| Summary: |
Understanding individual users and their context, as well as their surroundings, is a fundamental competence to create personalized services provided by a specialized companion. The EIT research line will develop an infrastructure to physically observe multiple data sources, act accordingly in the environment and provide a 'holistic' understanding of the user. Thus, building blocks will emerge, enabling the conception and nurture of companions for specific areas on agriculture, nutrition, activity monitoring, health and wellbeing, developed along the C3 research line.
The IoT has emerged as a standard solution to enable everyday objects to establish connections between themselves or with their surroundings. Mimicking the human body, the IoT acts like the nerves that carry data from our sense organs to the brain. The perception and interaction enabled by the sensors and actuators connected through the IoT have the ability to extend human beings' sensing capacities. More precisely, sensing devices resemble the eyes and the ears that can register changes in several variables, such as light, water temperature and motion, whereas actuators, like lights, screens, buzzers and valves, are used to provide feedback or interact with the world. Whilst these devices can autonomously sense and interact with things, taken alone they lack the ability to provide desirable understanding of one's status. By knowing the environment and inferring the appropriate context, meaningful information can be extracted to support and enhance human beings' daily living experience. Since gathering data from multiple sensors can be more enlightening to perceive users and their context, there is a need to develop algorithms that can generate information from single sensors by fusing data from several sources into meaningful outputs. This is not only true for human activity monitoring, by merging GPS and inertial sensors data to understand if someone is running indoo  |
Summary
Understanding individual users and their context, as well as their surroundings, is a fundamental competence to create personalized services provided by a specialized companion. The EIT research line will develop an infrastructure to physically observe multiple data sources, act accordingly in the environment and provide a 'holistic' understanding of the user. Thus, building blocks will emerge, enabling the conception and nurture of companions for specific areas on agriculture, nutrition, activity monitoring, health and wellbeing, developed along the C3 research line.
The IoT has emerged as a standard solution to enable everyday objects to establish connections between themselves or with their surroundings. Mimicking the human body, the IoT acts like the nerves that carry data from our sense organs to the brain. The perception and interaction enabled by the sensors and actuators connected through the IoT have the ability to extend human beings' sensing capacities. More precisely, sensing devices resemble the eyes and the ears that can register changes in several variables, such as light, water temperature and motion, whereas actuators, like lights, screens, buzzers and valves, are used to provide feedback or interact with the world. Whilst these devices can autonomously sense and interact with things, taken alone they lack the ability to provide desirable understanding of one's status. By knowing the environment and inferring the appropriate context, meaningful information can be extracted to support and enhance human beings' daily living experience. Since gathering data from multiple sensors can be more enlightening to perceive users and their context, there is a need to develop algorithms that can generate information from single sensors by fusing data from several sources into meaningful outputs. This is not only true for human activity monitoring, by merging GPS and inertial sensors data to understand if someone is running indoors or outdoors, but also for a farming scenario, where a sudden pH change can be directly related to the water temperature and be immediately corrected by actuators that change the environment.
Correcting the pH based on the temperature change exemplifies a new concept that goes beyond perception: learning. This is what the human brain has the ability to do: react to events based on previous experience. The processing power and storage capabilities enabled by cloud-based platforms can somehow mimic our most complex organ, by combining real-time information with previous experiences. Combined information can, then, be used to predict future events, assuming similar patterns are detected on the huge amount of data being analysed, and provide recommendations to solve specific situations.
Thus, the research line EIT CC, the 'Eyes of the Internet of Things' Competence Centre, will focus on the aspects required to understand the environment, the users and their context and actions, resulting in learning capabilities which empower decision making. The developments under the scope of this competence centre are the building blocks to create specific companion applications to all target domains identified by the C3 research line. In order to provide these companion building blocks, this research line is divided into one support work package, Management and dissemination, and four main work packages: Sensing and actuating, Local information fusion, Remote information fusion and big data analytics in the cloud, and Networks for ICT4D. |