An Integrated Approach To Human-In-The-Loop Systems And Online Social Sensing

As the number of smart devices that surround us increases, so do the possibilities of leveraging them to create intelligent, socially-aware systems. However, apart from e-health systems, few applications consider humans as active system players. In fact, most applications/systems have the sole objective of providing some service to humans without considering their intents, actions or emotions. In this respect, they can be looked at as open loop, rather than integrating humans in a feedback loop, with potential to react to and change the environment. Systems that do consider human feedback are called Human- in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical-Systems (HiTLCPS). In this paper we propose an approach that implements the HITLCPS concept. The developed platform, called ISABELA, explores both online social networks (OSN) data as well as a variety of other data, such as environmental data and personal mobile devices data, thus combining IoT, social sensors and mobile sensing. In addition to presenting the system architecture, the paper provides results obtained during field trials.