Intelligent middleware for Internet of Things: an approach based on monitoring the emotional and physical state of patients in smart homes

Abstract

The growth of the population in need of health care and reduced mobility in many countries highlights the need to develop assistive technologies appropriate to this public, especially when they need home treatment after discharge from the hospital. At this time, these people may experience excessive time of negative emotions and poor social interaction, symptoms related to emotional illness (eg depression, bipolar disorder, etc.). Thus, the opportunity arises to provide monitoring solutions for people with physical-motor needs using computational technologies to identify the physical and emotional state of these individuals. These solutions provide greater user interaction with intelligent environments, assisting in diagnosis or predicting risk situations for the patient, eg. signs of depression, falls, etc. However, due to the diversity of sensors that exist in the Smart Homes environment and the loss of connection between them at any time, one of the main challenges encountered by researchers is the development of opportunistic and flexible solutions capable of self-fit according to the environment. Thus, exploring an event-based Internet of Things (Publish/Subscribe) is a promising way. Integrating intelligence along with context sensitivity are some of the challenges virtually unexplored in these Middlewares. Therefore, this doctoral project aims to develop a generic and flexible opportunistic system capable of integrating intelligence and context sensitivity into an event-based middleware using the Publish/Subscribe paradigm. The proposed system will be able to: i) integrate multiple sensors to classify the physical and emotional state of individuals, in a non-intrusive and modularly flexible way; ii) integrate intelligence to an event-based Middleware; (iii) self-fit, opportunistically, to the context of the environment; and iv) make decisions Offloading-based techniques. (AU)