Ambient and Assisted Living (and the other term Active Assisted Living, AAL) applications and services rely on the use of Information and Communications Technologies’ (ICT) achievements supporting true assisted living environments. Such enhanced environments promote the provision of infrastructures and services for the independent or more autonomous living, via seamless integration of ICT within homes and residences and medical procedures. For this to become reality, we need advances in developments associated with the Internet of Things, towards designing services designed to better help and support people, or as a general term, to better live their life and interact with their environment. A multitude of heterogeneous applications, involving different stakeholders, have to communicate via a common network environment. Hence, infrastructures have to become pervasive, with an increasing number of distributed devices that will need to communicate between themselves, as well as with centralized services. Moreover, in the context of mobility, temporary colocation of devices will be exploited to build dynamic networks, without a prerequisite infrastructure, or to complement existing communication infrastructures with ad-hoc ones. The current networking infrastructures, however, are mostly based on the Internet, and were not designed to support the varying requirements for the dynamic interaction processes between human beings, sensors and systems (e.g. machine-to-machine communication styles).

MEDEA will focus on management approaches, applications and technologies to satisfy these requirements and thus enable a widespread usage of AAL systems. It will cover different aspect related to the planning and the operation of AAL monitoring platforms and the corresponding applications and services. Proposed mechanisms, architectures and technologies can be evaluated against metrics related to the different stakeholders in the AAL environments. The research topics cover several areas in the design, planning and operational phase.

MEDEA will thus focus on the following research issues:

1. Technologies ranging from smart sensors to future communication approaches and distributed platforms 

• Processing devices
• Smart data manipulation
• Distributed architectures supporting a multitude of heterogeneous sensor devices
• Communication patterns between involved entities, e.g., sensors and actuators

Effective AAL systems to be used for health/elderly monitoring, for example, need appropriate technological support. The technology is developed for new smart type of sensors, for networking / interconnectivity support, for data storing and processing. However, something is still missing: a standardized, reference architecture to support all that together. Maybe this is the reason why so few AAL systems manage to catch up-to-now the eye of the public. An integrated, resilient approach based on technologies capable to support interoperability (as in IoT and IoE newer models) are needed. The workshop is meant as an opportunity where practitioners in the field can present results, showing technologies where body-worn sensor send its data to the hospital platforms, where a physician can request in natural language information about the whereabouts of the patient, that are translated automatically into processing algorithms that use correctly various formats data is being fed in.

Besides the different components required to realize AAL systems the workshop aims at an holistic investigation of the design, the planning, and the operational phases of such systems. The design phase covers platform, protocol and API considerations based on the specific application scenario. The planning phase then involves the specific use-cases and daily life activities. It combines application modeling and capacity planning to ensure a functional system. The third phase, the operational phase, highlights solutions and mechanisms integrating platform and service monitoring, control and optimization of user-relevant and service-relevant metrics like service quality, service reliability, and energy efficiency.

2. Design, planning and operational issues of systems and architectures

• Design phase:
  • Platform considerations
  • Protocol considerations
• Planning phase:
  • Capacity planning
  • Use-cases and daily life activites
  • Application modeling
• Operational phase:
  • Platform and service monitoring
  • Optimization techniques considering application quality, energy efficiency and resilience

Most importantly the MEDEA workshop aims to demonstrate the implementations and well as different scenarios of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Everything related technologies towards allowing efficient interoperability between devices while integrated management can be differentiated by the use-case scenarios for IoT devices’ manipulation. In this context, topics will cover modeling, analysis and efficient management of information in IoT/IoE applications and architectures. It will address the major new technological developments in the field and will reflect current research trends, as well as industry needs. It will comprise of a good balance between theoretical and practical issues, covering case studies, experience and evaluation reports and best practices in utilizing IoT/IoE applications for AAL. It will also provide technical/scientific information about various aspects of IoT/IoE applications for AAL technologies, ranging from basic concepts to novel research material, including future directions. The latter includes the social information understanding as well as platform oriented integration towards enhancing social interaction among peers/mobile social networks. To this end IoT/IoE architectures can be proposed and presented as well as novel and emerging trends of context awareness in the IoT and IoE using cloud-oriented systems.

3. Applications and use-cases in the various domain

• Stakeholders analysis and profiling
• Pilot evaluation of proof of concept implementations
• User interaction and user design aspects
• Big-data and machine learning driven analysis
• Smart city and smart home applications and services
• Digital twins and smart technologies

The event is meant as the mean to disseminate successful applications and use-cases, for AAL systems ranging from telemonitoring the patients from an ambulance up to in-house hospitalized support and many others. Such applications could show successful stories of data collection, data processing, smart processing algorithms connected to interdisciplinary aspects (e.g., algorithms to support health procedures).

4. Security and privacy related considerations in the various domain

• Device security
• Cloud security
• Data access privacy