Advanced TeChnologies and PlatfoRm fOr Smarter ASsisted LivING

The main target of Acrossing project is to enhance the quality of life of older adults through the development of AAL technologies and tools for Smart Homes. ACROSSING will make a critical contribution towards an open smart home (SH) technology infrastructure by interlinking disciplines from sensor technology and integration, context inferences, and interaction, to service infrastructures, and considering key principles of social impact, security and privacy.

To do so, 15 early stage researchers (ESRs) will be educated in their PhD in one of the 4 following research areas that belong to this project:

• Sensing and monitoring technolgies.
• Context inference ad behaviour analysis.
• Personalisation and adaptive interaction.
• Open smart homes platform and service infrastructure.

In this technological project is particularly important the collaboration among different disciplines. The 4 aforementioned research areas make up 4 parts needed to develop 4 demonstrators based on real use cases, from the data gathering to the personalization and adaptation of interfaces and content based on the behaviour analysis. All this made trying to foster the services interoperability thanks the open platform and infrastructures.

The consortium of this project is very interesting and important. The consortium is made up by 36 European entities, between universities and companies. Among all of them, we can remark the University of Monfort (Leicester) because they are project co-ordinator and Philips as a well-known multinational private company. The Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) of China also collaborates in Acrossing.

Within Acrossing project, Isoin has the responsability to collaborate in the education and development of a PhD student in the are of personalisation and adaptive interaction. Isoin will work on the project “Semantic-based usage mining enabled personalisation for Smart Home based AAL”. As part of the PhD program, the research will do secondments all around Europe in entities specialized in distinct areas. This will foster and strecht the relation between researchers. Not only for the researchers but also it is a great opportunity to strecht relations between universities and companies.

To conclude, here you are a photo of the great family of Acrossing:

Due to the great advances and interest generated in e-Health projects, from the Isoin  I+D department we are working on adapting this new device to some of our projects, with the aim of offering the user the possibility of obtaining Its data of systolic pressure, diastolic pressure and heart rate.

For this, the first step has been the acquisition of the product, from which we can appreciate all its components:

It is a tensiometer compatible with Android and iOS that sends measurements to our Android application. This device has medical certificates on hypertension both European (European Hospital Georges Pompidou, Holland Leiden Hospital and ESH) and American (American Medical Group Association, FDA and AHA).

We are talking about the Withings Blood Pressure Tester, which provides an API for obtaining measurement results through the cloud. Which is even more interesting when it comes to providing the user with their own data in a more intuitive way.

The device works from the Withings application, which will be necessary for updating the user data for any of the e-Health projects applications. The user interface is quite intuitive:

We support in this way the incorporation of another body parameter to give the user another different category to improve the continuous care of his health.

Andalucía has been one of the 74 regions awarded with the title “Reference site” as a regional leader advancing innovation for active and healthy ageing across Europe. This reference sites are “ecosystems which comprise different players (including regional and/or local government authorities, cities, hospitals/care organizations, industry, SMEs and/or start-ups, research and innovation organizations and civil society), that jointly implement a comprehensive, innovation-based approach to active and healthy ageing, and can give evidence and concrete illustrations of the impact of such approaches on the ground”.

This awards were celebrated in the ‘European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing’ (EIP on AHA) http://ec.europa.eu/research/conferences/2016/aha-summit/index.cfm?pg=home. Awarded list can be seen here http://www.scale-aha.eu/rs2016-results.html.

Andalucía is present in the InnovCare Project with the participation of two SMEs, Wellness Telecom, the Coordinator of the project and ISOIN S.L.

This award shows the commitment of the Spanish partners and government in innovating and improving our elderly health and wellbeing.

The InnovCare project aims to contribute in Active and Healthy Ageing by creating an innovative collaborative platform in which elderly, friends, familiars, and caregivers can interact and monitor their status in a personalized, confidential and secure way, with the support of an active community.

Within the framework of SiGo Project, it has been identified some use cases such as M2M communications and vehicular communications. It is expected that this use cases are going to suffer an important evolution with the integration of new pre-5G technologies. Therefore, it is very important the correct modeling of this kind of devices because of along the third milestone of the project all the partners will collaborate in order to check the developments done previously. If it is necessary, Isoin will adjust these modelings to enreal the results.

By this time, the essential part of the development has been concluded. Among these developments we want to highlight the followings:

The migration to the most updated version of the simulator in order to correct some of the bugs in module we use in the SiGo framework.

Regarding the network energy efficiency, it has been developed a new module to evaluate the power consumption of the eNodesB. To do so, we have done a large amount of developments not only in the NS3 simulator but also in the numerical analysis program. The followed process has been very similar to the process followed to calculate the power consumption of the user equipments (UEs).

The module to evaluate the performance of the network is almost done. In this module we obtain the delay, the packet loss, the throughput and the jitter. Right now we are working on the presentation of this data to make it user friendly.

Finally, it is almost ready the user device modeling within the simulator. Thanks to this modeling it will be possible to simulate a huge variety of devices and due to the infinity of inner variables of the simulator, it will be possible to create simulation scenarios almost real.

 

PROYECTO Nº: ITC-20151298

Periodo: 2015 – 2017

The field of primary health care is becoming increasingly important. This is linked to the development of continuous health care by the population, who are increasingly concerned about their own well-being, through good habits, good diet and follow-up activities.

ISOIN, through its different e-Health projects, aims to facilitate the monitoring of people’s activity, as well as helping them to take control of their vital factors such as pulse, blood pressure or body weight.

To this end, the Department of Innovation and Development has carried out a study on the applicability and usability of the different devices capable of granting such measures, contemplating values such as communication, the form of access to data offered, price and comfort granted (from the battery life to the usability and size of the device).

In these projects we try to implement the concept of IoT (Internet of Things) in which we are dedicated to integrate different devices in order to make everything easier for the user, so that you only have to link your device to the application and start to enjoy all its parameters in the palm of your hand.

Similarly, we carry out these tasks based on Open mHealth-based modeling with the aim of improving interoperability with other medical and electronic systems or devices that can be integrated son.

It can be said that, at ISOIN we are proud to be part of these eHealth projects, contributing our small grain to the improvement of the provision of health services, supporting from the outset the promotion of continuous health care as a method of transportation to a healthy society that cares about the state of your health not only when they are sick.

Consistent exercise and proper nutrition play a vital role in your ability to maintain your overall health and quality of life.

A balanced diet includes eating the right amount of calories and nutrients to maintain a healthy weight.  Your body needs quality fuel and proper maintenance to function optimally; nutrition and exercise help meet these requirements.

Physical activity is any body movement that works your muscles and requires more energy than resting. People of all shapes and sizes and abilities can benefit from being physically active. Some physical activity is better than none and the more you do the more benefits you gain.

Nutrition is the intake of food, considered in relation to the body’s dietary needs. Nutrition plays a major part in physical activity because it influences how you perform. If you do not have the adequate nutrition you cannot perform as well if you adequately fuel.

Eating healthy and being active have similar effects on our health.  These include:

• Reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and some cancers and associated disabilities
• Prevent weight gain and/or promote weight loss
• Improve overall well-being

Being active can also improve your personal appearance, encourage fun with family and friends, maintain the ability to live independently, and enhance fitness for sports. 

In the Wellbeing project, we aim to reach all this benefits by tracking the physical activity and making meal recommendations based on the tracked activity

Nowadays the study of the performance of communications networks is an important task in order to establish policies that aim to the maximization of the network efficiency in very diverse fields.

Isoin is currently developing a useful tool the evaluate the performance of the communications. This evaluation is made from an energetic and from a quality of service point of view.

To the improvement of the simulator, it is scheduled not only the development of new functionalities related to HetNets, IoT device models and mobility scenarios, but also the evaluator module. Nowadays, with the evaluator module we can evaluate the energetic performance of the communications from the user equipment point of view, now the new evaluator module will add the power consumption of eNodeBs and a completely new subsystem for the evaluation of the Quality of Service. To evaluate the performance it will be used Key Performance Indicators such as packet loss, packet delay, throughput, jitter…

We can divide the structure of the tool in two different modules. The network simulator NS3 with its LTE/LTE-A communications module LENA. This network simulator runs under a free software licence and uses C++ as coding language. On the other hand, it is used a numerical calculation program in which the traces from the network simulator are processed. In addition, the whole environment is automatized thanks to Bash scripting.

To sum up, the development of this tool is important to Isoin because it gives value to the quality of the work already done in previous projects.

The target of all this development is to get a useful and complete tool for the evaluation of the performance of mobile communications.

Recommender systems are very present in our daily life but go unnoticed: they help us decide which product we should  buy, which hotel we should choose to go on holidays or which movie we should watch at weekends. You can learn more about them by Netflix recommender system here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/17/11030200/netflix-new-recommendation-system-global-regional.

 

ISOIN is researching these systems and learning their methods, algorithms and details of recommendations. Currently our team innovates on creative ideas and new ways to approach these systems. The ideas which we are working are mainly based on mathematical knowledge that we could apply into this new technology. In a curious way, we can perform many different techniques: from the equivalence relations (abstract algebra), classic geometry and  planes, through artificial intelligence and machine learning. We are going to continue working on these interesting systems in order to get new useful techniques to make recommendations.

 

El objetivo principal de la línea HCI (Human computer interaction) es desarrollar un sistema para ayudar a todo tipo de usuarios que trabajan en ambientes computerizados, a facilitar su adaptación a nuevas técnologias mediante el estudio y desarrollo de soluciones que faciliten el uso de sistemas de informacion, asistiéndoles a mantener e incluso aumentando su eficiciencia y eficacia en su lugar de trabajo u ocio. En particular, los desarrollos internos de ISOIN en el marco de proyectos de innovación europeos ayudan a estos adultos a disminuir el nivel de estrés generado al usar nuevas aplicaciones desconocidas, en particular en personas de edad más avanzada donde aparece una dificultad añadida por la eventual degradación de la memoria  y a la disminución progresiva de las facultades de aprendizaje que se da debido al proceso natural del envejecimiento. El sistema de ayuda al aprendizaje de ISOIN provee de  recomendaciones sobre bienestar y descansos basados en el calculo realizado por medio de algoritmos de inteligencia artificial y análisis de comportamiento, apoyado por la información extraída de sensores  como ratón, teclado, seguidor de posicionamiento de ojos y demás herramientes disponibles según la aplicación, que aportan datos fisiológicos en tiempo real combinado con el perfil personalizado de salud de los adultos almacenado en el sistema. El sistema provee a su vez, de interfaces adaptables según las características cognitivas del usuario, siendo fácilmente instalable en cualquier equipo.

Ademas el sistema de ayuda al aprendizaje de ISOIN, es capaz de detectar tareas y acciones específicas que el usuario este realizando y mostrar ayuda paso a paso o en forma de videos en caso de detectar un problema en su ejecución. ISOIN es por tanto un socio técnico clave en cualquier proyecto en el que se desarrollen técnicas de mejora del estado del arte de asistencia en la interacción hombre máquina

 

ISOIN investigates and performs projects about eHealth trying to promote and develop solutions to the current needs of the society. The SOPHIA project – Senior Occupation after Profession: Intriguing Habit Adults– in which ISOIN colaborates aims to create a network the core of which will be senior adults after retirement who would like to continue offering their skills. Some of the network branches will be companies and enterprises that would require knowledge and expertise of the seniors, or individuals who could use their help. This network will bring in contact the senior adults with any other group of persons who suffer information or knowledge of the senior experts, always in a friendly and efficient environment.

 
ISOIN is one of the partners responsible for developing technical part of the project. To perform our targets, our team is developing web platform that will be used by each user in order to bring in contact with other people who also use it. On this platform, all components of the study and development of the project are performing known technologies (Java development) and innovation ideas and algorithms.

Every SOPHIA development is performed taking into account needs and comforts of platform users. This task can be efficient through european partners participation and evaluation during the different phases of the project with assessments and demands of end users.

This project about eHealth is from AAL. You could find more information here:  http://sophia-aal.eu/