An aging population with increasing life expectancy drives a growing demand for effective interventions to counteract functional and cognitive decline. Exergaming platforms provide a potential solution by integrating physical and cognitive exercises into a gaming format that encourages older adults to train regularly. This paper investigates the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of an intervention using the GAME2AWE exergaming platform, designed specifically for older adults and incorporating a unique combination of Kinect-based motion tracking, a smart floor system, and virtual reality. The intervention emphasized ease of use and accessibility through a human-centered design, while offering progressively challenging, dual-task activities. In a pilot randomized controlled trial involving 58 older adults in the final analysis, technology acceptance was high. Participants in the intervention group (n = 30) used the platform in an average of 16.7 weekly sessions with 100% adherence. Compared to a control group receiving usual care, significant improvements were observed in motor functions, including balance, lower-limb strength, dynamic balance, and mobility. Cognitive outcomes also improved significantly, including global cognition, attention, executive function, working memory, and processing speed. These results suggest that the GAME2AWE multi-technology intervention is feasible, well-accepted, and potentially effective in improving motor and cognitive functions among older adults.

The high risk of falls in the elderly and their severe consequences makes research to prevent them an important priority for public health. Technologies that enable exercise in the form of games (exergames) can improve both cognitive and physical functions, which is a prerequisite to reduce fall risk. However, the key question is whether such tools are easy to use by the elderly. In this work, the development of a smart floor device for exergames that can motivate elderly to perform physical exercises is presented. The underlying hypothesis is that technologies that do not require the use of a complex user interaction environment such as the proposed smart floor are more suitable for the elderly to use for improving their physical and cognitive functions. The design and development of the smart floor leverages on features from the Internet of Things domain and follows the design principles for system composability using artifact tiles as building blocks. The tile mounting and circuit diagrams are discussed as well as the microcontroller selection to support both distributed and centralized game development models. Recurring training programs with stepping exercises can be deployed in the smart floor as appropriate interventions for fall prevention. Furthermore, the inherent ability to evaluate measures that can predict the risk of falling, such as the choice stepping reaction time, can promote the smart floor as a diagnostic tool. A qualitative assessment was performed with positive results on the perceived usefulness of the proposed exergame device.

The GAME2A WE platform aims to provide a versatile tool for elderly fall prevention through exergames that integrate aerobic, strength-enhancing and balance-enhancing exercises. In addition, cognitive improvements are expected due to dual task training activities. In this context, the use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to build such exergames is investigated through a review of relevant literature and an evaluation study of a functional prototype of the GAME2A WE platform. Fall prevention exercises have been integrated into two scenario-based exergame themes, “Life on a Farm” and “Fun Park Tour”, to be able to assess their applicability on the targeted users based on healthcare experts' evaluation. Test and evaluation sessions were conducted with eight end-users and four experts. The results indicate a positive assessment by the research sample in terms of usability, tolerability, and applicability. Feedback from user testing will be used for the final development stage which will fuel a pilot trial to assess the effects of AR and VR-based motor-cognitive training in community-dwelling older adults.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are two terms closely related to the vision of embedding sensing, processing and communication capabilities into everyday objects and physical environments whose interaction can support effectively human activities. In this paper we propose the term AmIoT to refer to AmI applications composed by IoT devices available in an AmI environment to serve a specific goal of its owner/creator. AmIoT is characterized by the human-centric perspective of AmI, the capability for thing-to-thing interactions and the shaping of IoT rich environments by end-users. Leveraging on the microservices architectural style to overcome fundamental application development and deployment challenges, a microservices-based platform is developed to support the runtime operation of AmIoT applications. Furthermore, an editing tool is provided to empower end-users to configure such applications using the trigger-action programming paradigm. AmIoT characteristics have been explored in practice by developing prototype IoT devices to realize an example use case scenario. Experiences from a preliminary usability evaluation of the editing tool are also reported.

Exercising through gaming (exergaming) based on commercial gaming platforms has been popular over the past years for fitness improving and balance training both for healthy people and for mobility rehabilitation purposes. For the elderly people, exergaming can provide motivation for increasing physical and cognitive activity and as a result improvements on posture balance, physical strength and mental well-being may be expected. However, an issue that arises is whether such gaming systems that are addressed to the general population following a fit-for-all design approach are appropriate for seniors. In this paper we address this issue by developing a new game based on the Microsoft Kinect sensor and creating an engaging three-dimensional world by using a popular 3D game engine. A human centered design approach is followed by involving main stakeholders in the development process for achieving an effective and user-friendly balance training. An evaluation of the proposed game tool with twelve seniors has been performed assessing system usability as well as the balance training efficacy measured by the Berg Balance Scale and the 30 seconds sit-to-stand test. The analysis of the feedback provided by the users and the performance statistics exported by the system indicates a positive acceptance and the potential for promoting health in older adults through balance improvement.

Currently, there is a growing research interest on emerging technologies, such as, ubiquitous computing, mobile computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), collectively mentioned as UMI technologies. The proliferation of UMI technologies will not only changethe way we live but can also offer new learning opportunities. At the same time, there is an increasing need for skills that are associated with the UMI domain in the labour market. The Umi-Sci-Ed is an EU project which explores ways to shed new light into this training aspect by introducing several model educational scenarios that incorporate UMI technologies, in order to cultivate relevant competences on high school students. This paper reports initial results achieved in this context. In particular, we give an overview of the key components of the UMI-Sci-Ed platform that aims to support the activities of Communities of Practice involved in STEM education. Students through a mentoring mechanism are provided with training material, IoT hardware kits and software tools to explore UMI technologies through hands-on activities. In this framework, example educational scenarios and the corresponding UMI applications developed are presented. The hypothesis is that the learning process can be empowered by using such UMI applications as students are provided with meaningful opportunities to participate in the learning process such as in terms of building applications that are relevant to the subject they like and having active interactions within student groups in a way that practical experiences can provide them a rich context to grasp scientific knowledge. Finally, the results of a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach in the context of an educational workshop are discussed.

Guest Editorial.

In this paper we report on our current research and development work that aims to apply pervasive computing and context-aware technologies to enhance the teaching and learning experience in distance education environments. In order to achieve this goal we move from the 2-D user interfaces found in virtual class management systems to the ubiquitous 3-D environment of the classroom. A smart classroom prototype is presented which provides the necessary mechanisms for building context-aware services to enrich distance learning experience. The fusion of location tracking with activity recognition mechanisms allows to control the liveliness of the video stream transmitted to remote students in order to reduce the gap between physical and virtual classrooms.

Educational process' experimental implementation with the support of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) integrated to the elective course "Principles of Environmental Sciences" of the Second High School Class that combines environmental education, principles of space design, introduction to information technologies in ecology and "green" ICT, and sustainable development through the digital management of planting and of the introduction to the crucial wider issue of precision agriculture. The experimental implementation is realized in collaboration with the professors of the 1st General High School of Agios Dimitrios. Temperature sensors, humidity and illumination are placed in structures parametrically designed according to the bioclimatic conditions of the space of the school yard and have been sited in accordance with the operational needs of the complex. Students interact with plants and offer maintenance services when plants request it.

In this paper, we present an approach to aggregating and using devices that support the everyday life of human users in ambient intelligence environments. These execution environments are complex and changing over time, since the devices of the environments are numerous and heterogeneous, and they may appear or disappear at any time. In order to appropriately adapt the ambient system to a user's needs, we adopt a service-oriented approach; i.e., devices provide services that reflect their capabilities. The orchestration of the devices is actually realized with the help of Artificial Intelligence planning techniques and dynamic service binding. At design time, (i) a planning problem is created that consists of the user's goal to be achieved and the services currently offered by the intelligent environment, (ii) the planning problem is then solved using Hierarchical Task Network and Partial-Order Causal-Link planning techniques, (iii) and from the planning decisions taken to find solution plans, abstract service workflows are automatically generated. At run time, the abstract services are dynamically bound to devices that are actually present in the environment. Adaptation of the workflow instantiation is possible due to the late binding mechanism employed. The paper depicts the architecture of our system. It also describes the modeling and the life cycle of the workflows. We discuss the advantages and the limit of our approach with respect to related work and give specific details about implementation. We present some experimental results that validate our system in a real-world application scenario.

Workflows have been used to model repeatable tasks or operations in a number of different industries including manufacturing and software. In this paper we examine the use of workflows to model the interaction of services that can be found in intelligent environments to support user tasks and goals. The deployment of such workflows needs to take care special design considerations, including context awareness, adaptation management, device heterogeneity, and user empowerment. In this paper, we present a framework for the deployment of adaptive workflows. The deployment infrastructure supports BPEL-like, design-time compositions that are complemented by mechanisms for the selection and binding of services at runtime. Workflow behaviour can also adjust dynamically in response to detected changes and unforeseen events by a suit of agents whose initial relationships are specified in the workflows.

In this paper we describe the ATRACO (adaptive and trusted ambient ecologies) approach towards next generation ambient intelligent environments. Several agents, such as a fuzzy task agent with learning capabilities and an interaction agent collaborate in a goal-related activity sphere and adapt heterogeneous artifacts within the sphere in order to support the user to fulfill tasks. All components work on a dynamic sphere ontology, which forms the main knowledge base of the ecology. The presented prototype is able to realize the goal ¿feel comfortable at home after work¿ and was implemented in an existing intelligent environment.

Contemporary software technologies complying with the Service-Oriented Architectural (SOA) paradigm, such as OSGi, UPnP, and the Web services do not meet on their own the adaptability and interoperability challenges of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. In this paper we present a solution based on the combination of the SOA model with Agents and Ontologies. The agent approach complements the SOA infrastructure by providing high level adaptation to user's tasks, as an intelligent control layer above SOA. Ontologies are used to tackle the semantic heterogeneity that arises in AmI spaces and provide to agents a common repository of system knowledge, policies and state.

An important characteristic of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) environments is the integration of information, communication and sensing technologies into our everyday objects, giving rise to a new proactive computing model in homes. A smart home uses networked sensors, devices and appliances to build an intelligent environment in which many activities in the home are automated and where devices and services seamlessly cooperate to support domestic tasks. Programming and maintaining such an infrastructure is challenging because suitable abstractions are currently missing. In this work we have attempted to define ambient ecologies as a metaphor for modeling UbiComp applications, specify design patterns and programming principles and develop infrastructure to provide a paradigm of application engineering and tools to support ambient ecology designers, developers and end-users. We describe our model and the middleware architecture and present the engineering of applications in a smart home environment.

The crew planning problem has been successfully solved on a loosely connected network of workstations (NOW) using advanced computational techniques and efficient communication patterns. The parallelization of the successful sequential system of Carmen Systems AB guarantees that the results are immediately useful and applicable to a large number of airlines scheduling problems. The parallel pairing generator component of the crew scheduling process achieves a linear speedup on the number of processors and can be efficiently scaled to a large number of processors. The novel parallel optimizer approach of the paper also achieves almost linear speedups for large problems solved on a small number of workstations. The Lufthansa problems that were used in our experiments validate our theoretical results and prove the value and usefulness of our work.

The present state of communication networks with respect to speed and reliability and the recent growth of distributed applications have created a need for a global enterprise solution to the legality checking and attribute evaluation requirement. Traditionally, the mainframe systems provided the cohesion of all the processes with respect to the company regulations. When decentralized systems and applications became widely used the legality checking mechanism lost its central role and became a necessary component for every decentralized system. In this paper a methodology to reconnect these systems with respect to their legality checking and attribute evaluation needs is presented. A generic Legality Checking system has been developed and integrated with scheduling systems of the airline domain. It is shown that the client-server model adopted can bring back in a flexible manner the lost homogeneity of the central legacy systems.