Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
independent living applications for the elderly, such as analysing own health status,
obtaining position and location information, controlling the smart environment (e.g. air
pressure, temperature, humidity, etc.) and mentally and physically interacting.
Long-term health and health monitoring.
Viable methods for long-term monitoring
of health and wellbeing in real-life settings are being developed. This includes easy
wearability and management of personal wireless sensor networks, mobile phone-
centred data collection, signal processing, wellbeing history presentation for self-care,
and integration of wellness data with patient information databases.
Context sensing.
The context information (i.e. any information describing the
situation) can be used in different ways by different applications, e.g. for automatically
keeping a diary, for automatically adapting the user interface or user profile, and for
automatically recommending a service or information for the user. Sensors might be
embedded in mobile phones and their accessories, and sports computers. The key
challenge is first to transform the increasing amount of raw sensor information into
knowledge that is either usable for computer applications or directly human
interpretable; second, to combine data from many users and the environment into
higher-level group or area contexts.
Smart environments.
Smart environments identify embedded sensor and actuator
systems networked by wireless Internet, with the capabilities to sense, elaborate, and
communicate. They are conceived to be installed in many different environments, such
as homes, cars, factories, buildings, offices, shops, hospitals, open spaces, etc. In the
future, networks and end-systems will be merged together (Internet of Things) and will
integrate passive and intelligent sensing devices, to provide information about their
environment and their user, sensory-motor devices, to act based on their perception of
the environment, and pure actuators, to perform actions based on information gathered
by some other devices and/or background knowledge. In this sense, smart
environments are really suitable to integrate pervasive computing with pervasive
robotics, thus allowing the Internet to exchange not only information but also action. It
is expected that smart environments will be characterized by many research challenges
in the fields of embedded systems, Internet of things, mobile communications,
intelligent user interfaces, intelligent sensor networks, augmented cognition, and
ambient intelligence.
5.1.4.
Low power and sustainable sensors
Sensing applications, above all for wireless sensor network, are often limited by the
reliance on battery power. Since sensors are often very small and require little power, it
is expected that in future they might include embedded functionalities to efficiently
manage, save, harvest and transmit energy. In the last decade many efforts have been
done to design low power technologies (e.g. very low power devices) and algorithms
(e.g. sleep mode) to minimize energy consumption and make free-maintenance sensor
units. In future sensing technologies might include the possibility to capture energy
derived from external sources, such as vibration harvesting, solar cells, electromagnetic,
inductive power and piezoelectric insole, and store it in micro batteries or capacitors.
Other future R&D challenges are the development of smart systems for the
management of energy storage systems (charge and discharge algorithms, power
