Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good

Population ageing is rising issues concerning the sustainability of older seniors assistance. A possible solution can be avoiding early retirement in nurse houses by providing the family and the senior(s) with an unobtrusive monitoring system, mainly based on motion sensors, capable of extending their independent living. The presented system processes the collected data to infer when the person exits and enters, his/her position inside the house, and the occupancy of the house areas. Such information is made available to the family through a set of purposefully designed graphical interfaces and prompt notifications. Preliminary results are satisfying, showing it is possible to restore Mutual Reassurance.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely used to interconnect the available medical resources and offer smart, reliable, and effective healthcare service to the elderly people. Health monitoring for active and assisted living is one of the paradigms that can use the IoT advantages to improve the elderly lifestyle. In this paper, we present an IoT architecture customized for healthcare applications. The proposed architecture collects the data and relays it to the cloud where it is processed and analyzed. Feedback actions based on the analyzed data can be sent back to the user. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been built to demonstrate its performance advantages.

Driving safety is of utmost importance in our society. The number of fatalities due to car accidents is still very high, and reducing this trend requires as much attention as possible. There are situations where the emotional conditions of drivers vary due to either reasons beyond their control, or because they decide to change their driving style. Hence, we consider that such frequent situations deserve more scrutiny. In this paper we designed an Android application able to monitor in real-time both physiological data from the driver and diagnostic data from the vehicle to study their correlation. More specifically, we study the connection between driving aggressiveness and heart rate. The vehicle diagnostic data is obtained using an OBD-II connector. Among the various non-invasive biomedical sensors available nowadays, in this work we focus on heart rate sensors, either packaged in belts or in smart watches.

This article provides food for thoughts elaborated by peer researchers who, basing on their studies and on current literature on relationships between Universal Design (UD) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), wish to share few key issues related to the challenges offered by the involvement of final users in designing product and services. Referring to approaches from different disciplines, key questions will be highlighted on which a debate could start, focused on the issue of promoting inclusion and how a close relationship among these different areas of knowledge can contribute to bridge the gap between the potential of new technologies and the real and diversified need by persons. Thus, actively contributing toward the empowerment of the community of belonging.

Applications supporting the independent living of people with disabilities are usually built in a monolithic fashion for a specific purpose. On the other hand, a crucial sector for the livability of urban spaces such as mobility is undergoing a deep transformation, heading towards flexible composition of standardized services. This paper shows how this approach allows to build better applications for people with specific needs, making them seamlessly integrated in the most modern approach to smart mobility.

Video consumption over VANETs will increase significantly bandwidth and will occupy an important part of the overall data traffic. To decrease the load on the VANET infrastructure and reduce bandwidth taken by video, high efficiency video codecs have been developed. In this work, a benchmarking of H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC and Google VP9 has been conducted by means of objective and subjective evaluations, assuming an urban VANET scenario. Considering a wide range of bit rates from very low to high, results show a clear advantage of HEVC with average bit rate savings of 27% when compared to VP9 and 49% when compared to AVC.

PIR (Pyroelectric InfraRed) sensors can be used to detect the presence of humans without the need for them to wear any device. By construction, the fields of view of the sensors are not uniform both in terms of vision space and of sensitivity. The aim of this work is twofold: to provide a probabilistic model of the sensors’ detection sensitivity with respect to the movement of the person and of his/her emission surface, and to identify the probability of detection within an area covered by multiple PIR sensors. This allows the computation of the coverage of the PIRs and their optimal arrangement that maximizes the probability of detection of the person.

Improving the usability conditions for all is one of the basic concepts underlying the enhancement of cultural heritage. Usability must be declined both in terms of physical accessibility and sensory-perceptive of the places of cultural interest, both as accessibility of contents of which they are witnesses.In this field, ICT technology can become very useful especially in terms of communication and thus effective before and during the visiting of a site.ICT technology is analyzed, also by examples, by identifying the limits, mainly due to the fact that in most cases the means are preferred rather than the goal, and the potential that is very promising if the same are designed to support undifferentiated users with the aim of transmitting cultural and not spectacular messages.

This study aimed at developing an engaging and informative application within first aid and CPR for people who are already certified in first aid. The paper outlines discussions within definitions of serious games, humor, gamification and engagement. Further we suggest specific elements for implementation and evaluation of humor and gamified elements. Two prototypes were developed: one with gamification elements and one without. A between-group design was used, in which two different groups tested one prototype each. Data were gathered through data logging, in-depth interviews (with use of a verbal numeric rating scale) and observations of participants’ facial expression. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) was used for analysis. The results showed very little difference between the gamified and non-gamified version. Important elements within gamification are focuses and thoughtfulness within the implementation of challenge, rewards, achievements, feedback and the overall visual theme.

Current technology allows the collection of data about cities by communities collaborating for the wellbeing of the city. The solution described in this paper is a wearable device ecosystem, called IOM (Internet of Mobility), consisting of a wearable device collecting environmental data through sensors to be visualized on a mobile or web platform. The paper focuses on the requirements analysis involving different types of target users and on the design of the wearable device.

It’s been many years since media began talking about the wonders of the IoT scenario, where a smart fridge checks the milk expiration date and automatically compiles the shopping list, but in the real life how many people have this smart fridge in the kitchen? Yet the interest around the IoT scenario is growing every day, so in this paper we try to figure out if IoT is science fiction or a real revolution. In particular, we describe in simple terms the IoT scenario, what can be done with current technologies, what are the main obstacles that limit the success and the wide use of IoT and we highlight directions that can make IoT a true reality.

Cognitive Stimulation aims to improve cognitive skills and quality of life for people with dementia by helping to reduce the functional disability resulting from damage to the brain. Recent studies suggest that this kind of treatment is effective, but it is not yet possible to demonstrate that leads to changes in behavior or in the patient’s lifestyle. The present work investigates the impact and the effectiveness of an information and communications technology platform able to allow the cognitive stimulation practice within a domestic environment. The platform is made up of a set-top-box connected to a TV monitor, a Microsoft Kinect sensor and a (optional) smart garment for clinical signs detection. Preliminary results, achieved after the tests performed on patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer, demonstrates that the aforementioned platform is a very useful tool able to increase the neuropsychiatric and cognitive state of the patient.

In the domain of smart homes, technologies for personal safety and security play a prominent role. This paper presents a low-complexity Android application designed for mobile and embedded devices, that exploits the on-board camera to easily capture two images of the subject, and processes them to discriminate a true 3D and live face from a 2D one. The liveness detection based on such a discrimination provides anti-spoofing capabilities to secure access control based on face recognition. The results obtained are satisfactory even in different ambient light conditions, and further improvements are being developed to deal with low precision image acquisition.

The increasing adoption of smartphones among older adults, especially in most developed countries, suggests they can be used not only for personal communications, but also in the framework of Active and Assisted Living solutions. This paper addresses two case studies in which a smartphone, when equipped with a proper software application, may operate as an inactivity monitor, and a drug management assistant, respectively. Activity monitoring is carried out by targeting the user’s interaction with the smartphone related to incoming, outgoing, and lost calls. In the latter case, an application processes images of drugs boxes captured by the smartphone camera, to automatically recognize the name of the drug, and inform the user about the corresponding prescription. Experimental results show this kind of approach is technically feasible and may provide satisfactory performance through a very easy interaction, thus supporting improved medication adherence by patients.

The wide diffusion of Online Social Networks (OSNs) presents several advantages, like the definition of simple tools for information sharing and spreading. However, OSNs present also some drawbacks, one of the most important one is the problem of privacy disclosures. Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs), which decentralize the control of the social network, have been recently proposed to overcome these issues. The decentralization of the control has issued several challenges, one of the main ones is guaranteeing data availability without relying on a central server. To define users’ data allocation strategies, the knowledge of the structure of the ego network and of the user’ temporal behaviour is required. Unfortunately, the lack of real datasets limits the research in this field. The goal of this paper is the study of the behaviour of users in a real social network in order to define proper strategies to allocate the users’ data on the DOSN nodes. In particular, we present an analysis of the temporal affinity and of the social communities based on a real Facebook dataset.

Motivated by the aim of developing a vision-based system to assist the social interaction of blind persons, the performance of some face detectors are evaluated. The detectors are applied to manually annotated video sequences acquired by blind persons with a glass-mounted camera and a necklace-mounted one. The sequences are relevant to the specific application and demonstrate to be challenging for all the considered detectors. A further analysis is performed to reveal how the performance is affected by some features such as occlusion, rotations, size and position of the face within the frame.

The development of visual skills is crucial in sustaining an adaptive cognitive and social development in children. The paper describes the result of a pilot study, involving a group of 4 years old children, with a set of serious games to improve the assessment and rehabilitation process in children with CVI. The system uses an eye tracker system to correctly measure the performances of the child and his/her capability to watch and touch a moving object at the same time and to perform ab cognitive visual decision making.

Persons with complex communication needs have difficulties in production and/or understanding of oral and/or written language. Software applications have great potential in speech rehabilitation, especially when providing visual feedback of the produced voice to users thus enabling better rehabilitation and increased user motivation. This paper presents software application for people with hearing impairment that has a form of voice controlled quiz with visual feedback of the users’ input voice frequency. The proposed application is evaluated through a case study of using it as an input for on-line application for hearing-aid evaluation.

Nowadays, the number of elderly people keeps growing and represents a non negligible part of the global population in the world. Consequently, healthcare and monitoring expenses destined to them become more and more important. Indeed, receiving ageing people in dedicated infrastructures with qualified staff costs a lot of money either for them and for governments. Also, a large number of elderly prefer continue to live in their own houses rather than joining those healthcare centers. However, they could be subject to domestic accidents and the latters are often detected after a while. This work aims to setup a efficient wireless video surveillance system to help elderly people who need a permanent assistance while they prefer still living in their houses. Our main objective is to early detect and transmit via Internet any abnormal behavior or domestic accident to assistance services. For this, small cameras embedded on wireless home deployed sensors have been considered. Moreover, a simple and lightweight routing protocol for an optimized data transmission have been proposed. The whole system was implemented on an Arduino based platform on which a set of experiments were conducted.

Computer network infrastructures constitute the critical backbone of every socio-economic ICT system. Consequently, they are becoming increasingly mission-critical in our society since they provide always-on services for many everyday applications (e.g., Cloud Data Centres), safety-critical operations (e.g., Air Traffic Control networks), critical manufacturing services (e.g., Utility networks and Industrial Control Systems), and critical real-time services (e.g., Financial Trading Systems). The resilience and ability of such systems to remain operational in the face of threats is therefore paramount; this needs to be done by taking remedial action and intelligently reshaping their resources. At the same time, current communication architectures do not allow for such informed and adaptive provisioning. In this paper, we introduce the concepts, principles and current research activities related to a new Situation Aware Information Infrastructure ($$SAI^2$$SAI2) framework being developed for next generation ICT environments.

Rural areas in economically developing regions often suffer from a slow and unreliable communication network infrastructure, which turns out to be a common bottleneck limiting access to content and services that promote economic growth. We report here how Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) can serve micro-business opportunities in such challenged locations. A DTN field trial conducted in 2015 in rural South Africa is examined to evaluate DTN architectures to best enable content distribution in areas where affordable communication channels are not fully available. The use-case in the trial was the support of micro-entrepreneurs that had been given access to simple cinema-in-a-backpack kits (battery, mobile projector and WLAN connection, plus software) that opportunistically connect to a DTN in the area. The network enabled the micro-entrepreneurs to order, receive, and screen movies at locations in under-served regions and in addition to invent and to execute micro-business activities around the screenings. The digital content was distributed to the micro-entrepreneurs by means of a DTN network with mobile infostations (wireless DTN-enabled devices) mounted on public transportation vehicles (commuter buses). In this paper, we present a six-month long field deployment that was organized in partnership with local institutions. We discuss the technical implications and make recommendations to support a socio-economic development in the under-served regions of rural South Africa.

Building centralized social networking systems has many drawbacks, e.g., lack of privacy, lack of anonymity, risks of censorship, and operating costs. As it is discussed in this article, an alternative approach is possible. A prototype system, named Blogracy, has been realized as a micro-blogging social networking system, based on well-known P2P technologies, such as DHTs and BitTorrent. In particular, this article presents the security architecture of the system, which relies on a key-based identity system and a scheme for attribute-based content encryption, with multiple authorities. Moreover, some empirical results obtained in test operations over PlanetLab are presented, comparing plain and I2P anonymized communications.

In this paper we propose a new approach based on a heuristic search for UAVs path planning with terrestrial wireless network tracking. In a previous work we proposed and exact solution based on an integer linear formulation of the problem. Unfortunately, the exact resolution is limited by the computation complexity. In this case, we propose in this paper a new approach based on a heuristic search. More precisely, a heuristic adaptive scheme based on Dijkstra algorithm is proposed to yield a simple but effective and fast solution. In addition, the proposed solution can cover a large area and generate a set of optimum and near optimum paths according to the drone battery capacities. Finally, the simulation results show that the drone tracking is sustainable even in noisy wireless network environment.

In the last decades, smart power wheelchairs have being used by people with motor skill impairment in order to improve their autonomy, independence and quality of life. The most recent power wheelchairs feature many technological devices, such as laser scanners to provide automatic obstacle detection or robotic arms to perform simple operations like pick and place. However, if a motor skill impaired user was able to control a very complex robotic arm, paradoxically he would not need it. For that reason, in this paper we present an autonomous control system based on Computer Vision algorithms which allows the user to interact with buttons or elevator panels via a robotic arm in a simple and easy way. Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm has been used to detect and track buttons. Objects detected by SIFT are mapped in a tridimensional reference system collected with Parallel and Tracking Mapping (PTAM) algorithm. Real word coordinates are obtained using a Maximum-Likelihood estimator, fusing the PTAM coordinates with distance information provided by a proximity sensor. The visual servoing algorithm has been developed in Robotic Operative System (ROS) Environment, in which the previous algorithms are implemented as different nodes. Performances have been analyzed in a test scenario, obtaining good results on the real position of the selected objects.

Preservation and restoration of ancient mosaics is a crucial activity for the perpetuation of cultural heritage of many countries. Such an activity is usually based on manual procedures which are typically lengthy and costly. Digital imaging technologies have a great potential in this important application domain, from a number of points of view including smaller costs and much broader functionalities. In this work, we propose a mosaic-oriented image segmentation algorithm aimed at identifying automatically the tiles composing a mosaic based solely on an image of the mosaic itself. Our proposal consists of a Genetic Algorithm, in which we represent each candidate segmentation with a set of quadrangles whose shapes and positions are modified during an evolutionary search based on multi-objective optimization. We evaluate our proposal in detail on a set of real mosaics which differ in age and style. The results are highly promising and in line with the current state-of-the-art.

Topological and structural properties of social networks, like Twitter, is of a major importance in order to understand the nature of user activities, for example how information propagates or how to identify influencing accounts. A deeper analysis of these properties may have a crucial impact on the design of new applications and of existing ones.In a social network there are different relations among nodes that can be defined and analyzed by keeping track of how the generated links evolve over time. So far, all evolutionary studies analyze the graph in a cumulative way, that is, once a link is inserted in a graph it is never eliminated [9, 12]. However, in social networks like Twitter interactions are more volatile, and after a period of life they should die.In this paper, we consider the Retweet Graph, where links are generated by the retweet action made by an user. The life of a tweet is limited in time, and it spans from the time it is generated, to the last time it is retweeted. To take into account the dynamics of Twitter users, we consider a model in which, when a tweet expires, we delete all the edges representing the retweet action relative to this tweet and all users corresponding to involved nodes become inactive, unless they are alive with respect to a different retweeting activity. In particular, we define a new version of the usual Retweet Graph, the Dynamic Retweet Graph (DRG): when a tweet has been retweeted for the last time all the edges related to this tweet are deleted. This allows to model the decay of tweet relavance in Twitter. To evaluate the structural properties of a DRG, we consider three different Twitter streams, derived by monitoring the Twitter flow on three different contexts: two of them are based on a specific event (the 2015 Black Friday and the 2015 World Series) while the third is the Firehose of the whole Twitter stream, filtered by the Italian language.We study the differences between the DRG graphs and the corresponding cumulative ones by comparing standard metrics for social networks, such as average distance, clustering coefficient, in-degree and out-degree distributions. The analysis shows an important difference between the cumulative graphs and the corresponding DRGs, both on the way they grow, and on the way the observed measures evolve.

MEP (Maps for Easy Paths) is a project for the enrichment of geographical maps with information about accessibility of urban pedestrian pathways, targeted at people with mobility problems and, in particular, with motor impairments. In this paper we describe the application to collect data along the paths travelled by target people and show experimental results.

Many studies show the effective positive impact of using computer technologies to support the lives of users with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), for simplifying interaction with other people, for organising daily activities, for improving relation with family and friends. Despite that, only a restricted part of the current websites is accessible for people with ASD. In this paper, we discuss a set of guidelines that should be followed by designers while developing websites or mobile applications for users with ASD. We review many of the existing websites and applications in order to check which comply with all, or parts of these guidelines. We finally highlight current common limitations and address new challenging research directions.

The upcoming availability of advanced Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) dedicated to the consumer market has lead to a great interest in the design and development of dedicated media, like e.g. immersive video games and movies. As a consequence, Virtual Reality is becoming more accessible to a wider audience, with a large number of potential applications and integrations with already existing smart technologies and devices. HMDs use stereoscopic visualization to enhance the sense of realism and immersivity in a virtual scene. However, a correct stereoscopic visualization requires an accurate consideration of different parameters related to the production and display stage. In this paper, we analyze the stereoscopic setup of a HMD, in order to highlight its main visualization characteristics in relation with the known issues and requirements of a correct stereoscopic visualization, and to establish some preliminary guidelines for an optimal creation of stereoscopic contents.

The aim of this Systematic Literature Review is to provide a heuristic overview on the recent trends of wearable technology and to assess their potential in workplaces. The search procedure resulted a total of 34 studies. In more details, 29 different types of wearable devices were obtained from the studies. Categorization revealed that obtained wearable devices were used for monitoring: 18 types (e.g. for mental stress, progress, etc.), augmenting: 3 types (e.g. for data, images), assisting: 3 types (e.g. to uplift their work), delivering: 2 types (e.g. for vital information contents) and tracking: 8 types (e.g. sedentary behaviour). To sum up, though wearable technology has already gained momentum for personal use to monitor daily activities, our studies shows that it also has potential to increase work efficiency among employees, improve worker’s physical well-being and reduce work related injuries. Further work in terms of privacy, usability, security, policies, cost of devices and its integration to the existing system is required in order to increase the adoption rate of wearable devices in workplaces.

Traditional radio planning tools present a steep learning curve. We present BotRf, a Telegram Bot that facilitates the process by guiding non-experts in assessing the feasibility of radio links. Built on open source tools, BotRf can run on any smartphone or PC using Telegram. Running it on a smartphone has the added value that the Bot can leverage the internal GPS to capture the current coordinates. BotRf can be used in low bandwidth environments as the generated data traffic is very limited. We present an example of its use in Venezuela.

In the last decade, governments, municipalities, and industries have invested large amounts of funds on research on smart cities with the main goal of developing services to improve people’s quality of life. Many proposals focus on a Cloud-centric network architecture in which all the data collected from amyriad of sensors devices is transferred to the Cloud for processing. However, this approach presents significant limitations when faced with the formidable traffic generated by the Internet of Things and with the need for low-latency services. The deployment of IoT devices in compact groups, connected to the smart city network infrastructure by relatively powerful “gateways”, opens the possibility to depart from the centralized architectures and move the computation closer to the data sources. To this end, this paper proposes SPF, a new middleware solution that supports IoT application and service development, deployment, and management. SPF runs IoT services on capable devices located at the edge of the network and proposes a programming model that enables to take advantage of decentralized computation resources in a seamless fashion. SPF also leverages an information dissemination solution designed for constrained network environments and adopts Value-of-Information based methods to prioritize transmission of essential information.

Safety enhancement is the main objective to pursue through the exploitation of connected vehicles. To this aim, the exchange of periodic beacon messages through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is essential to guarantee a timely and reliable alert, whatever is the targeted safety application. In this paper, we focus on beaconing in vehicular networks and we evaluate the reliability of beacons exchange between vehicles in realistic urban scenarios. Specifically, IEEE 802.11p, which is the actual standard de facto for vehicular communications, is considered as radio access technology and the impact of distance and obstacles on beacons reliability is evaluated. Results obtained through detailed simulations highlight the high impact of distance and obstacles, to be carefully taken into account in the application design.

Informatics is recognized as a fundamental discipline in education at all levels. It is also an indispensable subject for scientific and technical studies. Some abilities connected to informatics learning (computational thinking) has being considered to provide “fundamental skills for everyone”. Programming or, more generally, the ability of solving problems by algorithmic methods is one of these skills. In Italy, many scientific degree courses offer, at the first year, at least an introductory course in programming. Digital expertize and a basic attitude to computational thinking are in general expected. The present study, has been conducted at the University of Verona, in the context of the course Programming with laboratory of Applied Mathematics curriculum. We focus on first period of lessons, when the fundamentals of programming are introduced. Most of the students come from secondary schools, in particular Liceo, a secondary school with emphasis science or humanities, and where the role of informatics is in general not central. So, an academic course in programming can be a difficult task for students. In this paper, we analyze how the “cultural” background influences the learning of programming and the performance of students.

Smart devices are becoming more common in our daily lives; they are being incorporated in buildings, houses, cars, and public places. Moreover, this technological revolution, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), brings us new opportunities. A variety of navigation systems has been developed to assist blind people. Yet, none of these systems are connected to the IoT. The objective of this paper is to implement a low cost and low power IoT navigation system for blind people. The system consists of an array of ultrasonic sensors that are mounted on a waist belt to survey the scene, iBeacons to identify the location, and a Raspberry Pi to do the data processing. The Raspberry Pi uses the ultrasonic sensors to detect the obstacles, and provide audio cues via a Bluetooth headset to the user. iBeacons will be deployed at different locations with each having a unique ID. In the cloud, there is a database for all the iBeacons attached with the corresponding information e.g. address and information about the place. The Raspberry Pi detects the iBeacon’s ID and sends it to the cloud, accordingly the cloud sends back the information attached to this ID to the Raspberry Pi that converts the text to audio and plays it via a Bluetooth headset to the user. Tests demonstrate that the system is accurate within the threshold radius and functions as a navigational assistant.

Economic growth in Europe has been, strongly associated with urbanization, overwhelming cities with vehicles. This renders mobility inside cities problematic, since it is often associated with large waste of time in traffic congestions, environmental pollution and accidents. Cities struggle to invent and deploy “smart” solutions in the domain of urban mobility, so as to offer innovative services to citizens and visitors and improve the overall quality of life. In this context, the paper discusses on the basic challenges that cities face when trying to enable smart objects, focusing on the particular area of mobility and presenting a capability – driven enterprise modeling approach towards enabling Smart Objects for Smart City Operations (SCO). Moreover, a process towards linking capability models to simulation ones is presented, trying to set the basis for effective SCO based on Smart Objects deployment.

In recent years, the growing prevalence of social networks makes it possible to utilize human users as sensors to inspect city environment and human activities. Consequently, valuable insights can be gained by applying data mining techniques to the data generated through social networks. In this work, a practical approach to combine data mining techniques with statistical analysis is proposed to implement crowd sensing in a smart city. A case study to analyze the relationship between weather conditions and traffic congestion in Beijing based on tweets posted on Sina Weibo platform is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach. Following the steps of raw dataset pre-processing, target dataset processing and statistical data analysis, analytic corpus containing tweets related to different weather conditions, traffic congestion and human outdoor activity is selected to test causal relationships by Granger Causality Test. The mediation analysis is also implemented to verify human outdoor activity as a mediator variable significantly carrying the influence of good weather to traffic congestion. The result demonstrates that outdoor activity serves as a mediator transmitting the effect of good weather on traffic congestion.

In this study, a video-games based training platform that aims to provide user-specific physical and cognitive tasks is developed so that children with Down Syndrome can continue their training autonomously at home. For this purpose, a set of video games which addresses physical activities (balance and feet coordination) and cognitive tasks (abstraction, memory and word-forming) are being designed and implemented. During the gameplays, center of pressure, brain activity and electrodermal activity measurements are done to identify the specific needs of the child and to tailor a training programme that addresses these difficulties.