D. Bottazzi

Bio: D. Bottazzi is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Middleware (distributed applications) & Affective computing. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 43 citations.

A Novel Middleware Solution to Improve Ubiquitous Healthcare Systems Aided by Affective Information

Abstract: The arousal of emotion might have consequences for physical health is a broadly acknowledged idea. Therapy for depression, prevention for heart pathologies, and rehabilitation treatments for drug addiction are just a few examples of application domains that may benefit from technologies capable of monitoring, detecting, representing, and disseminating information pertaining to patients' physical and psychological/emotional states. However, the design and development of healthcare applications of this kind is a rather challenging issue that requires to integrate sensor infrastructures, which are able to detect changes in patients' physiological and emotional states, and of sharing this information to interested caregivers, such as professional medical staff, relatives, and friends. This paper proposes the Pervasive Environment for AffeCtive Healthcare (PEACH) framework, a middleware level support for affective healthcare that incarnates these ideas and describes its effective functions in a drug addiction treatment application scenario.

Body Area Networks: A Survey

Abstract: Advances in wireless communication technologies, such as wearable and implantable biosensors, along with recent developments in the embedded computing area are enabling the design, development, and implementation of body area networks. This class of networks is paving the way for the deployment of innovative healthcare monitoring applications. In the past few years, much of the research in the area of body area networks has focused on issues related to wireless sensor designs, sensor miniaturization, low-power sensor circuitry, signal processing, and communications protocols. In this paper, we present an overview of body area networks, and a discussion of BAN communications types and their related issues. We provide a detailed investigation of sensor devices, physical layer, data link layer, and radio technology aspects of BAN research. We also present a taxonomy of BAN projects that have been introduced/proposed to date. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make BANs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.

Low-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Internet of Things Services: Comprehensive Survey and Future Perspectives

Abstract: Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have attracted a lot of attention, since they represent a new potential market. Along with the maturity of the technology and relevant regulations, a worldwide deployment of these UAVs is expected. Thanks to the high mobility of drones, they can be used to provide a lot of applications, such as service delivery, pollution mitigation, farming, and in the rescue operations. Due to its ubiquitous usability, the UAV will play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, and it may become the main key enabler of this vision. While these UAVs would be deployed for specific objectives (e.g., service delivery), they can be, at the same time, used to offer new IoT value-added services when they are equipped with suitable and remotely controllable machine type communications (MTCs) devices (i.e., sensors, cameras, and actuators). However, deploying UAVs for the envisioned purposes cannot be done before overcoming the relevant challenging issues. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, such as physical collision, but also regulation issues as this nascent technology could be associated with problems like breaking the privacy of people or even use it for illegal operations like drug smuggling. Providing the communication to UAVs is another challenging issue facing the deployment of this technology. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the UAVs and the related issues will be introduced. In addition, our envisioned UAV-based architecture for the delivery of UAV-based value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced, and the relevant key challenges and requirements will be presented.

Emotion representation, analysis and synthesis in continuous space: A survey

Abstract: Despite major advances within the affective computing research field, modelling, analysing, interpreting and responding to naturalistic human affective behaviour still remains as a challenge for automated systems as emotions are complex constructs with fuzzy boundaries and with substantial individual variations in expression and experience. Thus, a small number of discrete categories (e.g., happiness and sadness) may not reflect the subtlety and complexity of the affective states conveyed by such rich sources of information. Therefore, affective and behavioural computing researchers have recently invested increased effort in exploring how to best model, analyse, interpret and respond to the subtlety, complexity and continuity (represented along a continuum e.g., from −1 to +1) of affective behaviour in terms of latent dimensions (e.g., arousal, power and valence) and appraisals. Accordingly, this paper aims to present the current state of the art and the new challenges in automatic, dimensional and continuous analysis and synthesis of human emotional behaviour in an interdisciplinary perspective.