S Au ms tb ai ei n at b Ass

l i t iy s t e d L i v i n g

Bridging e-Health and

the Internet of Things:
The SPHERE Project
Ni Zhu, Tom Diethe, Massimo Camplani, Lili Tao, Alison Burrows, Niall Twomey,
Dritan Kaleshi, Majid Mirmehdi, Peter Flach, and Ian Craddock, University of Bristol

odays aging population and the rise in chronic health conditions is precipitating a shift toward empowering people to manage their care and

well-being at home. In particular, advances in ambient assisted living (AAL) are

An overview of the

providing resources that improve patients lives, as well as informing necessary

interventions from relatives, caregivers, and

rapidly growing body healthcare professionals.

The current challenge for the AAL inter-

of work underpinning disciplinary research community is discov-

ering how to build integrated, useful, and

deployable systems that can close the loop
from data sensing through processing enliving aims to uncover gines to end users. Such systems will rely on
sensor datasets and deliver in (quasi) real
time relevant contextual information to spethe gap between the
cific users, from clinicians and care providers to the individuals whose data are being
state of the art and
collected and processed. The premise of the
work in this area is that building profiles of
the broad needs of
activities of daily living (ADLs) will lead to
useful datasets that can scale to very large
healthcare services.
populations, supporting early diagnosis,
tracking the progress of chronic diseases, informing personalized treatment, and encouraging healthy behavior changes.
These systems are composed of several
subsystems and rely on various technologies, some of which are fit for this purpose
and some of which are still under development. Additional challenges arise when these
technologies have to cope with multiple end

ambient assisted

july/august 2015

users, as is typical in a domestic environment. A household often comprises several

people who might have differing healthcare
needs and individual preferences. For smart
home systems to be effective in detecting and
managing health conditions, they must provide meaningful clinical data but also be desirable to their domestic users.
This article provides an overview of current developments in the fields of sensing,
networking, and machine learning, with an
aim of underpinning the vision of the sensor
platform for healthcare in a residential environment (SPHERE) project. The main aim
of this interdisciplinary work is to build a
generic platform that fuses complementary
sensor data to generate rich datasets that
support the detection and management of
various health conditions.

Sensing Technologies in
Ambient Assisted Living
Sensing technologies are used in AAL for a
range of applications. Some existing solutions include physiological, environmental,
and vision sensors that frequently assist in

1541-1672/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

Published by the IEEE Computer Society

39

Commercial products

Ambient Assisted Living

System

Raw data freely

accessible

Data
aggregation

Application

Expandability

Fitbit

Fitness

Limited

Jawbone Up

Fitness

Limited

Nike+ Fuelband SE

Fitness

Pebble Steel

Fitness

Withings blood
pressure montor

Measurement of
blood pressure

Limited

Fit Shirt

Vital signs monitoring

Vital signs monitoring

Physiological signals
monitoring

Vital signs monitoring

Limited

Activity recognition

V-Patch

Research
outputs

Multiple
signals

Verity AAL3
H@H4
Activity Recognition
System5

Figure 1. Physiological signal-monitoring systems. Different concept-to-prototype systems have been proposed and
implemented in response to various healthcare issues.

health monitoring in the home. They

help characterize users everyday activities by providing long-term sensing
data that, in combination with ambient intelligence algorithms, contribute
to behavior pattern recognition.1 In
the following subsections, we discuss
the distinctions frequently adopted in
the literature and caused by the different data outputs and approaches.
However, one of SPHEREs aims is to
integrate these various sensing modalities into an Internet of Things (IoT)
solution for AAL.
Physiological Signal Monitoring

Physiological signals provide health evidence directly from the human body
via diverse biosensors that measure various physiological parameters.2 These
biosensors are deployed through an
implantable (in-body), wearable (onbody), portable (off-body), or environmental modality. Of these, implantable
sensors are the most intrusive and are
included in this list merely for completenessthe aspiration in AAL has
been to foster comfort through unobtrusive technology. Further research
40

into telecare, telehealth, and telemedicine systems has improved biomedical

sensing efficacy.
Recently, the advent of personal
wearable devices for self-monitoring
has pushed research outputs and fashionable electronic gadgets into the
consumer space. Different conceptto-prototype systems have been proposed and implemented in response
to individual healthcare issues. Figure 1 summarizes several representative systems, their individual features,
and their architectures.35 A typical
biomedical sensing system is composed of a data acquisition module
that collects various biomedical signals, a signal-processing module, a
communication gateway (normally a
computer or smartphone) that forwards data over the Internet, and a
monitoring center. Mobile healthcare
(m-health) uses smartphones and hand
held devices for biomedical signal
monitoring.6
Almost all of these personal physiological signal-monitoring systems can
use various embedded sensors to synchronize data automatically from the
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device to the network gateway or

monitoring center. Although its
promising that these wearable selfmonitoring gadgets perform activity
tracking to collect ADL data, the case
analysis in Figure 1 shows that several
issues must be addressed for them to
truly support AAL systems, including
lack of long-term, continuous, easy-toaccess raw data that contains rich details of clinically relevant information;
lack of interoperability with other
healthcare systems; and
limited expandability to adapt to
new sensing data.
The technology is moving toward
more comfortable and desirable wearable devices and should build on users real-life attitudes and experiences.
Two big challenges are first, the absence of ambient information related
to the physiological data and second,
energy consumption (battery life). The
former could introduce sensing cognition difficulty or even bias, and the latter is actually a bottleneck to wearable
device proliferation.
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Application

Falls

Indoor localization

ADL recognition

Anomaly detection

Sensing modality

Suitable sensor type

Environment

Floor sensor, infrared (IR) sensor, microphone, pressure sensor

Wearable

Accelerometer

Video

RGB camera, depth sensor

Environment

Ultra wideband (UWB), wireless LAN (WLAN), IR, ultrasound, physical contact,
differential air pressure

Wearable

RFID, Bluetooth-enabled device

Video

RGB camera, depth sensor

Environment

Passive IR (PIR), light, microphone, television IR sensor, weather conditions,

internal and external light levels, temperatures, pressure, humidity, smart meters

Wearable

Accelerometer, blood pressure sensor, blood glucose monitors

Video

RGB camera, depth sensor, time-of-flight camera, thermal infrared imagery

Environment

PIR, microphone, IR sensor, weather conditions, internal and external light levels,
temperatures, pressure, humidity, solar average rate, wind speed and direction

Wearable

Tri-axial accelerometer, blood pressure sensors, blood glucose sensors

Video

RGB camera, depth sensor, infrared imagery

Figure 2. Sensor taxonomy of environment, wearable, and video sensing modalities used in ambient monitoring and activity
detection. This isnt an exhaustive summary, but it demonstrates different sensor modality usage.

Home Environment Monitoring

A smart home is a system of pervasive

information and communication technologies by which both the home environment and residents interactions with
it are unobtrusively monitored.2 A list
of sensors appears elsewhere,2 but its
by no means comprehensive and has
the potential to grow as the field of sensor technologies matures. Most AAL research projects use a diverse sensor portfolio rather than single sensors in various applications, as discussed later.
The fusion of ambient monitoring
and signal processing techniques assists with the accurate recognition of
activities or events in the home environment. Figure 2 provides an overview of some existing sensors and technology types, as well as their applications in a healthcare setting.7 It isnt
an exhaustive summary, but it demonstrates different sensor modality usage.
One prominent area of application
is fall detection8 via wearable, ambient,
july/august 2015

and camera-based approaches. Accurate

localization within the home environment is another important component in
AAL applications.9 Many ambient sensor systems have been applied to address
different health issues, such as mental
health, emotional state, sleep measures,
diabetes, and Alzheimers disease,10
monitoring individual daily activities for
health assessments and to detect deviation from a users behavioral patterns.
A good example is the Casas project,11
which treats environments in a smart
home as intelligent agents and uses technologies from machine learning and pervasive computing. Different versions of
smart home systems serve different purposes, including managing energy consumption, healthcare, home automation,
and home entertainment. They all provide rich ADL datasets, but even though
the data is available and can help identify
behavior profiles, theyve been relatively
underexplored and integrated as indicators of health and well-being. The major
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challenge in this space is system and data

integration for different commercially
available devices to support user-friendly
configuration.12 The datasets generated
from those different smart home systems
are disaggregated or less efficiently manipulated by advanced machine learning
algorithms. A truly generic AAL system
of systems that creates knowledge-based,
context-aware services for AAL is yet to
be realized.13
Vision-Based Monitoring

Intelligent visual monitoring has received a great deal of attention in the

past decade, especially because of increased interest in smart healthcare
systems in home environments. 14
Although a wide variety of sensing
technologies can be used for in-home
assistive systems, visual sensors have
the potential to address several limitationsspecifically, they dont require
the user to wear them, and they can
simultaneously detect multiple events.
41

Ambient Assisted Living

Technology

Frequency band

Bit rate

20/40/250
kbps
20/40/250
868/915 MHz/2.4 GHz
kbps

IEEE 802.15.4 868/915 MHz/2.4 GHz

ZigBee

Network topology

Maximum nodes IP enabled

P2P, star

Implementation
dependent

No

P2P, star, mesh (tree)

>64000

No

BLE

2.4 GHz

1 Mbps

P2P, star

Wi-Fi

2.4/5 GHz

<600 Mbps
(11n)

Star

Implementation
dependent
Implementation
dependent

No
Yes

Figure 3. Short-range wireless networking technologies in the home. WiFi has the
significant advantage of being Internet Protocol (IP) enabled.

Analysis of human motion via visual

information has been achieved through
the use of multicamera architectures
in indoor and outdoor environments15
and centralized or distributed platforms
predicated on processing requirements
and scalability issues. Recently, human
motion analysis algorithms have dramatically improved through the combination of color cameras and depth
sensors, the main advantages of the latter being their low cost and ability to
provide real-time, dense depth data
without intensive processing. These devices allow the extraction of detailed
3D information from a scene, boosting
their effectiveness in detecting the human shape. However, they suffer from
several limitations, such as interference
from natural light, scattering, and limited range. Although visual data provides rich information, most of it affects individuals privacy, prompting
researchers to develop different methods for ensuring privacy protection in
videos and images.14 Intelligent video
analysis lends itself well to many application areas in health monitoring.
Systems for daily-life assistance have
been designed to monitor people with
dementia, measure sleeping correlated
with respiration, and track medication
habits,16 with the vision systems in infotainment gadgets fueling research
interest in their use for healthcare applications.17 However, works based
solely on computer vision techniques
for monitoring and clinical evaluation
of movement disorders are still in their
infancy.
42

Fall detection is a major challenge in

healthcare for the elderly, with videobased technologies offering many advantages over popular wearable alarms
because they dont require user action
and theyre always active. Recently,
RGB-depth (RGB-D) devices have successfully outperformed other sensing
technologies for fall detection.8 In addition, the use of sensors on staircases
can reflect musculoskeletal problems
and recovery progress, with researchers
recently proposing a general method for
online estimation of quality of movement on stairs.18
The primary limitations of videobased systems come from cluttered environments, occluded scenes, and unstable lighting conditions. But even if
these issues can be reduced by using
multiple cameras or complementary devices, such as depth sensors, theyre still
open problems that must be tackled by
integrating the information provided
from different environmental sensors.
Moreover, in most real-world applications, analyzing and processing data
in real time is paramount, but existing
methods can fail due to computational
demands. The lack of a comprehensive
and realistic dataset is also an issue.

Networking Technologies
for Smart Homes
Existing networking technologies play
an increasingly prominent role in modern AAL designs. In-home communications are well supported, and their
performance, from a communication
system perspective, is relatively well
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understood. These technologies are stable and mature, with current research
focusing on incorporating different
communication technologies into clinical applications that feature heterogeneous devices with diverse communication protocols. What gives sensing
platforms the functionality of remote
monitoring is ubiquitous network connectivity to close the loop between residents and clinicians.
Due to existing in-home infrastructures, wired technologies commonly
provide high data-transmission rates.
Among these, power line communication technologies are evolving in the
field of smart home applications, especially advanced metering infrastructure
and automated home energy management. Widely adopted systems use X10,
KNX, and ITU-T G.Hn, IEEE 1901.2
Various wireless networking technologies and communication protocols are summarized elsewhere19; Figure 3 lists some of the typical shortrange wireless options. WiFi has the
significant advantage of being Internet
Protocol (IP) enabled. However, hardware with WiFi connectivity is still
relatively power hungry and less suitable for battery-powered sensor motes
in applications anticipating long-term
deployment. To break down this barrier, an adaptive sublayer 6LoWPAN
enables IPv6 for low-power, processing-limited, embedded hardware over
low-bandwidth wireless networks.
Adopting these networking technologies requires guaranteeing the necessary communications throughput,
power consumption, and hardware
costs. Beyond this, to fully underpin a multimodality sensor system in
a smart home, the IoT infrastructure
must provide ubiquitous connectivity
and interaction to all the sensing devices in a heterogeneous network circumstance. Additional advantages can
be gained through IP-|enabled sensing networks because they remove
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the need for translation gateways or

proxies in hardware and software,
thereby creating more seamlessly integrated AAL systems. However, datacollecting points in wireless sensor
networks must have identifiers to be
manipulated. If a unique name for a
sensor is defined by an IP (more likely,
an IPv6) address, the data-collecting
point can be addressable through the
whole end-to-end system.
Other important standards such as
UPnP/DLNA, ECHONET, Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi), and
Continua Health Alliance are reviewed
in detail elsewhere,20 but for this article,
it suffices to say that a significant barrier to their widespread use is their limited compatibility. Overlay networking
protocols and metadata technologies
aim to solve this problem. All AAL systems are built around a gateway device
that provides remote access to sensor
data to connect and bridge diverse networks. The home gateway implements
multiple functions, such as a local monitoring/controlling center, intelligent
agents, and network management. Nobuo Saito reviewed the home gateway
from a broad, practical perspective and
proposed an architecture suitable for
better implementation and management.21 In the context of a sensing platform for healthcare and well-being in a
smart home, middleware solutions embedded in the gateway address the
fusion of different clusters of sensors,
coordinating and managing highly heterogeneous systems. Several works
address AAL systems specifically because middleware solutions are often
designed for different application domainsfor example, openAAL middleware defines a framework on top of the
OSGi specification to facilitate integration and communication among services, including the context manager,
procedural manager, and composer.22
A key factor for the IoT infrastructure
to successfully enable AAL systems is
july/august 2015

to provide loosely coupled functionality, allowing autoconfiguration and

dynamic interoperability among not

only all devices but all end users as well.

(Bayesian) graphical models, coupled

with efficient inference algorithms,
provide a principled and flexible modeling framework.23

Pattern Analysis and

Machine Learning
The performance of different sensor
technologies, in terms of reliability, discriminative ability, and monetary and
energy costs, is context-dependent.
Readings from individual sensors must
be preprocessed, integrated, and mined
to provide the most likely model of activity that maximizes information content in the given health monitoring
context. Moreover, the decision-making process must be implemented and
fine-tunedin particular, it must consider the contextual knowledge of sensors and individuals.
Although weve seen some advances
in applying machine learning techniques to ADLs, an end-to-end system
doesnt currently exist in this space.
What follows is a discussion on the
state of the art of such a systems individual elements.

Feature Construction, Selection,

and Fusion

Quantification of Uncertainty

Multiple heterogeneous sensors in a

real-world environment introduce different sources of uncertainty. At a basic level, we might have sensors that
simply arent working or that are giving incorrect readings. More generally, a given sensor will at any given
time have a particular signal-to-noise
ratio; the types of noise corrupting the
signal might also vary.
Consequently, we need to handle
quantities whose values are uncertain,
and we need a principled framework
for quantifying uncertainty that will
let us build solutions in ways that can
represent and process uncertain values. A compelling approach is to build
a model of the data-generating process that directly incorporates each
sensors noise models. Probabilistic
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Given an understanding of data-generating processes, sensor data can be

interpreted to identify meaningful features, so its important that its closely
coupled to the development of individual sensing modalities.24 Sensors
might have strong spatial or temporal
correlations, or specific combinations
of sensors might be particularly meaningful. A key hypothesis underlying
the SPHERE project25 is that once
calibrated, many weak signals from
particular sensors can be fused into
a strong signal, allowing meaningful
health-related interventions.26
Based on the calibrated and fused signals, the system must decide whether intervention is required and which intervention to recommendinterventions
will need to be information gathering as
well as health providing. This is known
as the exploration-exploitation dilemma,
which must be extended to address the
challenges of costly interventions and
complex data structures.27
Adapting to Context and
Domain Knowledge

Data mining and decision making must

be contextualized and situated within a
wide body of nontrivial, health-related
background knowledge, which in turn
requires highly explanatory models.28
The operating context will vary from
training to deployment among different
applications, residents, and households,
so the incorporation of methods that
are robust to these variations is critical.
Continuous data streams can be
mined for temporal patterns that vary
among individuals; these patterns can
be directly built into the model-based
framework and additionally learned on
43

Ambient Assisted Living

Nonintrusive monitoring system

(that is, movement monitoring)

Home gateway/hub

Sensor 1

Internet

IP

Sensor 2
Sensor 3
Management hub

Home broadband

ZigBee/
6LoWPAN
Sink-node/dongle

IP

ZigBee-based WSN

Home router

Environment sensing system

Sensor 1

Cellular network AP

IP

Sensor 2
Sensor 3

Sensor 2

Home display unit

(non-IP)

Sensor 3
ZigBee-based WSN

BLE dongle

Energy consumption system

Ethernet/Wi-Fi/others

ZigBee/6LoWPAN-based WSN

Sensor 1

IP

IP

BLE-Wi-Fi bridge
BLE node
Smartphone/tablet

IP-network bridge

Ambient sensor network

SPHERE data hub

Camera

Wearable
sensors

Figure 4. The proposed system scenario of the sensing platform. The clustered-sensor approach is currently installed and running
in a real house in Bristol.

both group-wide and individual levels

to glean context-sensitive and -specific
patterns. A recent review of methods
for dealing with multiple heterogeneous
data streams appears elsewhere.29
Finally, interfaces will need to communicate data and predictions. Such
communications must be informative and assist in decision making
including the ability to communicate
uncertainty and conflicts within that
data, which is increasingly becoming
an important issue.30

Real-World Implementations
The premise for the SPHERE project is
that we dont know what data is necessary to drive analytics for ADL identification and standardization across
different homes and that single-modality sensing platforms cant answer this
44

question fully. To address this, SPHERE

has developed a multimodality sensing
platform to collect data from 100
houses in the Bristol area. Figure 4
shows the overall architecture, which
follows a clustered-sensor approach
and is currently installed and running
in a real house in Bristol.
The SPHERE system uses three sensing technologies: environment, video,
and wearable sensing. The environment
sensors include humidity, temperature,
air quality, noise level, luminosity, occupancy, door contacts, and utility consumption (water, gas, and electricity),
centrally and at the appliance and faucet level. The currently
deployed system uses 40 nodes, providing more than
90 data points, all structured and time
stamped to establish context and temporal relationships. The video sensors
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are RGB-D devices placed in various locations, such as the living room, kitchen,
hall, and staircases. The video sensors
let us gather information about residents cadence, gait, and 3D trajectory
throughout the smart environment. The
wearable sensors are Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices with dual accelerometer data; they support dual-operation
mode (connection-oriented and extra-low
energy connectionless communication
modes) to p
rovide full 50-Hz accelerator measurements in addition to localization services.
The data from each sensor cluster is
collected in a SPHERE home gateway
that maintains time synchronization in
the system and, in addition, controls data
access to ensure user privacy. The data
from the gateway is collected by a heterogeneous data management platform
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(SPHEREs data hub), which manages

data access and makes a d
ynamic library
of data analytics services available for
registered end users. The current system
is operational and undergoing scripted
validation experiments, with multiple
sensor domain data processed to establish ADLs against external (manual or
automatic) activity tagging. On deployment, the data from the environment,
wearable, and camera sensing subsystems are fused and processed in real
time for activity and health monitoring
in longitudinal and focused studies. A
key objective of the SPHERE project is
to deliver datasets with a strong focus on
the richness of metadata annotations, as
well as the experimental and user contexts to provide to the wider research
community a platform for improved understanding of their roles in behavioral
trends for healthcare.

ven at a high level, this overview

reveals certain gaps and challenges caused by the multidisciplinary
nature of the systems required to provide AAL data and applications. Some
of these challenges arent unique to ehealth, but theyre happening in fields
where researchers want data collected
in multiple domains from multiple
technological systemsnot necessarily designed or even deployed togetherto bring together a cohesive,
stable, and reliable view of the measured activities.
Although individual technologies
will continue to be developed, whether
wireless or wired, the main challenge
remains the design of analytics-driven,
data-gathering platforms that provide a
rich set of data efficiently, reliably, and
on-demand. SPHERE is addressing this
by building a multimodality sensing
system as an infrastructure platform
fully integrated, at design stage, with
intelligent data processing algorithms
driving the data collection.

july/august 2015

Acknowledgments

The SPHERE Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) includes more than 40 researchers working together and contributing
to the SPHERE vision. We acknowledge fully
the valued contribution, discussions, and exchange of ideas that have influenced the analysis in this article. A full list of SPHERE collaborators can be found at www.irc-sphere.ac.uk.
This work was performed under the
SPHERE IRC funded by the UK Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), grant EP/K031910/1.

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1. L. Chen et al., Activity Recognition
in Pervasive Intelligent Environments,
Atlantis Publishing, 2011.
2. M.R. Alam, M.B.I. Reaz, and M.A.M.
Ali, A Review of Smart Homes: Past,
Present, and Future, IEEE Trans.
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C:
Applications and Reviews, vol. 42, no. 6,
2012, pp. 11901203.
3. J. Winkley, P. Jiang, and W. Jiang, Verity:
An Ambient Assisted Living Platform,
IEEE Trans. Consumer Electronics,
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Sensor Signal Processing for Remote
Monitoring of Vital Signs in CHF
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5. P. Gupta and T. Dallas, Feature Selection
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9. P. Barsocchi et al., Evaluating Ambient

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45

Ambient Assisted Living

The Authors
Ni Zhu is a postdoctoral researcher working on the SPHERE project at the University of

Bristol. His research interests include the design and development of Internet-based embedded system, next-generation wireless sensor networks, and telemedicine systems. Zhu has a
PhD in telemedicine from the University of Manchester. Contact him at ni.zhu@bristol.ac.uk.

Tom Diethe is a research fellow on the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. His
research interests include probabilistic machine learning, computational statistics, learning
theory, and data fusion. Diethe has a PhD in machine learning applied to multivariate signal processing from University College London. Contact him at tom.diethe@bristol.ac.uk.
Massimo Camplani is a research associate on the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. His research interests include areas in computer vision. Camplani has a PhD in electronic and computer engineering from the Universit degli Studi di Cagliari. Contact him at
massimo.camplani@bristol.ac.uk.
Lili Tao is a postdoctoral researcher on the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. Her
research interests include human motion analysis, 3D deformable objects reconstruction,
and facial expression analysis. Tao has a PhD in computer vision from the University of
Central Lancashire. Contact her at lili.tao@bristol.ac.uk.
Alison Burrows is a postdoctoral researcher in User-Centred Design on the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include inclusive design, user experience, ethnography, and design research methodologies. Burrows has a PhD in inclusive design from Loughborough University. Contact her at alison.burrows@bristol.ac.uk.
Niall Twomey is a postdoctoral researcher on the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. His research interests include data mining, fusion of environmental sensors in smart
home environments, and the use of digital signal processing, machine learning, and application-centric decision making for objective health and wellness assessments. Twomey has
a PhD in machine learning applied to signal processing from University College Cork, Ireland. Contact him at niall.twomey@bristol.ac.uk.
Dritan Kaleshi is a senior lecturer of communication networks at the University of Bristol.

His research interests are in network protocols, distributed systems design and performance
evaluation, and data interoperability for sensor/actuator systems, including new networking architectures, protocols, and algorithms for large-scale, loosely coupled systems such as
the Internet of Things. Kaleshi represents the UK in various international standardization
bodies (ISO/IEC, CEN/CENELEC) related to home networking and the smart grid. Contact
him at dritan.kaleshi@bristol.ac.uk.

Majid Mirmehdi is a professor of computer vision in the Department of Computer Science

at the University of Bristol, and graduate dean and faculty graduate education director in
its faculty of engineering. His research interests include natural scene analysis and medical image analysis. Mirmehdi is editor in chief of IET Computer Vision Journal and an associate editor of the Pattern Analysis and Applications Journal. Hes a senior member of
IEEE and a fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Contact him at
m.mirmehdi@bristol.ac.uk.
Peter Flach is a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol. His research inter-

ests include mining highly structured data and the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models using receiver operating characteristic analysis. Flach is editor in chief of the Machine
Learning journal and author of Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms That Make
Sense of Data (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). Contact him at peter.flach@bristol.ac.uk.

Ian Craddock is director of the SPHERE project at the University of Bristol. He serves on

the steering board of the universitys flagship Elizabeth Blackwell Health Research Institute,
and is also Toshibas managing director for its Telecommunications Research Lab in Bristol,
responsible for a portfolio of both internal and collaborative communications, healthcare,
and smart city research. Contact him at ian.craddock@bristol.ac.uk.

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Overlay Networking Protocols and
Metadata for Controlling and
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21. N. Saito, Ecological Home Network: An

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26. L.A. Klein, Sensor and Data Fusion: A
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27. B.C. May et al., Optimistic Bayesian
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