Logical interactions for heterogeneous IoT entities via virtual world mirrors in support of Ambient Assisted Living

摘要

In Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), as an important applied area of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, logical entity interaction establishes an intelligent virtual world in which heterogeneous entities are emulated by object-oriented mirrors through tightly cooperating sensors and actuators from different spaces in the real world; this enables the system to generate intelligent services to support human behaviour. However, until now, few researchers have focused on enabling interactions between heterogeneous IoT entities for AAL services. Further, in relevant studies regarding semantic entity interactions, researchers have mainly focused on enabling semantic interactions between sensors (rather than integral entities) for the purpose of coordinating and managing data resources, where tight collaborations between sensors and actuators are not emphasised. Hence, the system capability of initialising intelligent service to enhance human experience has not been properly emphasised, to date. This paper discusses enabling logical object-oriented IoT entity interactions to enrich AAL services for humans through the creation of mirrors in the virtual world emulating the attributes and behaviours of heterogeneous entities via cooperating sensors and actuators in the real world. This paper introduces the Entity Device Collocating (EDC) Platform to globally locate and retrieve sensors and actuators respectively adhering to the attributes and behaviours of integral mirrors in the virtual world; this is intended to enable the interoperability between virtual and real worlds. Interactions are created upon entity mirrors mapping entities from the physical world to the virtual world, during which interactions continue to evolve based on the service logics. The proposed technique is applied to a typical AAL case of smart pill-ingestion, where a demo is implemented for verification. Comparing with relevant research, the proposed technique contributes by introducing a flexible and scalable IoT entity interaction method targeting AAL to address human needs.