Research Student Project
Supervisor name & contact details:
Research Centre Name and Website (if
applicable)
Name
Dr. Damon Berry
School Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Email
damon.berry@dit.ie
Name
Paula Kelly
School Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Email
paula.kelly@dit.ie
http://Teapot.dit.ie
Please indicate if the intention is to transfer
from the Masters programme to the PhD
programme (if applicable)
No
Please indicate if the project is suitable for a
self-funded student
Yes
Funding Agency
DIT (Fiosraigh) funding
Scholarship Details
Please give details of student stipend and
research fees covered by the funding
Assistive Technology, instrumentation, web
services, the Internet of Things
Subject Area
Title of the Project
No
Ambient Intelligence to support a web-serviceaware domestic information appliance for
assisted living
Project Description (max 300 words)
According to parents and carers, scheduling and planning activities of daily living is one of the
most time consuming aspects of caring for people with intellectual disability. This project
seeks to develop, using universal design principles, a generalised context model and
accompanying general software architecture to support reasoning between web-service
information, sensor network measurements and the static or quasi-static user preferences
and context information selected by users themselves, carers and other stakeholders.
This general architecture will be used to develop a simple-to-use information and
communication appliance to support the care of intellectually impaired persons.
If you look around a modern home or business place, you can see what could now be
considered as “ambient” appliances. The user interfaces and mode of interaction with
certain traditional household devices such as aneroid barometers, electric clocks or wall
calendars, are literally centuries old. This project will re-imagine this functionality, in the age
of web services and sensor networks, in the context of ambient intelligence with a particular
focus on assistance for people with intellectual impairment.
Leading edge domestic sensor technology such as sensors produced by NeST Labs (NeSt Labs
2014) mix locally-sourced sensor data with information from web services. Well-structured
context information can help in this decision making process but context models of this type
are not freely available. This context deficit problem is particularly relevant for intellectually
impaired users who may not have the capacity to select options required to “set their
context” as would usually be the case for users of say a mobile phone app.
The student will develop an ambient intelligence-based information appliance featuring




information from distributed services
usable and well-structured context information and user preferences along different
dimensions (e.g. temporal, spatial, environmental) ,
a reasoning process,
a means of outputting information to the user.
Please indicate the student requirements for this project
min. high 2.1 BE in Electrical or Electronic Engineering. Preferrably 1.1
Student must have a strong interest and some experience in software development and must
demonstrate a very good standard of written and spoken English.
Deadline to submit applications (only for
funded projects)
Early summer 2015.