Building IoT Services for Aging in Place Using Standard-Based IoT Platforms and Heterogeneous IoT Products

Study on the measurement of coupling and coordinated development level between China's internet and elderly care services and its influencing factors

BACKGROUND

With the intensification of China's aging population, the demand for elderly care services has become increasingly prominent. At the same time, rapid development of internet technology provides more convenience and possibilities for the elderly. However, the coordinated development between the internet and elderly care services still faces challenges. This study aims to measure the level of coupling and coordinated development between the internet and elderly care services in China, and analyze the influencing factors, in order to provide reference for promoting elderly care services.

METHODS

In this paper, the entropy method and coupling coordination degree model were used to measure the coupling coordination development index of the internet and elderly care services in China from 2012 to 2021. In addition, considering that the coordinated development between the two is affected by many factors, the Tobit model was used to analyze the main factors affecting the integration of the internet and elderly care services.

RESULTS

(1) The coupling and coordination of the Internet and senior care services is in its infancy, but the coupling and coordination of the two is on the rise, and there is still a lot of room for development in the future. (2) In terms of time scale, the coupling coordination development level between the internet and elderly care services in China has gone through three stages of "disorder recession-transition coordination-coordinated development". (3) In terms of influencing factors, government management ability has a more positive impact on the development of the integration of the Internet and senior care services, financial support, scientific and technological investment and the level of innovation play a mild pulling role, while the level of informatization to a certain extent restricts the level of integration of the Internet and senior care services.

CONCLUSION

In order to promote the coordinated development of China's Internet and senior care services, it is necessary to comprehensively understand the current situation and development space of China's Internet and senior care services coupling coordination degree, accurately grasp the dynamic trend of China's Internet and senior care services coupling and coordinated development, promote the stage of leapfrogging, and fully consider the influencing factors, so as to realize the optimal allocation of policies and resources. These measures will help to promote a more coordinated and sustainable development of the internet and elderly care services in China.

Usability and Feasibility Assessment of a Social Assistive Robot for the Older People: Results from the GUARDIAN Project

In Italy, many people aged over 65 cannot live independently, causing an overall decrease in their quality of life and a need for social and health care. Due to the lack of both formal and informal caregivers, technological solutions become of paramount importance in this scenario. This article describes the user-centered development of the GUARDIAN ecosystem, consisting of a social robot integrated with two mobile applications which aim to monitor, coach, and keep the older user company in order to prolong his/her independence at home. In particular, the advancements from the alpha to the beta prototype of the ecosystem are described, achieved through the feedback collected from 41 end users-older people and their carers-that have tested the system for 6 weeks. By enhancing human-robot interaction, a positive improvement in terms of usability and acceptability of the system was retrieved. However, to increase the perceived usefulness and the impact on older users' lives, it is necessary to make the entire system more customizable, and more capable in providing support for daily activities.

A Systematic Literature Review on Service Composition for People with Disabilities: Taxonomies, Solutions, and Open Research Challenges

Integrating smart heterogeneous objects, IoT devices, data sources, and software services to produce new business processes and functionalities continues to attract considerable attention from the research community due to its unraveled advantages, including reusability, adaptation, distribution, and pervasiveness. However, the exploitation of service-oriented computing technologies (e.g., SOC, SOA, and microservice architectures) by people with special needs is underexplored and often overlooked. Furthermore, the existing challenges in this area are yet to be identified clearly. This research study presents a rigorous literature survey of the recent advances in service-oriented composition approaches and solutions for disabled people, their domains of application, and the major challenges, covering studies published between January 2010 and October 2022. To this end, we applied the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology to retrieve and collate only the articles presenting and discussing service composition solutions tailored to produce digitally accessible services for consumption by people who suffer from an impairment or loss of some physical or mental functions. We searched six renowned bibliographic databases, particularly IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Springer Link, ACM Library, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, to synthesize a final pool of 38 related articles. Our survey contributes a comprehensive taxonomy of service composition solutions, techniques, and practices that are utilized to create assistive technologies and services. The seven-facet taxonomy helps researchers and practitioners to quickly understand and analyze the fundamental conceptualizations and characteristics of accessible service composition for people with disabilities. Key findings showed that services are fused to assist disabled persons to carry out their daily activities, mainly in smart homes and ambient intelligent environments. Despite the emergence of immersive technologies (e.g., wearable computing), user-service interactions are enabled primarily through tactile and speech modalities. Service descriptions mainly incorporate functional features (e.g., performance, latency, and cost) of service quality, largely ignoring accessibility features. Moreover, the outstanding research problems revolve around (1) the unavailability of assistive services datasets, (2) the underspecification of accessibility aspects of disabilities, (3) the weak adoption of accessible and universal design practices, (4) the abstraction of service composition approaches, and (5) the rare experimental testing of composition approaches with disabled users. We conclude our survey with a set of guidelines to realize effective assistive service composition in IoT and cloud environments. Researchers and practitioners are advised to create assistive services that support the social relationships of disabled users and model their accessibility needs as part of the quality of service (QoS). Moreover, they should exploit AI/ML models to address the evolving requirements of disabled users in their unique environments. Furthermore, weaknesses of service composition solutions and research challenges are exposed as notable opportunities for future research.

Comparison of the Mental Burden on Nursing Care Providers With and Without Mat-Type Sleep State Sensors at a Nursing Home in Tokyo, Japan: Quasi-Experimental Study

Background

Increasing need for nursing care has led to the increased burden on formal caregivers, with those in nursing homes having to deal with exhausting labor. Although research activities on the use of internet of things devices to support nursing care for older adults exist, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions among formal caregivers in nursing homes.

Objective

This study aims to investigate whether mat-type sleep state sensors for supporting nursing care can reduce the mental burden of formal caregivers in a nursing home.

Methods

This was a quasi-experimental study at a nursing home in Tokyo, Japan. The study participants were formal caregivers who cared for residents in private rooms on the fourth and fifth floors of the nursing home. In the intervention group, formal caregivers took care of residents who used sleep state sensors on the fourth floor of the nursing home. The sleep state sensors were mat types and designed to detect body motion such as the frequency of toss and turning and to measure heartbeat and respiration. One sensor was placed on a bed in a private room. When body motion is detected, the information is instantly displayed on a monitor at a staff station. In addition, the mental condition of the formal caregivers was measured using a validated self-reported outcome measure—the Profile of Mood States (POMS), Short-Form, 2nd edition. Formal caregivers in both groups received the POMS at baseline, midpoint (week 4), and endpoint (week 8) to identify changes in these domains. The primary outcome was the difference in total mood disturbance (TMD) of the POMS at baseline and week 8.

Results

Of the 22 eligible formal caregivers, 12 (intervention group) utilized sleep state sensors for 8 weeks. The remaining 10 formal caregivers (control group) provided nursing care as usual. As for the primary outcome of the difference between TMD at baseline and week 8, TMD in the intervention group improved by –3.67 versus 4.70 in the control group, resulting in a mean difference of –8.37 (95% CI –32.02 to 15.29; P=.48) in favor of the intervention.

Conclusions

The present 8-week study showed that sleep state sensing for elderly residents might not be associated with reduced mental burdens on formal caregivers in nursing homes.

Scalable OneM2M IoT Open-Source Platform Evaluated in an SDN Optical Network Controller Scenario

Software Defined Networking represents a mature technology for the control of optical networks, though all open controller implementations present in the literature still lack the adequate level of maturity and completeness to be considered for (pre)-production network deployments. This work aims at experimenting on, assessing and discussing the use of the OneM2M open-source platform in the context of optical networks. Network elements and devices are implemented as IoT devices, and the control application is built on top of an OneM2M-compliant server. The work concretely addresses the scalability and flexibility performances of the proposed solution, accounting for the expected growth of optical networks. The two experiment scenarios show promising results and confirm that the OneM2M platform can be adopted in such a context, paving the way to other researches and studies.

A Qualitative Study toward Technologies for Active and Healthy Aging: A Thematic Analysis of Perspectives among Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary End Users

It is expected that, by 2050, people aged over 60 in 65 nations will constitute 30% of the total population. Healthy aging is at the top of the world political agenda as a possible means for hindering the collapse of care systems. How can ICT/sensing technology meet older people's needs for active and healthy aging? This qualitative study carried out in Italy and Romania in 2020 involved 30 participants: older adults, caregivers, and stakeholders. Based on a user-centered design approach, this study aimed to understand which requirements of ICT/sensing technologies could match people's needs of active and healthy aging. Findings highlighted that ICT/sensing technology needs to focus on six major themes: (1) learnability, (2) security, (3) independence, empowerment, and coaching values, (4) social isolation, (5) impact of habit, culture, and education variables, and (6) personalized solutions. These themes are consistent with the Active Aging framework and the factors that influence perceived usefulness and potential benefits among older adults. Consequently, this study shows how well-known, but still unresolved, issues affect the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote active and healthy aging. This suggests that the reinforcement of the public health system, especially considering the pandemic effect, requires a concrete and formidable effort from an interdisciplinary research network.

Semantic Microservice Framework for Digital Twins

Digital Twins (DT) in industrial cyber-physical systems are the key enabling technology for Industry 4.0. Services are an essential part of almost every DT concept, but their interaction is usually implementation-specific since no common guidelines are available. This work identifies some fundamental requirements for a DT service framework based on applications identified in corresponding literature. Based on these requirements, a service framework architecture is proposed. The architecture utilizes Semantic Web technology and a workflow engine for service orchestration to support the fulfilment of the identified requirements. As a case study for sensor data evaluation of an industrial process, a proof-of-concept implementation is presented, showing the feasibility and suitability of the proposed DT service framework architecture.

Knowledge-Based Decision Support in Healthcare via Near Field Communication

The benefits of automatic identification technologies in healthcare have been largely recognized. Nevertheless, unlocking their potential to support the most knowledge-intensive medical tasks requires to go beyond mere item identification. This paper presents an innovative Decision Support System (DSS), based on a semantic enhancement of Near Field Communication (NFC) standard. Annotated descriptions of medications and patient’s case history are stored in NFC transponders and used to help caregivers providing the right therapy. The proposed framework includes a lightweight reasoning engine to infer possible incompatibilities in treatment, suggesting substitute therapies. A working prototype is presented in a rheumatology case study and preliminary performance tests are reported. The approach is independent from back-end infrastructures. The proposed DSS framework is validated in a limited but realistic case study, and performance evaluation of the prototype supports its practical feasibility. Automated reasoning on knowledge fragments extracted via NFC enables effective decision support not only in hospital centers, but also in pervasive IoT-based healthcare contexts such as first aid, ambulance transport, rehabilitation facilities and home care.

Knowledge to action framework for home health monitoring

Chronic disease management is a grand challenge, both to the patients for optimal management and to the overall health system with cost utilization. Emerging research evidence suggests that Home Health Monitoring (HHM) using home-based, remoting monitoring technologies can improve the patients' quality of life, self-management, and achieve cost-effectiveness for the health system. How should HHM be introduced and integrated appropriately into the current healthcare delivery pathways to improve patient care and collect evidence of benefits simultaneously? The Knowledge to Action (KTA) framework is an effective approach in the implementation science literature to methodically guide the translation of evidence-based research findings into practice, putting knowledge into practical use. This article examines the use of the seven-step KTA model to address implementation facilitators and barriers of applying HHM in chronic disease management and then focus on its applicability on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as an example.

Implementation of Sensing and Actuation Capabilities for IoT Devices Using oneM2M Platforms

In this paper, we present an implementation work of sensing and actuation capabilities for IoT devices using the oneM2M standard-based platforms. We mainly focus on the heterogeneity of the hardware interfaces employed in IoT devices. For IoT devices (i.e., Internet-connected embedded systems) to perform sensing and actuation capabilities in a standardized manner, a well-designed middleware solution will be a crucial part of IoT platform. Accordingly, we propose an oneM2M standard-based IoT platform (called nCube) incorporated with a set of tiny middleware programs (called TAS) responsible for translating sensing values and actuation commands into oneM2M-defined resources accessible in Web-based applications. All the source codes for the oneM2M middleware platform and smartphone application are available for free in the GitHub repositories. The full details on the implementation work and open-source contributions are described.

Building-in-Briefcase: A Rapidly-Deployable Environmental Sensor Suite for the Smart Building

A building’s environment has profound influence on occupant comfort and health. Continuous monitoring of building occupancy and environment is essential to fault detection, intelligent control, and building commissioning. Though many solutions for environmental measuring based on wireless sensor networks exist, they are not easily accessible to households and building owners who may lack time or technical expertise needed to set up a system and get quick and detailed overview of environmental conditions. Building-in-Briefcase (BiB) is a portable sensor network platform that is trivially easy to deploy in any building environment. Once the sensors are distributed, the environmental data is collected and communicated to the BiB router via the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and WiFi technology, which then forwards the data to the central database securely over the internet through a 3G radio. The user, with minimal effort, can access the aggregated data and visualize the trends in real time on the BiB web portal. Paramount to the adoption and continued operation of an indoor sensing platform is battery lifetime. This design has achieved a multi-year lifespan by careful selection of components, an efficient binary communications protocol and data compression. Our BiB sensor is capable of collecting a rich set of environmental parameters, and is expandable to measure others, such as CO 2 . This paper describes the power characteristics of BiB sensors and their occupancy estimation and activity recognition functionality. We have demonstrated large-scale deployment of BiB throughout Singapore. Our vision is that, by monitoring thousands of buildings through BiB, it would provide ample research opportunities and opportunities to identify ways to improve the building environment and energy efficiency.