This paper addresses rule conflicts within wireless sensor networks. The work is situated within psychiatric ambulatory assessment settings where patients are monitored in and around their homes. Detecting behaviours within these settings favours sensor networks, while scalability and resource concerns favour processing data on smart nodes incorporating rule engines. Such monitoring involves personalisation, thereby becoming important to program node rules on the fly. Since rules may originate from distinct sources and change over time, methods are required to maintain rule consistency. Drawing on lessons from Feature Interaction, the paper contributes novel approaches for detecting and resolving rule-conflict across sensor networks.

Mobile and environmental sensing technology can be used to assess human behaviour and mental health trajectories outside of laboratories and in ecologically-relevant settings. To achieve maximum benefit, the set of equipment and the monitoring patterns must be personalised to respect individual needs and fit into individual lifestyles. We have developed a sensor network infrastructure for mobile phones and homecare using a rule-oriented programming architecture to monitor the activity signatures of people with Bipolar Disorder (BD). We believe that the use of this rule-based paradigm within the network for a mental health setting to be a contribution of this work. We are evaluating the effectiveness of the technology in an ongoing technical trial with control participants as a precursor to studying the effectiveness of the system for use with people with BD. In this paper, we report the design and development of the monitoring system along with preliminary findings from the technical trial of the system, and discuss future developments.

P2P applications are increasingly popular. Unlike traditional client-server applications they do not require central server resources. This makes them less costly to host and maintain. While there have been a large number of P2P applications developed for PC based systems, there are only very few for mobile appliances, such as mobile phones or networked PDAs. Furthermore, there are even fewer applications which operate successfully on the public mobile data network (GPRS, 3G), rather than WiFi. This is largely due to the difficulties posed by the restrictive data access to mobile devices (NATs, Firewalls by the network operators) and traditionally high charges for data communications. Recently, the latter point has been virtually removed by the introduction of flat-rate data packages by the operators. This paper (and demo) present a framework and applications based on a structured P2P overlay network which can successfully operate on the public data network.

User Interfaces to control networked appliances are often inadequate. Either they are too simplistic and cannot cover the extended functionality offered by the appliance, or they are too complex and complicated as they typically rely on the use of a computer keyboard and screen. Therefore a user interface that supports complex functionalities and is easy to use is required. In this demo, digital pen and paper are presented as a suitable interface. Pen and paper are well known to all users and suitable paper forms make it straightforward to fully control and program networked appliances without a PC interface. Thus an important barrier to the acceptance of networked appliances is broken. A major challenge to this work has been the integration of different network protocols used in the home. The use of an OSGi gateway has proven a great help to integrate them. This paper discusses an approach to the integration of pen and paper with networked appliances using an OSGi gateway. Because of the use of an OSGi gateway, the approach is open for application to devices using a variety of network protocols. In this demo the control of a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) using digital pen and paper will be demonstrated.

Networked appliances are consumer or household devices with a network interface which allows them to he connected to a (home) network. Networked appliances offer major benefits compared to their conventional equivalent. Software services can operate upon an array of these appliances to offer value added functionality. In this case the user interface to control the appliances will be inadequate. Commonly networked appliances may either he controlled using the traditional user interface, such as switches and buttons on the device, or alternatively using a PC based interface. Traditional user interfaces often cannot support the full functionality offered by the appliance. The PC based interfaces tend to be too complicated for the average user and enables the PC based interface to be suitable and available in many situations. Therefore a user interface which supports the new functionalities and is easy to use is required. In this paper, Anoto functionality enabled pen and paper are suggested as a suitable interface. Pen and paper are well known to all users and suitable paper forms make it straightforward to fully control and program networked appliances without a PC interface. Thus an important barrier to the acceptance of networked appliances is broken. Furthermore, the presented approach can be used to integrate the control of multiple appliances and services. A major challenge to this work has been the integration of different network protocols used in the home. The use of an OSGi gateway has proven a great help to integrate them. This paper discusses an approach to the integration of pen and paper with networked appliances using an OSGi gateway. Because of the use of an OSGi gateway, the approach is not restricted to controlling devices which use a specific single network protocol. Rather, the approach can be used with appliances which communicate using a wide variety of protocols.

Home automation is maturing with the increased deployment of networks and intelligent devices in the home. Along with new protocols and devices, new software services have emerged and worked together releasing the full potential of networked consumer devices. Services may include home security, climate control or entertainment. With such extensive interworking, the phenomenon known as service interaction, or feature interaction, appears. The problem occurs when services interfere with one another causing unexpected or undesirable outcomes. Whereas previous approaches to solving service interaction have focused on the service, the technique presented here concentrates on the device and its surrounding environment, as some interactions may happen through conflicting effects on the environment. The concept of environmental variables is introduced, a variable may be room temperature, movement or perhaps light. Drawing inspiration from the operating systems domain, access to the device and environmental variable is controlled. Using this technique, undesirable interactions are avoided.

This paper investigates the feature interaction problem, known from traditional telephony environments, in the context of Internet personal appliances (IPA). IPAs are dedicated consumer devices which contain at least one network processor. They include the Internet alarm clock, which takes into account road conditions or expected arrival times of air planes when setting the alarm time, or the Internet enabled fridge, which keeps an inventory of groceries and issues orders to suppliers. The results of our investigation are threefold. The first part of this paper introduces a service taxonomy supported by a list of example services. The second part discusses feature interactions between services for appliances. A classification for such interactions and example interactions and possible conflicts are presented. The final part contains an outline for an approach to handle such interactions.

The Intelligent Network (IN) allows rapid changes in the services provisioned and their functionality. Services may be supplied by different service providers, making it unlikely that all service specifications will be available for examination by any single agency. Approaches to handle feature interaction problems must be able to operate within these constraints. Work by the authors has produced a generic run time feature interaction manager (FIM) concept to manage feature interactions in a live network. It monitors features as black boxes, learns their "correct" behavior and uses this to determine when feature interactions have occurred. The paper describes and compares experiences using three different techniques to realize the proposed approach. These are: state sequence monitoring, artificial neural networks (ANN), and rule based monitoring which also includes integrated generic resolution approaches. The paper explores the design alternatives with the various techniques, and reports on the results obtained from experimentation.