SM4ALL: Smart Houses for home-care assistance
Roberto Baldoni Massimo Mecella
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Antonio Ruberti, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza
{roberto.baldoni,massimo.mecella}@dis.uniroma1.it
Abstract. SM4All project investigates an innovative middleware platform for inter-working of smart embedded services in immersive and person-centric environments, through the use of composability and semantic techniques for dynamic service reconfiguration. By leveraging P2P technologies, the platform is inherently scalable and able to resist to devices’churn and failures, while preserving the privacy of users as well as the security of the whole environment. This is applied to the challenging scenario of private houses and home-care assistance in presence of users with different abilities and needs (e.g., young able bodied, aged and disabled). This paper presents a brief overview of the high-level SM4All system architecture.
Keywords: smart homes,.
Project Presentation
Embedded systems are specialized computers used in larger systems or machines to control equipments such as automobiles, home appliances, communication, control and office machines. Such pervasivity is particularly evident in immersive realities, i.e., scenarios in which invisible embedded systems need to continuously interact with human users, in order to provide continuous sensed information and to react to service requests from the users themselves. Having the users at the centre poses many new challenges to the current middleware and service technologies for embedded systems, in terms of:
• dynamicity: sensors and services are no more static thus the overall distributed system (consisting of all the sensors and devices and appliances) need to continuously adapt on the basis of the user context, habits, etc., by adding/removing/composing on- the-fly basic elements (services offered by sensors/devices/appliances);
• scalability: in order to really immerse the users in the system, the number of sensors/devices/appliances could be huge;
• dependability: when users are at the centre of the environment, they heavily depend and thrust on the system itself, that should therefore be highly dependable;
• security and privacy: if users continuously interact with the system, the security of the overall invisible environment become crucial; therefore, the design of such a system should pay specific attention to privacy preservation, that should be built-in in the system, and not added-on later, as in current design practices.
These considerations require novel techniques and middleware technologies targeted to person-centric embedded systems (i.e., usable in immersive scenarios). Among the most widespread scenarios that require person-centric embedded systems, domotics and home-care assistance are particularly important in the current technological context. Domotics and home-care are the fields where housing (domus) meets technology in its various forms (informatics, but also robotics, mechanics, ergonomics, and communication) to provide better homes from the point of view of safety and comfort and care for elderly/disabled persons. Traditionally, domotic solutions were provided by single vendors with proprietary solutions. This is no longer true: today devices come from different vendors, have different hardware, network interfaces, and operating systems; they however need to interoperate. Users want to be able to have a unique view on all the hardware entering their home.
Therefore, one of today's challenges for the home is total interoperability and cooperation. The SM4All (Smart hoMes for ALL) project aims at studying and developing an innovative middleware platform for inter-working of smart embedded services in immersive and person-centric environments, through the use of composability and semantic techniques, in order to guarantee dynamicity, dependability and scalability, while preserving the privacy and security of the platform and its users. This is applied to the challenging scenario of private/home/building in presence of users with different abilities and needs (e.g., young able bodied, aged and disabled).
In particular, in the SM4All project P2P, service-orientation and context-awareness are merged in novel ways in order to define a general reference architecture for embedded middleware targeted to immersive scenarios, among which the domotics and home-care have been selected as showcases. The SM4All platform will offer specific features of scalability (with respect to the number of embedded services to be managed) and dynamicity (the capability of the platform to manage on-the-fly insertion/removal of (new) devices/sensors/appliances). By exploiting techniques from autonomic computing (self-* properties) and peer-to-peer systems, the services and the platform will offer such features directly built-in, and not as a subsequent add- on.
The project is now close to the middle of its life and we already have a detailed architecture and showcases that can be found in the SM4ALL web sites (http://www.sm4all-project.eu/). Moreover, the work has produced several scientific publications in forums of very different areas and scientific community. This show the truly interdisciplinarity of the SM4ALL approach. In the references, it can be found a short list of them.
Finally we want to remark that partners of the SM4All consortium have signed a cooperation agreement with Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI http://www.itri.org.tw/). The cooperation will couple the research efforts on smart home middleware developed within SM4All with home energy management system.
In this context, a research unit at ITRI will carry out the definition of a detailed energy consumption model based on the operation of smart appliances and embedded into the framework defined by the SM4ALL project and will set up a detailed
showcase. This will amplify the impact of SM4ALL technology also to the field of Smart Houses.
Acknowledgments. The authors wish to thank all the people participating to SM4ALL project.
References
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