The Gator Tech Smart House – A Smart Home in a Box
An imminent crisis in healthcare and elder care threatens our economies and quality of life. The first cohorts of “baby boomers” are now 60 years or older, presaging a massive wave of aging “boomers” that could degrade American health care over the next quarter-century. Cost-effective, high impact technologies for personal health and independent living are urgently needed. I will present our experience and lessons learned in building “assistive environments” for the elderly and demonstrate some of the challenges faced in working on multi-disciplinary, human-centric research. I will also present ATLAS, a middleware architecture and a sensor platform that supports self-integration and enables SODA - a service oriented device architecture for programming pervasive spaces. I will show how ATLAS and SODA were used as the foundation on which we built and programmed the Gator Tech Smart House, and how it enabled pervasive application development, data collection, and analysis. I will then delineate the limitations of ATLAS and SODA and present our ongoing work on programming models, namely, the event-driven service oriented model, and a safety oriented model. Finally, I will present our recent research on scalable activity modeling and recognition.
Dr. Sumi Helal is Professor in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, and Director of its Pervasive and Mobile Computing Laboratory. His active areas of research focus on understanding and enabling cyber-physical computing systems and their human-centric applications. Specifically he and his research team investigate middleware, programming models and methodologies to define and support the entire lifecycle of pervasive spaces. From 2001-2207, Dr. Helal was Director of Technology Development of the University of Florida Rehabilitating Engineering Research Center (RERC). He is co-founder and Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, a large ongoing project aiming at creating technological breakthroughs that will allow the Smart Home Concept to be successfully commercialized (creating the “Smart Home in a Box” concept). He is a co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is also the Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He currently serves as Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Computer magazine and serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He published extensively and is inventor/co-inventor of 16 patents or pending patent applications. He has been a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since October 2000. Dr. Helal organized over 20 IEEE/ACM conferences as General or Program Chair. In 2009 he was General Chair of the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Dr. Helal earned his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University in 1991. Before joining the University of Florida, he held academic and industrial research positions at the University of Texas at Arlington, Purdue University and MCC, in Austin, Texas.