DistriMuSe
Distributed multi-sensor systems for human safety and health
Our everyday activities are assisted by a variety of technological devices with diverse levels of intelligence, ultimately designed to serve us and make our lives easier. Applications on mobile phones, wrist-worn sports and health sensors, autonomous vacuum cleaners, robots cooperating with workers on the factory floor and an increasing number of driving aids in our vehicles– all pledge to facilitate our duties and keep us safe and healthy. Seamless interplay with these devices gains importance as they proliferate and grow in their capacity and autonomy. We expect continuous availability of the services they provide − yet we want them to disappear unobtrusively in the background when not needed. To provide support in a collaborative environment where human, physical and digital players coexist, the technology needs to be equipped with sensors that grasp human presence, as well as with processing intelligence which permits to infer, to a certain degree, our mental and physical state, our activities and our intentions. This is required to ensure human safety, safeguard our health, and allow for natural interaction.
DistriMuSe intends to support human health and safety by improved sensing of human presence, behaviour and vital signs in a collaborative or common environment by means of multi-sensor systems, distributed processing and machine learning.
The project will work in three domains through specific use cases that will illustrate the potential of our approach to improve human health and safety. These use cases and their high-level objectives are:
- Continuous hybrid health monitoring – aimed at providing means to continuously and unobtrusively monitor a person’s health state to enable 1) early detection of adverse health developments in elderly people, 2) near-clinical sleep monitoring at home to detect sleep-related health issues, and 3) timely and personalized rehabilitation and coaching services.
- Situational awareness for VRU and driver safety – focused on ensuring safe traffic and especially protecting the VRU (vulnerable road users) by the continuous monitoring of 1) the behaviour and intentions of VRUs when interacting with traffic, and 2) the drivers’ ability to drive and ensuring their attention is appropriate for the given traffic situation including VRUs.
- Safe interaction with robots – dedicated to factory floors shared by human workers and robots, enabling more efficient human-robot cooperation by providing the robots with better monitoring capabilities of the presence and an understanding of the intentions of their human counterparts. Our goal is gradually eliminating the safety fences that separate humans and industrial robots in such environments, permitting an efficient and safe collaboration between them.
From SEDS our efforts in the project are focused on using deterministic communications to support the security of the systems, especially in robotic environments and the control of critical signals. The communication of robotic control equipment and its interface to the virtualized systems will be done through standardized technologies such as TSN (Time Sensitive Networking), ensuring guaranteed bandwidths and latencies.