Table Of ContentVangelis Karkaletsis
Stasinos Konstantopoulos · Nikolaos S. Voros
Roberta Annicchiarico · Maria Dagioglou
Christos P. Antonopoulos Editors
RADIO—
Robots in
Assisted Living
Unobtrusive, Efficient, Reliable and
Modular Solutions for Independent
Ageing
RADIO—Robots in Assisted Living
Vangelis Karkaletsis • Stasinos Konstantopoulos
Nikolaos S. Voros • Roberta Annicchiarico
Maria Dagioglou • Christos P. Antonopoulos
Editors
RADIO—Robots in Assisted
Living
Unobtrusive, Efficient, Reliable and Modular
Solutions for Independent Ageing
123
Editors
Vangelis Karkaletsis Roberta Annicchiarico
Institute of Informatics Clinical and Behavioral Neurology
and Telecommunications, Laboratory
NCSR “Demokritos” IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia
Aghia Paraskevi Rome
Greece Italy
Stasinos Konstantopoulos Maria Dagioglou
Institute of Informatics Institute of Informatics
and Telecommunications, and Telecommunications,
NCSR “Demokritos” NCSR “Demokritos”
Aghia Paraskevi Aghia Paraskevi
Greece Greece
Nikolaos S. Voros Christos P. Antonopoulos
Embedded System Design and Application Embedded System Design and Application
Lab, Department of Computer Lab, Department of Computer
and Informatics Engineering and Informatics Engineering
Technological Educational Institute Technological Educational Institute
of Western Greece of Western Greece
Patras Patras
Greece Greece
ISBN 978-3-319-92329-1 ISBN 978-3-319-92330-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92330-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942515
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or
for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
Recognizing the highly dynamic area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environ-
ments and their potentially huge societal and economic impact, the Horizon 2020
programme set a research topic on integrating robotics technologies in AAL
environments. The RADIO project approached the topic with an investigation that
spanned three technical topics: (a) integrating machine vision and, more generally,
robot perception with Smart Home technical capabilities into a health monitoring
system; (b) moving machine vision algorithms to hardware-based processing
accelerators; and (c) managing and processing the sensitive raw content collected and
the health-related information derived from it. But, most importantly, RADIO
investigated the interaction between these technical capabilities and the ever-present
and ever-pressing need to balance between what monitoring is medically required, the
value of health records to medical research and what levels of obtrusion these
medical requirements justify.
To elaborate and to avoid the obtrusion of having to use specific devices in order
to have data collected, we restricted our sensing equipment to what is useful and
desired independently of its monitoring functionality: a robot that helps you find
misplaced items and a Smart Home that automates daily chores are nice things to
have; if the same hardware can also be used to collect data about the ability to
perform activities of daily living, so much the better. Hardware-based processing is
a low-power alternative to CPU processing which increases the robot’s battery
autonomy, but it is also a safeguard for privacy, touching upon questions of ethics,
dignity and obtrusiveness: sensitive content is kept safe by immediately processing
at the source and directly discarding, without ever storing in any computer. Finally,
the distributed management of medical data can offer new opportunities for both
medical practice and medical research, without compromising privacy.
v
vi Preface
We hope that you will enjoy the RADIO book and appreciate the insights it
intends to provide in a topic that cuts across the humanities, health, information
technology and engineering disciplines.
Aghia Paraskevi, Greece Vangelis Karkaletsis
Aghia Paraskevi, Greece Stasinos Konstantopoulos
Patras, Greece Nikolaos S. Voros
Rome, Italy Roberta Annicchiarico
Aghia Paraskevi, Greece Maria Dagioglou
Patras, Greece Christos P. Antonopoulos
Acknowledgements
The research work that provided the material for this book was carried out during
2015–2018 in the Horizon 2020 RADIO RIA Project (Robots in assisted living
environments: Unobtrusive, efficient, reliable and modular solutions for indepen-
dent ageing) funded by the European Commission under the Grant Agreement
number 643892.
The guidance and the comments of the Project Officer Ms. Monika Lanzenberger
and of the external reviewers are highly appreciated.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction to the RADIO Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Vangelis Karkaletsis, Stasinos Konstantopoulos
and Nikolaos S. Voros
Part I Early Detection of Emerging Functional Impairments
2 A System of Recognition Services for Clinical Assessment . . . . . . . 7
Theodoros Giannakopoulos, Stasinos Konstantopoulos,
Georgios Siantikos and Vangelis Karkaletsis
3 Obtrusiveness Considerations of AAL Environments . . . . . . . . . . . 19
S. Ariño Blasco, D. Navarro Llobet and G. Koumanakos
4 Realistic and Unobtrusive Solutions for Independent Ageing . . . . . 33
M. Dagioglou, S. Ariño Blasco, D. Navarro Llobet
and S. Konstantopoulos
Part II The RADIO System
5 Integrating Robots and WSN: Communication and Interfacing
Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Christos P. Antonopoulos, Christos Panagiotou,
Konstantinos Antonopoulos, Alexandros Spournias, Nikolaos Voros,
Fynn Schwiegelshohn, Philipp Wehner, Michael Huebner,
Diana Göhringer, Raquel Ventura, Alberto Fernández,
Georgios Stavrinos and Evangelinos Mariatos
6 ROS as Integration Medium for Service Robotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Georgios Stavrinos and Román Navarro García
ix
x Contents
7 Accelerating AAL Home Services Using Embedded Hardware
Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Georgios Keramidas, Christos P. Antonopoulos, Nikolaos S. Voros,
Fynn Schwiegelshohn, Philipp Wehner, Michael Huebner,
Diana Göhringer and Evaggelinos Mariatos
8 Designing User Interfaces for the Elderly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Maria Rigou, Spiros Sirmakessis, Raquel Ventura,
Alberto Fernández, Christos P. Antonopoulos and Nikolaos Voros
9 The Ecosystem of Connected RADIO Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Angelos Charalambidis, Giannis Mouchakis
and Stasinos Konstantopoulos
Part III The Road to Commercialization
10 Roadmap to Expanding Alternatives to Hospitalization . . . . . . . . . 167
Roberta Annicchiarico, Fulvia Adriano, Sergio Ariño-Blasco
and Diana Navarro-Llobet
11 Robots in Home Automation and Assistive Environments . . . . . . . 177
Rafael López Tarazón, Román Navarro García, Sofia Aivalioti,
Raquel Ventura and Vagelis Mariatos
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
About the Editors
Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis is Research Director and Head of the Software and
Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL), Institute of Informatics and
Telecommunications, NCSR “Demokritos”. His research interests are in the areas
of big data management, content analysis, natural language interfaces, ontology
engineering and personalization. He has organized international summer schools,
workshops and conferences. He is currently Director of the MSc program on Data
Science, and responsible for the Institute educational activities. He is co-founder
of the spin-off company ‘i-sieve Technologies’ that exploited SKEL research work
on online content analysis. He is currently involved in the founding of the new
spin-off company NewSum that exploits SKEL technology on multilingual and
multi-document summarization. Dr. Karkaletsis coordinated the Radio project.
Dr. Stasinos Konstantopoulos holds an M.Eng. in Computer Engineering
(University of Patras, Greece, 1997), an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence (Edinburgh
University, UK, 1998) and a Ph.D. on machine learning and computational logic
(Groningen University, The Netherlands, 2003). He leads Roboskel, the robotics
activity of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR
“Demokritos”. His main research interests are artificial intelligence and computa-
tional logic, and their applications to semantic modelling, data management and
robot perception. He has published several papers in these fields and is or has been
on the program and organizing committees of various international conferences,
including chairing the Programme Committee of the 6th Hellenic AI Conference
(SETN 2010), Athens, 2010. Dr. Konstantopoulos was the scientific manager of the
Radio project.
Dr. Nikolaos S. Voros received his Diploma in Computer and Informatics
Engineering, in 1996, and his Ph.D. degree, in 2001, from University of Patras,
Greece. His research interests fall in the area of embedded system design, and
include specification techniques for complex embedded telecommunication sys-
tems, hardware–software co-design, formal refinement techniques and reuse prac-
tices. Currently, Dr. Voros is Assistant Professor at Technological Institute of
xi
