Previous | 
Home
Section: Application Domains
Ambient intelligence
Taking into consideration some scientific strategic choices made by the Nancy – Grand Est Research Center such as developing some platforms around Robotics and Smart Living Apartments, some members of the team have recentered their research toward “ambient intelligence and AI” . This choice has been also comforted by the launch by Inria of a Large-scale initiative project termed PAL (Personal assistant Living) in which we are strongly involved. The regional council of Lorraine also supports this new research line through the CPER, (project "situated computing" or "INFOSITU" (http://infositu.loria.fr ) whose the coordinator is a member of MAIA Team. Within this new domain of research in MAIA, we are thinking about the design of intelligent environments dedicated to eldely people with loss of autonomy. This domain of research is currently very active, taking up a societal challenge that developped countries have to address. In order to contribute to this resarch domain, we are currently developping several action lines both at the technological, scientific and service levels:
Evaluation of the degree of frailty of the elderly : We are currently designing a system whose the objective is twofold : assessing the risk of fall and evaluating the degree of frailty of the elderly. This issue is considered with more or less sophisticated sensors : one kinect, a network of kinects, an heterogeneous sensor network made up of an intelligent floor and a network of kinects. One simple idea which is currently developped is to determine either the center of mass of a person using one or several kinect, or the center of pressure and footsteps localization using an intelligent floor. The idea is to induce from these simple measures, the walking speed, the length of the steps and the position of the monitored persons.
People activity analysis: Sensitive or intelligent floors have attracted a lot of attention during the last two decades for different applications going from interaction capture in immersive virtual environments to robotics or human tracking, fall detection or activity recognition. Different technologies have been proposed so far either based on optical fiber sensing, pressure sensing or electrical near field. In PAL we envision a more more sophisticate approach in which both computation and sensing is distributed within the floor. This floor is made up of interconnected intelligent titles with can:
sense the environment activity through four weight sensors, an accelerometer and a magnetometer,
interact with users, robots or other sensor networks either by wireless/wire communication or through visual communication (each tiles being equipped be 16 leds).
Several scientific challenges are open to us
Concerning the second point, we envision several applications :