1,280 research outputs found
What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes
No full textAmbient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen
Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments
No full textIntelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement
Publishing LO(D)D: Linked Open (Dynamic) Data for Smart Sensing and Measuring Environments
No full textThe paper proposes a distributed framework that provides a systematic way to publish environment data which is being updated continuously; such updates might be issued at specific time intervals or bound to some environment- specific event. The framework targets smart environments having networks of devices and sensors which are interacting with each other and with their respective environments to gather and generate data and willing to publish this data. This paper addresses the issues of supporting the data publishers to maintain up-to-date and machine understandable representations, separation of views (static or dynamic data) and delivering up-to-date information to data consumers in real time, helping data consumers to keep track of changes triggered from diverse environments and keeping track of evolution of the smart environment. The paper also describes a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture. A preliminary use case implementation over a real energy metering infrastructure is also provided in the paper to prove the feasibility of the architectur
SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments
No full textThe emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur
Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments
No full textIntelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte
JEERP: Energy Aware Enterprise Resource Planning
No full textEver increasing energy costs, and saving requirements, especially in enterprise contexts, are pushing the limits of Enterprise Resource Planning to better account energy, with component-level asset granularity. Using an application-oriented approach we discuss the different aspects involved in designing Energy Aware ERPs and we show a prototypical open source implementation based on the Dog Domotic Gateway and the Oratio ER
Controllo neuromotorio in acqua nella scoliosi idiopatica adolescenziale
No full textObjective. To develop and ascertain the usefulness of a test performed in water to examine the neuromotor capacities of adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis. Study design. A cross-sectional study involving a control group of normal subjects and a subgroup of patients with clinically defined scoliosis. Location. A public swimming-pool. Population. Pupils from a State Secondary School in Asti (mean age 12 years); 70 subjects had adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (32 boys, 38 girls-12,5° Cobb) and 184 were normal controls (78 girls, 106 boys). Intervention. The test required the pupils to swim on their backs with their eyes closed. Evaluation. The deviation in degrees from the ideal straight line was measured when the swimmer had reached a distance of one metre perpendicularly from the initial lane. Results. The performance of the subjects with scoliosis was, on the whole, worse than that of the normal subjects; this difference in performance reached statistical significance when only female subjects were considered. In the clinically defined subgroup, the deviation from the midline was always towards the concave side of the principal curve. The test did not reveal a correlation with curve location; there were statistically significant differences based on magnitude of the scoliotic curves and gibbosity but there wasn't any direct correlation. Conclusions. Differences of performance between adolescential idiopathic scoliosis patients and a group of controls has been verified. Whether these are due to secondary biomechanical changes (less likely, according both to results and literature) or to damages of the neurological mechanisms of control of the spine is discussed. This is the first time these results have been obtained in relation to tests carried out in water
Mixed Kinematics and Camera Based Vehicle Dynamic Sideslip Estimation for an RC Scaled Model
No full textVehicle side slip angle is at the basis of many vehicle dynamics control systems. Many methods are available to estimate side-slip angle using on board sensors (usually accelerometers and gyros). The technical advances pertaining autonomous vehicles made an additional kind of sensor available: cameras. This study develops a mixed kinematic vision-based side slip angle estimation. The proposed algorithm merges the information of a commercial grade inertial measurement system, wheel encoders and information from a camera. The camera measurement are integrated in a Kalman filter observer. The paper implements and tests the approach on an instrumented RC scale vehicle, comparing the proposed approach against a kinematic based estimation. Experimental results show a decrease of a factor between 2 and 10 (depending on the type of maneuver) of the estimation mean squared error
Neuromotor control in water in adolescential idiopathic scoliosis
No full textObjective. To develop and ascertain the usefulness of a test performed in water to examine the neuromotor capacities of adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis. Study design. A cross-sectional study involving a control group of normal subjects and a subgroup of patients with clinically defined scoliosis. Location. A public swimming-pool. Population. Pupils from a State Secondary School in Asti (mean age 12 years); 70 subjects had adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (32 boys, 38 girls-12,5° Cobb) and 184 were normal controls (78 girls, 106 boys). Intervention. The test required the pupils to swim on their backs with their eyes closed. Evaluation. The deviation in degrees from the ideal straight line was measured when the swimmer had reached a distance of one metre perpendicularly from the initial lane. Results. The performance of the subjects with scoliosis was, on the whole, worse than that of the normal subjects; this difference in performance reached statistical significance when only female subjects were considered. In the clinically defined subgroup, the deviation from the midline was always towards the concave side of the principal curve. The test did not reveal a correlation with curve location; there were statistically significant differences based on magnitude of the scoliotic curves and gibbosity but there wasn't any direct correlation. Conclusions. Differences of performance between adolescential idiopathic scoliosis patients and a group of controls has been verified. Whether these are due to secondary biomechanical changes (less likely, according both to results and literature) or to damages of the neurological mechanisms of control of the spine is discussed. This is the first time these results have been obtained in relation to tests carried out in water
Esercizi di programmazione in C
No full textEsercizi di programmazione in C, proposti e risolti, utilizzati nei corsi di Informatica presso le Facoltà di Ingegneria del Politecnico di Torino
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