The global demographic shift toward an aging population presents a critical socio-economic challenge, necessitating "aging in place" solutions that balance autonomy with safety. Although the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers a theoretical foundation for remote monitoring, current implementations often fail to meet real-world requirements due to high costs, intrusive sensing modalities, and a lack of contextual reasoning. This article outlines the architectural requirements of the next-generation platform for digital health support. We argue that the future of monitoring the elderly lies within the framework of Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), a system that not only records events but also reasons about them, detects and adapts to anomalies, and communicates with caregivers through natural language. As a result, the next generation of digital wellness platforms must bridge the gap between technical data and human understanding, providing high-precision detection, human-readable, and context-aware recommendations. This shifts systems from simple data loggers to proactive decision-supporting tools.

Obesity is a real health emergency with significant consequences for individuals and society, reducing expectations and quality of life or even the death for 2.8 million people each year. Being a chronic condition with limited pharmacological options, weight loss therapies are mainly based on dietary and cognitive-behavioral interventions delivered at specialist public and/or private centers. In order to promote and facilitate weight loss, this paper proposes a virtual coaching system to motivate and guide the patients during the therapy and to support the clinicians in monitoring its effectiveness. The system has three components: a) the clinician's web application, which is used to monitor and modify the therapy for each patient; b) a mobile application for patients, used to log nutrition intakes and physical activities, and to consult motivational documents/videos; and c) a cloud server, which collects data and implements smart monitoring features. The platform is adopted in a clinical trial involving 120 patients with obesity (Body Mass Index 2> 30) that has recently started.

This paper presents DOHMO, an embedded computer vision system where multiple sensors, including intelligent cameras, are connected to actuators that regulate illumination and doors. The system aims at assisting elderly and impaired people in co-housing scenarios, in accordance with privacy design principles. The paper provides details of two core elements of the system: The first one is the BOX-IO controller, a fully scalable and customizable hardware and software IoT ecosystem that can collect, control, and monitor data, operational flows and business scenarios, whether indoor or outdoor. The second one is the embedded 3DEverywhere intelligent camera, a device composed of an embedded system that receives input data provided by a 3D/2D camera, analyzes it, and returns the metadata of this analysis. We illustrate how they can be connected and how simple decision mechanisms can be implemented in such a framework. In particular, illumination can be triggered on and off by the detected presence of people, overcoming the limitations of typical sensors, while doors can be opened or closed based on person trajectories in an intelligent manner. To substantiate the proposed system, numerous experiments are performed in a lab and a co-housina scenario.

The paper addresses the design-space exploration of network alternatives for complex distributed systems of embedded devices, e.g., for smart power grid or telecommunication services. While past research mainly provided efficient programming abstractions and HW/SW simulation tools, this work introduces the network perspective in the verification of different design solutions (e.g., different task decomposition and assignment to network nodes). To do that, network simulation capability has been added to the so-called Abstract Middleware Environment and its effectiveness has been shown experimentally through the design of a wireless sensor network application taken from a real-world case study.

This paper presents an accurate and scalable implementation of an energy-aware simulator for wireless sensor networks (WSN's). Scalability and accuracy have been achieved through an energy-aware instrumentation of the Instruction Set Simulator of node's microcontroller and a functional SystemC TLM model of the radio module implementing the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The framework allows to execute actual software and to evaluate accurately its effect on the network lifetime. We first validate energy estimation results against a working hardware prototype of a wireless sensor node. The methodology, compared against state-of-the-art simulators such as NS-2, represents a flexible and scalable solution for fast and accurate prototyping of WSN software.

The extreme heterogeneity of networked embedded platforms makes both design and reuse of applications really hard. These facts decrease portability. A middleware is the software layer that allows to abstract the actual characteristics of each embedded platform. Using a middleware decreases the difficulty in designing applications, but programming for different middlewares is still a barrier to portability. This paper presents a design methodology based on an abstract middleware environment that allows to abstract even the services provided. This is gained by allowing the designer to smoothly move across different design paradigms. As a proof, the paper shows how to mix and exchange applications between tuple-space and message-oriented based middleware environments.

The literature does not report a complete design methodology for WSN applications integrating all these aspects. The proposed methodology allows programmers to write WSN applications by using the system description language SystemC and the Abstract Middleware Environment (AME) framework for fast sim

In this paper we present an energy-aware framework for the design of wireless sensor networks, based on a hardware/software/network co-simulation strategy. The framework enables fast development and optimization of software power management policies, since it allows to run real software that can be easily ported on target hardware nodes. The capabilities of the simulation framework have been stressed by comparing different power management strategies, exploring their power-performance trade-offs and their effectiveness in various network conditions.

The paper focuses on the design of networked embedded systems which cooperate to provide complex distributed applications. A milestone in the effort of simplifying the implementation of such applications has been the introduction of a service layer, named middleware, which abstracts from the peculiarities of the operating system and HW components. However, the presence of the middleware has not been yet introduced in the design flow as an explicit dimension. This work presents an abstract model of middleware supporting different programming paradigms; it can be used as component in the design flow and allows to simulate and develop the application without doing premature assumptions on the actual HW/SW platform. At the end of the design flow the abstract middleware can be mapped to an actual middleware. The methodology has been analyzed both theoretically and practically with the actual application on a wireless sensor network

Modular design is an important requirement in modern embedded system design flows because of the widespread acceptance of new paradigms such as IP core reuse and platform-based design. Co-simulation frameworks must thus support modular design, since programmable devices, ad-hoc HW components, and the interconnect infrastructure must be easily interchangeable in order to allow design exploration while keeping the SW portion unchanged or only marginally changed. The proposed co-simulation framework implements such a modular approach to co-simulation by means of a novel paradigm in which HW models can be modified on the fly by keeping the SW parts unchanged. This is achieved through an ISS-centric co-simulation strategy in which modularity is provided in terms of (i) the replacement of HW components thanks to the use of a common interface based on the device address space, or (ii) the use of different ISS's, thanks to a re-configurable simulator. We demonstrate our approach onto an industrial-strength embedded application, showing that the proposed co-simulation strategy provides both high speed and accuracy.

Designers of factory automation applications increasingly demand tools for rapid prototyping of hardware extensions to existing systems and verification of resulting behaviors through hardware and software co-simulation. The paper presents a framework for the timing-accurate co-simulation of HDL models and their verification against hardware and software running on an actual embedded device of which only a minimal knowledge of the current design is required. Experiments on real-life applications show that early architectural and design decisions can be taken by measuring the expected performance on the models realized using the proposed framework.

Mobile terminals are embedded systems with growing elaboration capacity, even still limited, which are continuously connected to a worldwide communication network. Thus, the idea of embedding in mobile terminals remote computing services seems attractive and it is more and more exploited. This paper evaluates a middleware platform based on the simple object access protocol (SOAP) to develop distributed applications on mobile terminals.

The paper deals with modelling and analysis of heterogeneous industrial networks architectures. At first homogeneous modelling strategy using the network simulator is presented and then the role of systemC and the use of the instruction set simulator is provided. Experimental results shows that the network cannot support the workload generated by the PLCs.

In a system-level design flow, the transition from a high-level description entry implies the refinement from an untimed, unpartitioned description to a real architecture where applications are executed on a programmable device and interact with ad-hoc hardware components. Simulation of such architectures requires the capability of efficient co-simulation of a model of hardware with a model of the processor. This paper presents two co-simulation methodologies, based on SystemC as hardware modeling language and on an instruction set simulator (ISS) as a model of the processor. The first one works at the SystemC kernel level and exploits potentialities of the GNU suite, whereas the second uses features offered by the operating system running on the ISS. The two methodologies improve co-simulation performance with respect to state-of the art methods, and provide different trade-offs between the simplicity of the programming model, the modeling power, and co-simulation performance.

Networked embedded systems pose several challenges in the modeling, simulation, and design domains. The presence of the network, in particular, makes an already critical task such as HW/SW co-simulation even more complex, since a three-way (HW/SW/network) co-simulation and co-design capability is required. Modeling of networks and their interaction with hardware and software is thus key for an effective design methodology at early stages of the design flow. In this work, we present a HW/SW/network co-simulation and co-design methodology, based on the integration of heterogeneous simulation environments such as systemC and NS (network simulator). This methodology has been successfully applied to the design of a system-on-chip performing the fast path of IPv4 routing, allowing to explore different HW/SW allocation for different network configurations.

This work presents a modeling and analysis framework for heterogeneous industrial networks architectures, which is based on a tight integration of a network simulator with embedded software, middleware and a real-time operating system. This framework is suitable for modeling and simulating the behavior of typical components involved in factory automation applications (e.g., PLCs, remote controllers, operational screens, etc.) when they are connected through heterogeneous industrial networks. Experiments show that the framework allows to take early architectural decisions by evaluating the expected system performance based on the available models.

The design of state-of-the-art, complex embedded systems requires the capability of modeling and simulating the complex networked environment in which such systems operate. This implies the availability of both a networking modeling environment and traditional system-level modeling capabilities. In this paper we present a modeling and simulation methodology based on a timing accurate integration of a system-level modeling language (SystemC) and a network simulation environment (NS-2). The efficiency of the proposed design environment has been demonstrated on a description of a 802.11 MAC layer.

This paper describes a design methodology for the estimation of bus performance of a tuplespace for factory automation. The need of a tuplespace is motivated by the characteristics of typical embedded architectures for factory automation. We describe the features of a bus for embedded applications and the problem of estimating its performance, and present a rapid prototyping design methodology developed for a qualitative and quantitative estimation. The methodology is based on a mix of different modeling languages such as Java, C++, SystemC and Network Simulator2 (NS2). Its application allows the estimation of the expected performance of the bus under design in relation to the developed tuplespace.