A Smart Multi-Sensor Approach to Monitoring Weak People in Indoor Environments

Abstract

This paper deals with a novel system to assist weak people while exploring indoor environments. The proposed architecture is aimed to monitor the position and inertial behavior of users as well as environmental status (e.g. temperature, humidity, gases leakage, or smoke). The system is based on a Wireless Sensor Network and smart paradigms which extract relevant information from data collected through the multi-sensor architecture. The data collected are then processed to build awareness of User-Environment Interaction and User-Environment Contextualization. This knowledge is used to build information that is useful to the user for safe and efficient exploitation of the environment and to the supervisor for a suitable assessment and management of hazard situations. The paper mainly focuses on the multi-sensor system architecture and smart paradigms used to implement the User-Environment Contextualization feature.

From Data Acquisition to Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Review and a Roadmap for the Identification of Activities of Daily Living Using Mobile Devices

“…Social networks are widely used and promote context-aware applications, as data can be collected with the user’s mobile device sensors to promote the adaptation of the mobile applications to the user-specific lifestyle [ 102 ]. Context-aware applications are an important research topic; Andò [ 103 ] proposed an architecture to adapt context-aware applications to a real environment, using position, inertial and environmental sensors (e.g., temperature, humidity, gases leakage or smoke). The authors claim this system is very useful for the management of hazardous situations and also to supervise various physical activities, fusing the data in a specific architecture.…”

“…Distributed systems for sensor data fusion with off-the-shelf mobile devices have been used for tracking [ 120 , 121 , 122 , 126 , 147 ], location detection [ 83 , 84 , 123 , 124 , 148 , 149 ], health monitoring [ 99 , 103 , 119 ], user monitoring [ 113 , 150 ], automotive systems [ 151 ] and other purposes.…”