The birth of a student entrepreneurial idea needs a delivery room and a research methodology. It should be nourished to grow like a nursery takes care of its offspring for them to become healthy adults. The initial birth of a startup idea needs encouragement, assistance and protection. Entreprenursery's main goal is to bring to life ideas and to help them develop once discovered. In this respect, Entreprenursery, working as an accelerator of ideas, is built on stakeholders who take care of the student's inclination for entrepreneurship. Entreprenursery is characterized by an informal teaching approach that breaks down barriers, fosters involvement and creates an enjoyable working atmosphere within students, mentors, corporates and entrepreneurial members of the society. All of them are part of a quadruple helix model in which the main actors are students leading their startup ideas to innovation. A digital platform – pingel@p – manages the collection and helps all stakeholders to work together to reach a common goal: allowing startup ideas to grow in a safe but encouraging environment by taking care of the intellectual property (IP) as well. Providing IP protection gives students a nurtured feeling and a sense of ownership. In Entreprenursery, students are also confronted with companies expressing their business needs and challenges, allowing entrepreneurial students to take them up.

This study presents preliminary results of a broader research on Home Robot monitoring for elder people. The final goal of the project is the development of a robot that works in synergy with an automatic fall detection device, reaching the patient and checking his condition in case of triggered alarm. This paper covers the initial steps necessary for the design of the tracking network which provides the machine with the subject's position, in particular the single node performance. The network is based on Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) wireless transceivers that in this study are the Decawave EVB1000 evaluation boards. Two types of analysis have been performed on the anchor: a Line of Sight (LOS) baseline accuracy and interference robustness. The results demonstrate that, for LOS distance estimation, to achieve a margin of error below 15 cm, the node has to be closer than 12 m to the target. If we remove the line of sight condition, introducing a subject walking straight between the two anchors, the error is spread in the order of 10 cm from the original baseline for a 10 m nodes distance recording. If the path is obstructed instead by a subject walking perpendicularly to the nodes instead leads to a different types of perturbations, with an absolute error below 13 cm.

Motivated by a need for accurate assessment and monitoring of patients with knee osteoarthritis in an ambulatory setting, a wearable electrogoniometer composed of a knee angular sensor and a three-axis accelerometer placed on the thigh is developed. Accurate assessment of knee kinematics requires accurate detection of walking amongst dynamic, heterogeneous, and individualized activities of daily living. This paper investigates four different machine learning techniques for detecting occurrences of walking in uncontrolled environments based on a dataset collected from a total of 4 healthy subjects. Multi-class classifier (random forest) based detection method showed the best performance, which supports 90% precision and 75% recall. The in-depth analysis and interpretation of the results show that accurate decision boundaries are necessary between 1) fast walking and descending stairs, 2) slow walking and ascending stairs, as well as 3) slow walking and transitional activities. This work provides a systematic approach to detect occurrences of walking in uncontrolled living conditions, which can also be extended to other activities.

The Zigbee low-power communication standard has established itself as one of the most important wireless standards, enabling thousands of industrial and environmental monitoring applications. At the same time, Bluetooth and newly also Bluetooth Low Energy has captured the gadget and smartphone markets and currently enables various health and personal applications. The border between these two markets becomes thinner and applications would profit significantly from interconnecting these two standards and sharing the information obtained.

An increased number of vehicular applications and services requires accurate distance measurements. Due to specific properties of radio waves propagation, it may not be effective to use ranging systems designed for other environments inside tunnels. In this paper we analysed the characteristics of time of flight based ranging for in-tunnel applications. Based on our analysis, we designed a vehicle localization system showing that the time of flight approach is a suitable, accurate and cost effective solution for this purpose. We designed and validated our solution by performing real experiments in a tunnel located in Lugano, Switzerland.

Welcome to the third edition of the International Workshop on Interdisciplinary Research on E-Health Services and Systems, being held on Monday, June 20th, 2011 in Lucca, Italy, in conjunction with IEEE WoWMoM conference. It has been our great pleasure to organize this one-day workshop, dealing with a variety of research advances and challenges around e-health services and systems.

We propose DisCord, an opportunistic protocol for neighbor discovery and data exchange coordination in sensor networks. DisCord allows multiple low-end nodes within radio range to discover each other, self-organize into a network, and exchange data in an autonomous fashion. DisCord can successfully cope with node mobility and unstable network dynamics.

Routing in intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (ICMAN) is a very challenging problem because disconnections are prevalent and the lack of knowledge about network dynamics hinders good decision making. In ICMAN one of the most important decisions is how to choose the most suitable intermediate(s) to forward the message to the destination. We propose in this document a new algorithm (PROPICMAN) that, based on context information, allows the sender to select the neighbor(s) such that the message has the highest probability to reach the destination.