The main ambition of ACANTO is to produce effective and well tested technological solution to the problems of “aging well”. This ambition brings about compelling research opportunities on a number of cutting-edge scientific issues.
ACANTO seeks to build a successful research strategy building on three pillars. 1. the scientific excellence of the partners in the consortium, 2. the fundamental role played by users and stake-holders, 3. a careful organisation in tightly connected work-packages, each one centred on a specific area. An effective information flow and a constant cross-fertilisation between the activities in the different work-packages is key to the successful achievement of the project’s goal.
The logical flow of the work packages naturally reflects the structure of the ACANTO project. The first work package (WP1 – “User Centric Design”) ground the technological developments throughout the project length to the user and care givers needs.
Therefore, tWP1 is an overarching fundamental work package influencing and receiving feedback from all the other technical work packages, i.e., WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 and WP6, and to the experimental and validation work package WP8. WP2 – “Modelling” is mainly an enabler for the technological developments since it translates the social aspects influencing the user motion and preferences as well as the concept of “life zones” into motion models and high level descriptors for the user profiles, the activities and the environment that will be treated by the other work packages, which are deputed to implementing the ACANTO paradigm: perception, conception and execution. WP3 – “Perception of Users and Environment” is the first technological work package which is responsible to sense the user and the environment and extract the perceptual information to provide all kind of necessary information that is relevant and required to provide a high level of situational awareness. The collected information are used by WP4 – “Conception of Social Activities” to support the user inclusion and better living through an adequate strategic decision support based on the user profile and the cyber-physical social network. WP3 is also responsible to give the inputs to WP5 – “Execution Support of Social Activities”, which is the responsible to build-up algorithms deputed to take corrections in the execution of the planned activities responding to partially predictable environmental situations, and to monitor the correct course of actions.
The devices adopted in the project are instead designed in WP6 – “Design of Robotic Personal Devices” whose form factor and the definition of the information rendering, mainly through intuitive wearable haptic interfaces and visual user interface, is strictly related to the outcomes of WP1. The integration of all the functionalities defined in WP2, WP3, WP4 and WP5 is also carried out in this work package.
WP7 – “Cloud Infrastructure and Integration” provides support to WP4 and WP5 by offering different levels of service to these clients: the conception of activities is a quite static task (it may be executed only once a day, or anyway quite rarely); the planning of activities is instead a task more frequently executed for each user, finally the execution of activities is the more demanding task as for the required real-time response from the cloud. Additionally, the Cloud Infrastructure provides support to the environment representation defined in WP2. This work package provides the
infrastructure for the system experimental validation carried out in WP8.
The deployment in the foreseen application scenarios of the FriWalk working prototype is carried out in WP8 – “Experimental Validation”, which will be also responsible of its evaluation. Therefore, the primary source of input for WP8 come form WP6 and WP7. A strong interaction with WP1 will set the methodological ground to carry out the experimental validation.
WP9 – “Exploitation & Dissemination” will define the best strategies for the exploitation of technological artefacts developed in WP7 and in WP8. WP9 will also collect the scientific results from WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 and WP6 to secure their best exploitation in terms of visibility and scientific impact.
Finally, WP10 – Management is in charge of the correct management of the different activities and of the relation with the EC.
The ten work packages are described as follows:
WP1 – User Centric Design
WP2 – Modelling
WP3 – Perception of Users and Environment
WP4 – Conception of Social Activities
WP5 – Execution Support of Social Activities
WP6 – Design of Robotic Personal Devices
WP7 – Cloud Infrastructure and Integration
WP8 – Clinical Validation
WP9 – Dissemination and Exploitation
WP10 – Management