With the growing popularity of wearable devices and smartphones, mobile crowdsourcing applications (MCNs) have prevailed as a standard for collectively gathering geo-spatial information. This can be very valuable, especially in the public transport section where the associated challenge consists of acquiring area-wide accessibilty information for points of interest. The aim of this work is to describe the implementation of a mobile crowdsourcing platform for the secure recording of accessibility information: mobisaarWORLD. We analyse and discuss which approach is best for its implementation with a focus on ensuring security, privacy and trust. We examine in detail the state-of-the-art in the field, taxonomies of crowdsourcing platforms and the associated security, privacy and trust requirements, issues and countermeasures. In order to measure the effectiveness of the applied countermeasures and the resulting security properties, the platform is then compared to OpenStreetMap. We show that the mobisaarWORLD is able to provide a simple, but effective verification mechanism to ensure data trust and that it can provide personal information privacy, in particular location privacy for its workers.

In the light of the German national energy system transformation, the so-called “Energiewende”, the requirements for a sustainable energy supply based on renewables are very complex. To address this topic, the project Designetz develops approaches to test how decentralized renewable energy sources and the need for electrical energy can affect the respective network infrastructure levels and how an intelligent information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure can look like, to meet the demands of the energy network of the future, also in the context of smart cities. First results indicate that a transformation towards an increasingly decentralized energy supply is necessary and, particularly in view of the volatility, demands corresponding requirements of the ICT infrastructure. It will be shown how the classic producer-consumer constellation is changed and a multitude of prosumers, i.e. actors, who are both producers and consumers of electricity, arise, and how they can be integrated into the grid structure. Core functionalities will be demonstrated with an integrated data and service platform which also allows the possible integration of supplementary services. In addition, the potential interdependencies from a more decentralized energy network towards regional and urban planning patterns will be assessed.

The goal of the DiDiER project is to verifiably improve services in the field of dietary counselling. This will be achieved by digitising information to increase counselling intensity and to improve workflows for the service provider. The project will develop an IT-based support system for dietary counselling, covering two use cases, facilitation and support of the work of nutritionists in ambulatory allergological nutrition counselling and of nutritionists involved in the care of geriatric patients, especially of those with frailty. One of the project's significant features is that the user's sensitive data remain under his or her personal control at all times.

We are interested in an alternative to “built-in one-size-fits-all” user interfaces for appliances and services in intelligent environments. The ISO/IEC 24752 Universal Remote Console (URC) technology provides an open box that can connect arbitrary users with arbitrary appliances and services. Its core is the Universal Control Hub (UCH), a middleware providing standardized abstract interfaces that serves as a contract between a personalized user interface and the appliances/services. The UCH allows for “plugging” a new user interface into the abstract interface to adapt it to the user’s needs. Whereas the URC approach applies to intelligent environments in general (IoT, IoS), it has shown to be particularly useful when accessibility is a mandatory requirement. In order to foster an ecosystem that allows for sharing third-party resources, the Open URC Alliance has been founded. However, third-party resources are potential threats, which can harm the platform, its connected appliances, and even other resources involved. In fact, we are convinced that future usage of networked technologies, such as the URC technology, will not be possible unless a user will trust it. In this paper, we describe a pioneering effort by which we through a security-by-design approach along the prescriptions of the ISO/IEC 15408 common criteria (CC) methodology systematically develop and implement a secure UCH that guarantees fundamentally necessary security–privacy–trust properties, such as access control, role concepts, correct transportation of sensitive data, etc. The implementation is targeting a certification on the evaluation assurance level 4, that is, Methodically Designed, Tested and Reviewed.

To allow persons with mobility issues to remain mobile, the three-year project Mobia set out to develop a technology-supported human-based service within public transport: mobility guides provide a helping hand for passengers with mobility issues. The Mobia system can be positioned within the field of AAL and consists of multiple user interfaces and actors to coordinate and realise the point of service. This paper introduces two extension to the User-Centred Design methodology which were successfully applied during the course of the project. The first is the development of a large board game like demonstrator that allows for simulation of realistic scenarios within the scenario during which observation of user behaviour can take place. The second – regulars’ table – is a monthly face2face meeting between developers, passengers and mobility guides serving as a platform for exchanging experiences, testing and discussing new ideas. Results from the Mobia project are discussed.

The Mobia project is a 3-year R&D project focussing on making public transport more accessible for elderly persons and persons with mobility impairments. We research and develop of a combination of a human service system consisting of on the one hand mobility helpers, that is, humans available for helping passengers with things they cannot do or are uncomfortable with, such as, entering and exiting the carriers. On the other hand, we develop a technological backbone containing a coordination system and user interfaces for passengers, mobility helpers and the Mobia call center with the goal of coordinating the point of service. The project applies a user-centred design methodology in which qualitative (N = 29) and quantitative (N = 250) interviews have been used to identify barriers in public transport, develop personae and scenarios.

Home environments are one of the subjects of study regarding ambient intelligent systems for various purposes, including development of assistance systems for the elderly and energy consumption optimization. Sensing the environmental state via different sensors is the first and crucial component of every ambient intelligent system. In this work we investigate the use of environmental sounds for touch-free audio-based device recognition in a home environment. For this purpose, we analyzed sound characteristics of typical home appliances using different processing techniques. We are using the acquired knowledge to develop a flexible set of features, which can be set manually or determined automatically. To classify the device-specific acoustic fingerprints – consisting of a significant subset of our features – we use established supervised learning techniques, whereby we optimized the straightforward ones. After building a recognition basis for the recognition of fixed length sound buffers on demand, we implemented a live recognition mode for real-time environment monitoring, providing runtime setup adjustments. We then extended our work with the recognition of untrained, simultaneously working, known devices by mixing their records, utilizing semi-supervised learning. We then anticipated promising results in our evaluation in various aspects, including recognition rate, performance for the different combinations of features, as well as to study the reliability of an automatic mixing of trained data.

With recent advancements in supporting fields like Embedded Systems and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), intelligent environments are becoming reality. Learning and adapting to user behaviors and gaining some basic knowledge about the underlying user intentions and activities are essential features of an intelligent system. Many systems use an underlying environment model with spatial and semantic information, and often the manual creation of such spatial semantic models is an error-prone and time-consuming task. Moreover, these approaches often neglect how people actually use their physical space. The concept of Activity Zones defines the environmental context by regions of similar user activities and can be learned by observing human behavior. In this paper, we present our approach to extend the notion of Activity Zones by applying a three-dimensional zone computation and visualization process that is independent from the present smart home infrastructure and that is able to autonomously adapt to changes in the environment as well as to shifts in the user behavior.

Noticeable, within the area of Smart Homes, Intelligent Environment and/or Ambient Assisted Living the research deviates into two main branches. On the one hand, there are the agent-based distributed approaches providing intelligent services with focus on data analysis. On the other hand there are the centralized middleware platforms with the main focus on interfacing appliances and services and providing accessible user personalized and interfaces. To bridge this gap, we propose to integrate FIPA Specifications compliant MAS approaches with a standardized middleware platform, the ISO/IEC 24752 Universal Remote Console (URC). By doing so, we resolve two problems that have been neglected so far. Firstly, we provide for MASs a standardized way of interfacing arbitrary appliances and services. Secondly, we allow to deploy personalized and accessible user interfaces for MAS. Additionally, from the point of view of the URC technology, we provide a uniform way to interact with agents. We illustrate the capabilities of the proposed framework with a centralized, decentralized, and hybrid setup scenario.