PUBLICATIONS

Title: Intelligent Luminaire based Real-time Indoor Positioning for Assisted Living
Authors: Iuliana Marin, Maria Iuliana Bocicor, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar
Published: 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2020), 5-6 May 2020.
Abstract: This paper presents an experimental evaluation on the accuracy of indoor localisation. The research was carried out as part of a European Union project targeting the creation of ICT solutions for older adult care. Current expectation is that advances in technology will supplement the human workforce required for older adult care, improve their quality of life and decrease healthcare expenditure. The proposed approach is implemented in the form of a configurable cyber-physical system that enables indoor localization and monitoring of older adults living at home or in residential buildings. Hardware consists of custom developed luminaires with sensing, communication and processing capabilities.
They replace the existing lighting infrastructure, do not look out of place and are cost effective. The luminaires record the strength of a Bluetooth signal emitted by a wearable device equipped by the monitored user. The system’s software server uses trilateration to calculate the person’s location based on known luminaire placement and recorded signal strengths. However, multipath fading caused by the presence of walls, furniture and other objects introduces localisation errors. Our previous experiments showed that room-level accuracy can be achieved using software-based filtering for a stationary subject. Our current objective is to assess system accuracy in the context of a moving subject, and ascertain whether room-level localization is feasible in real time.

Title: Indoor Localisation with Intelligent Luminaires for Home Monitoring
Authors: Iuliana Marin, Maria Iuliana Bocicor, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar
Published: 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, Heraklion, Crete – Greece, 4-5 May, 2019
Abstract: This paper presents the initial results of our experiments regarding accurate indoor localisation. The research was carried out in the context of a European Union funded project targeting the development of a configurable, cost-effective cyber-physical system for monitoring older adults in their homes. The system comprises a number of hardware nodes deployed as intelligent luminaires that replace light bulbs present in the monitored location. By measuring the strength of a Bluetooth Low Energy signal generated by a device on the monitored person, a rough estimation of the person’s location is obtained. We show that the presence of walls, furniture and other objects in typical indoor settings precludes accurate localisation. In order to improve accuracy, we employ several software-based approaches, including Kalman filtering and neural networks. We carry out an initial experiment showing that additional software processing significantly improves localisation accuracy.

Title: i-Light—Intelligent Luminaire Based Platform for Home Monitoring and Assisted Living
Authors: Iuliana Marin, Andrei Vasilateanu, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar, Maria Iuliana Bocicor, David Cuesta-Frau, Antonio Molina-Picó and Nicolae Goga
Published: Electronics 2018, 7(10), 220; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics7100220
Abstract: We present i-Light, a cyber-physical platform that aims to help older adults to live safely within their own homes. The system is the result of an international research project funded by the European Union and is comprised of a custom developed wireless sensor network together with software services that provide continuous monitoring, reporting and real-time alerting capabilities. The principal innovation proposed within the project regards implementation of the hardware components in the form of intelligent luminaires with inbuilt sensing and communication capabilities. Custom luminaires provide indoor localisation and environment sensing, are cost-effective and are designed to replace the lighting infrastructure of the deployment location without prior mapping or fingerprinting. We evaluate the system within a home and show that it achieves localisation accuracy sufficient for room-level detection. We present the communication infrastructure, and detail how the software services can be configured and used for visualisation, reporting and real-time alerting.

Title: Intelligent Decision Support for Pervasive Home Monitoring and Assisted Living
Authors: Iuliana Bocicor, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar, Iuliana Marin, Nicolae Goga, David Cuesta Frau and Raúl Valor Pérez
Published: International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), 2018
Abstract: The current trend of population ageing leads to an increasingly larger population of older adults, who understandably desire to continue living an independent and fulfilling life in their home and within their communities. While traditionally seen as a societal issue, we are currently at a point where advancement in science and technology enables us to augment human help with ambient assisted living solutions. This paper is the result of research and development undertaken within the framework of a European Union research project targeting the development of a cyber-physical system for assisted living and home monitoring. The system integrates an unobtrusive network of wireless sensors with server software to provide ambient monitoring, location detection and real-time alerting. The present paper is focused on the system’s intelligent software components. The first is a business rules engine that can be configured to send real-time alerts in the case of certain ambient conditions or when the location of the monitored person shows signification alteration from their usual movement patterns. The second component is an artificial intelligence-based location predictor, used to provide the monitored person’s location. Discrepancies between actual and expected location are used by the rule engine to trigger real-time alerts to caregivers.

Title: Ambient Assisted Control using Smart Luminaires
Authors: Iuliana Marin, Nicolae Goga, Ionel-Bujorel Pavaloiu, Maria-Iuliana Dascalu, Ionut Draghici and Melania Nițu
Published: Zooming Innovation in Consumer Electronics International Conference (ZINC), 2018
Abstract: The population aging, the need to reduce the cost of elderly care, as well as to increase security and energy efficiency have led to the emergence of many home monitoring systems. However, most of these systems are expensive, are not standardized, are complicated to implement (individualized wiring, wireless nodes) and can only be used with qualified personnel. Our light bulb prototype aims to reduce such deficiencies as well as remove the obstacles to adopting such systems by reducing costs and simplifying installation. The proposed solution aims to capitalize on existing electrical and lighting equipment, to set up a monitoring system only by replacing the luminaires in the existing electrical system with other lighting sources developed specifically for this purpose. Through the periodic replacement process and based on the current trend in light-emitting diode usage, these smart luminaires can be gradually introduced to supervise the location within houses, mostly elders’ homes that live alone.

Title: Cyber-physical system for assisted living and home monitoring
Authors: Maria Iuliana Bocicor, David Cuesta Frau, Ionut-Catalin Draghici, Nicolae Goga, Arthur-Jozsef Molnar, Raúl Valor Pérez, Andrei Vasilateanu
Published: International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), 2017
Abstract: Assisted living and home monitoring systems are gradually becoming a  necessity, considering the current trends in population ageing and older adults’ desire to continue living independently in their homes and their communities for as long as possible. This paper presents our current achievements regarding the implementation of a cyber-physical system for assisted living and home monitoring, developed as part of a European Union-funded research project. Integrating a wireless network of smart, sensor-equipped hardware nodes for indoor localization and ambient monitoring, as well as both  server and client side software components, the system offers basic activity recognition, decision support, supervision and real-time alerting capabilities. While briefly presenting the high-level architecture of our proposed solution, in this paper we focus our attention on the software components of the platform, which are portrayed in more detail. Using data acquired by the smart nodes along with data processing and analysis techniques, the system is able to pinpoint the location of monitored persons within the home, to provide reports about ambient conditions and basic activities of the supervised person and, most  importantly, in case of potential danger, send real-time alerts to caregivers, allowing them to act immediately to ensure the safety of monitored persons.

Title: Indoor positioning system for location based healthcare using trilateration with corrections
Authors: Ionut-Catalin Draghici, Andrei Vasilateanu, Nicolae Goga, Bujor Pavaloiu, Laurentiu Guta, Monica N. Mihailescu, Costin-Anton Boiangiu
Published: International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE), 2017
Abstract: Indoor positioning systems are becoming a required sub-system in many ambient assisted living scenarios. Another area that would greatly benefit from the enriched context of localization is the IoT (Internet of Things) device interaction. However, at this moment there aren’t any satisfying technologies or approaches for precise indoor positioning. This paper proposes an indoor positioning method based on trilateration using Wi-Fi RSSI measurements with corrections to eliminate the noise and the bias. The proposed method is tested in a laboratory environment and results are described.

Title: A Quantitative Research to Decide the User Requirements for the i-Light System
Authors: Ionut-Catalin Draghici, Monica Nastasia Mihailescu, Laurentiu Ilie Guta, Andrei Vasilateanu, Bujor Pavaloiu, Iuliana Bocicor, Arthur Molnar, Nicolae Goga
Published: The 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS21), 2017
Abstract: i-Light is a home-monitoring system that enables a pervasive, seamless, and inexpensive monitoring scheme. It is researched and implemented as part of a European Union funded project and it will achieve pervasive monitoring by means of a novel energy efficient luminaire equipped with an embedded sensing, indoor localization and communications electronic system, luminaire that is developed as part of the project. This report is based on a multi-national survey with respect to the usage of intelligent luminaires indoors. The purpose of this paper is to determine the interest of population in a new type of product, and to identify the requirements that satisfy the needs of the end users. This product will interact with many third-party devices in the healthcare and wellness sectors, enabling plug-and-play interoperability just out-of-the-box. I-Light is envisioned as an ambient assisted living system, thus it will continuously monitor environmental conditions and supervised persons’ daily activities and send alerts to caregivers, in case of potentially dangerous situations.

Title: Evaluating indoor localization using WiFi for patient tracking
Authors: Nicolae Goga, Andrei Vasilateanu, Monica Nastasia Mihailescu, Laurentiu Guta, Arthur Molnar, Iuliana Bocicor, Larisa Bolea, Dragos Constantin Stoica, Bujor Pavaloiu
Published: International Symposium on Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering (ISFEE), 2016
Abstract: Our paper presents the first phase in developing an indoor localization technique based on WiFi for patient monitoring scenarios in patient empowerment and ambient assisted living settings. We describe an experiment that measures the accuracy for positioning using WiFi signals and the results show that decent accuracy can be obtained using existing equipment and with a minimum setting effort.

Title: Testing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy technologies for a hybrid indoor positioning system
Authors: Andrei Vasilateanu, Nicolae Goga, Laurentiu Guta, Monica N. Mihailescu, Bujor Pavaloiu
Published: IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE), 2016
Abstract: Indoor positioning systems are becoming a required sub-system in many ambient assisted living scenarios. Also IoT (Internet of Things) device interaction would greatly benefit from the enriched context of localization. However, at this moment there is not a satisfying technology or approach for precise indoor positioning. In our paper we test the accuracy for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy RSSI measurements and we propose a prototype system for smartphone simulation.

Title: Smart Home Simulation System
Authors: Andrei Vasilateanu, Ioan Andrei Popescu, Alexandra Silvia Cergan, Nicolae Goga
Published: IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE), 2016
Abstract: Our paper is addressing an actual need of the modern society, which is to take advantage of Internet of Things for creating smart environments in order to improve everyday life. We propose a solution for helping the design of smart environments by letting the user test different topologies, without the actual equipment, in order to find out the best configuration for transforming the house into a connected, intelligent one.