning and real-time processing.

Older adults experience a disconnect between their needs and adoption of technologies that have potential to assist and to support more independent living. This paper reviewed research that links people’s needs with opportunities for assistive technologies. It searched 13 databases identifying 923 papers with 34 papers finally included for detailed analysis. The research papers identified needs in the fields of health, leisure, living, safety, communication, family relationship and social involvement. Amongst these, support for activities of daily living category was of most interest. In specific sub-categories, the next most reported need was assistive technology to support walking and mobility followed by smart cooking/kitchen technology and assistive technology for social contacts with family member/other people. The research aimed to inform a program of research into improving the adoption of technologies where they can ameliorate identified needs of older people.

Ambient systems owns some particular characteristics that makes their context awareness a sincere problem; they are composed of heterogeneous distributed devices, some of these devices may appear and disappear during operations. In addition, users interacting in these systems are themselves dynamic. Therefore, context-aware workflow management allows workflows to adapt dynamically according to the environment changes. Context information are complex and diverse which makes the modeling the key issue. This paper presents an approach to model context-aware workflows. First, we describe the workflow using Ag-LOTOS. Then, based on this description, we build the contextual planning system CPSw that allows the presentation of the context at each activity state.

Despite the silent effects sometimes hidden to the major audience, air pollution is becoming one of the most impactful threat to global health. Cities are the places where deaths due to air pollution are concentrated most.In order to correctly address intervention and prevention thus is essential to assest the risk and the impacts of air pollution spatially and temporally inside the urban spaces. PULSE aims to design and build a large-scale data management system enabling real time analytics of health, behaviour and environmental data on air quality. The objective is to reduce the environmental and behavioral risk of chronic disease incidence to allow timely and evidence-driven management of epidemiological episodes linked in particular to two pathologies; asthma and type 2 diabetes in adult populations. developing a policy-making across the domains of health, environment, transport, planning in the PULSE test bed cities.

We created an approach for a smart living platform called ForeSight which consists of different modules: a service engineering module, a Web of Things (WoT)-based Internet of Things (IoT) module and an artificial intelligence (AI) component. This paper describes how openHAB, a smart home middleware, is extended to fulfill platform requirements related to a successful interaction with the IoT module of ForeSight, more precisely, to add identity and access management (IAM) to openHAB and comply with European privacy laws.