Emanuele Lattanzi

Università degli Studi di Urbino "Carlo Bo" | UNIURB · Department of Pure and Applied Sciences

The capability of effectively quantifying the uncertainty associated to a given prediction is an important task in many applications that range from drug design to autonomous driving, providing valuable information to many downstream decision-making processes. The increasing capacity of novel machine learning models, and the growing amount of data...

The increasing diffusion of tiny wearable devices and, at the same time, the advent of machine learning techniques that can perform sophisticated inference, represent a valuable opportunity for the development of pervasive computing applications. Moreover, pushing inference on edge devices can in principle improve application responsiveness, reduce...

With the dramatic increase of the Internet of Medical Things devices, self and remote health data monitoring is consistently receiving more attention. However, medical devices are usually challenging to deploy due to privacy regulations, and they generally leverage a centralized third party. Enabling data sharing would enhance new medical studies,...

Current guidelines from the World Health Organization indicate that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which results in the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is transmitted through respiratory droplets or by contact. Contact transmission occurs when contaminated hands touch the mucous membrane of the mouth, nose, or eyes so hands hygiene is extremely...

Current guidelines from the World Health Organization indicate that the SARSCoV-2 coronavirus, which results in the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is transmitted through respiratory droplets or by contact. Contact transmission occurs when contaminated hands touch the mucous membrane of the mouth, nose, or eyes. Moreover, pathogens can also b...

Traffic crashes are one of the biggest causes of accidental death in the way where, every year, more than 1.35 million of people die. In most of them, the main cause is related to the driver’s behavior. The driver performs a set of actions on the vehicle commands, such as steering, braking, accelerating or changing gear, which generate a direct res...

The development of large scale systems of networked embedded devices with sensing capabilities relies on the availability of low-cost and resource-constrained components However, the reduced precision and accuracy of low-cost sensors on board of low-power platforms risks to impair the overall reliability of these systems, thus preventing their pote...

The privacy issue limits the Internet of Medical Things. Medical information would enhance new medical studies, formulate new treatments, and deliver new digital health technologies. Solving the sharing issue will have a triple impact: handling sensitive information easily, contributing to international medical advancements, and enabling personalis...

Nowadays, there are a lot of new mobile devices that have the potential to assist healthcare professionals when working and help to increase the well-being of the people. These devices comprise the Internet of Medical Things, but it is generally difficult for healthcare institutions to meet compliance of their systems with new medical solutions eff...

Most road accidents occur due to human fatigue, inattention, or drowsiness. Recently, machine learning technology has been successfully applied to identifying driving styles and recognizing unsafe behaviors starting from in-vehicle sensors signals such as vehicle and engine speed, throttle position, and engine load. In this work, we investigated th...

According to recent studies, mobility and balance problems represent a risk factor for elderly people, resulting into augmented fall probabilities with negative impact on medical, social and economical aspects. Posturographic analysis plays a major role in clinical applications, enabling the evaluation of standing balance and the quantification of...

Assessment of balance by means of posturographic analysis is frequently used in the clinical practice for evaluating the risk of falls or as an indicator of balance-related disorders. The development of automatic, affordable and accurate systems for gauging balance capabilities in the elderly is deemed a crucial step towards the adoption of prevent...

Wireless sensor networks are nowadays considered an enabling technology for a wide spectrum of cyber-physical systems applications. However, in order to cope with stringent dependability and energy efficiency requirements, several research challenges have to be solved. Electromagnetic interference, for instance, adversely affects wireless communica...

The possibility of emulating renewable energy sources by means of portable, low-cost embedded devices is a key factor for the design and validation of ultra low-power networked embedded systems. Full characterisation of hardware-software platforms used for reliably and adaptively generating energy traces is therefore needed in order to clearly unde...

Interference signals negatively impact the performance of wireless embedded systems. The increased packet losses, delays and energy consumption experienced by devices operating in environments subject to interference is particularly critical in constrained systems, like wireless sensor networks. The need to design and test systems for mitigating th...

Reliability is nowadays considered a key requirement in wireless sensor networks for their increasing diffusion in various Internet of Things applications. However, radio interference from various sources may heavily affect the performance of wirelessly connected embedded devices, resulting into increased packet collisions and congestions. There is...

Energy harvesting is increasingly considered a key technology for the design of autonomous embedded systems. However, the design, deployment and validation of systems exploiting the energy scavenged from the environment to sustain their operativeness, poses considerable research challenges, especially in a networked context. Emulation is regarded a...

Achieving occupants comfort in built environments is a major goal of modern building automation systems. Nonetheless, even a quantification of human comfort represents a significant challenge because of the number of physical quantities affecting it which, therefore, have to be tracked at suitable spatial and temporal resolution. Wireless sensor an...

Distributed computation of average consensus is an important function in numerous wireless sensor networks and ad-hoc networks applications. In light of the severe resource constraints characterizing these embedded networked systems, it is of paramount importance the design of effective algorithms with low computational, communication, and energy r...

Reproducibility of experimental conditions is a fundamental requirement for designing energy efficient, self-sustainable wireless sensor networks (WSNs). At the same time, it represents a significant challenge because of the variability and the unpredictability of many energy harvesting sources, and because of the dynamic operating conditions of th...

SmartRoadSense is a crowdsensing project aimed at monitoring the conditions of the road surface. Using the sensors of a smartphone, SmartRoadSense monitors the vertical accelerations inside a vehicle traveling the road and extracts a roughness index conveying information about the road conditions. The roughness index and the smartphone GPS data are...

The diffusion of mobile devices equipped with sensing, computation, and communication capabilities is opening unprecedented possibilities for high-resolution, spatio-temporal mapping of several phenomena. This novel data generation, collection and processing paradigm, termed crowdsensing, lays upon complex, distributed cyberphysical systems. Collec...

The capability to either minimize energy consumption in battery-operated devices, or to adequately exploit energy harvesting from various ambient sources, is central to the development and engineering of energy-neutral wireless sensor networks. However, the design of effective networked embedded systems targeting unlimited lifetime poses several ch...

Distributed averaging represents a central task in many applications related to sensor networks, ad-hoc networks, and embedded wireless systems. These systems are typically constrained in terms of computation, communication and energy requirements, thus making the design of effective solutions particularly challenging. Algorithms based on iterative...

Energy neutral operation of WSNs can be achieved by exploiting the idleness of the workload to bring the average power consumption of each node below the harvesting power available. This paper proposes a combination of state-of-the-art low-power design techniques to minimize the local and global impact of the two main activities of each node: sampl...

This work is part of a project, SmartRoadSense, aimed to estimate the quality of the road surface exploiting the sensors of a mobile device anchored to the car cabin. Using the data of the triaxial accelerometer and the vehicle speed provided by GPS system, it has been shown that an estimate of the quality of road surface can be obtained. In order...

Ecoacoustic techniques using multiple acoustic sensors and two metrics of the acoustic community – the acoustic complexity index (ACI) and the chorus ratio (CR) – were successfully used to describe and characterize the morning acoustic activity of birds according to three equal temporal intervals during spring 2013: Dawn Chorus, Post Chorus 1, and...

Underwater communications exploit acoustic signals to interconnect embedded systems deployed for various scientific, environmental, industrial, or security tasks. The engineering of networked devices in underwater environment is today considered a critical research challenge. The propagation of acoustic waves in water is characterized by low, dista...

Mobile crowdsensing is emerging as a cost-effective solution to conduct extensive monitoring campaigns by exploiting the potential of mobile terminals with unprecedented communication, processing, and sensing capabilities. On the other hand, data provided by a large number of end-users equipped with heterogeneous devices pose trust and accuracy iss...

Distributed computation of average values held by nodes belonging to a self-organized network is a key task in many application areas, ranging from sensor and ad-hoc networks to networked control systems. Severe computational, communication, and energy constraints typical of these environments prompt for the design of specific solutions addressing...

Low cost (audio) recorders (LCRs) represent a new opportunity to investigate the sonic complexity of both natural and urban ecosystems. LCRs are inexpensive sampling audio recorders which have the external shape of a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, and are composed of a microphone, an analog-to-digital converter, central processing unit wit...

Mobile devices present several features which make them attractive as enabling technology for crowdsensing systems. In particular, their spectrum of sensing capabilities, together with consolidated diffusion and ease of use contribute to an increasing adoption in different mobility-based sensing scenarios. On the other hand, the availability of mas...

Monitoring of road surface conditions is a critical activity in transport infrastructure management. Many research solutions have been proposed in order to automatically control and check the quality of road surfaces. Most of them make use of expensive sensors embedded in vehicles or mainly focus on detection of specific anomalies during monitoring...

SmartRoadSense aims to evaluate the status of the road surface condition using a smartphone. To this purpose, a low-cost collaborative system is developed. The proposed approach introduces a thoroughly integrated system suitable for monitoring applications in a scalable, crowdsourcing collaborative setting.

One of the most challenging goals of many wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments is the reduction of energy consumption to extend system lifetime. This paper considers a novel combination of techniques that address energy savings at the hardware and application levels: wake-up receivers and node-level power management, plus prediction-based data...

Supporting the concurrent execution of multiple tasks on lightweight sensor nodes could enable the deployment of independent applications on a shared wireless sensor network, thus saving cost and time by exploiting infrastructures which are typically underutilized if dedicated to a single task. Existing approaches to wireless sensor network program...

Communication is responsible for the majority of energy consumption in typical wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While transmission energy can be controlled at each node, reception energy is outside the control of the nodes because they usually do not know the arrival time of their packets and they cannot avoid overhearing packets directed to the ot...

In spite of the availability of ultra-low-power microcontrollers and radio transceivers, the power consumption of an active sensor node is much higher than the power provided by state-of-the-art harvesters of suitable size and cost. Hence, the feasibility of energy-neutral wireless sensor networks mainly depends on the capability of the nodes to ex...

Out-of-band signaling provides a valuable support to the management of wireless sensor networks. Among other signals, sound has a propagation speed in air which is fast enough to be neglected in typical sensor network applications, and slow enough to be measured by means of lowcost embedded systems. An ultrasonic triggering mechanism has been recen...

Algorithmic approaches to the estimation of pairwise distances between the nodes of a wireless sensor network are highly attractive to provide information for routing and localization without requiring specific hardware to be added to cost/resource-constrained nodes. This paper exploits statistical geometry to derive robust estimators of the pairwi...

Wireless sensor nodes spend most of the time waiting either for sensed data or for packets to be routed to the sink. While on board, sensors can raise hardware interrupts to trigger the wake-up of the processor, incoming packets require the radio module to be turned on in order to be properly received and processed; thus, reducing the effectiveness...

Idleness has to be carefully exploited in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to save power and to accumulate the energy possibly harvested from the environment. State-of-the-art microcontroller units provide a wide range of ultra-low-power inactive modes with sub-millisecond wakeup time that can be effectively used for this purpose. At the same time t...

The energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks strongly depends on the possibility of exploiting the idleness of their nodes. In principle, idle periods could be fully exploited by making use of ultra low power micro controller units (MCUs) and power manageable network interfaces which provide a wide range of sleep states with sub micro Watt pow...

The widespread diffusion of wireless sensor net-works and wearable devices, together with the emergence of energy harvesting techniques, has motivated the development of ultra-low-power micro controller units (MCUs) which are highly energy efficient in active mode and provide a wide range of sleep states to be possibly exploited to save power durin...

The availability of off-the-shelf micro controller units based on energy efficient 16-bit RISC processors which provide a wide range of low-power inactive modes with average current in the range of micro Watts and wake-up times in the range of micro seconds makes it possible to develop ultra-low-power sensor nodes able to run a virtual machine to s...

Multimedia contents delivered over residential and mobile IP networks are among the main driving forces of the Internet. The pervasiveness of connected devices capable of receiving and decoding multimedia streams has induced a change in the market of set-top boxes from dedicated proprietary appliances to software modules running on top of off-the-s...

The soundscape is proposed as a phenomenological entity with which to investigate environmental complexity. In particular, the avian soundtope, which is defined as a place in which sound is intentionally structured by different bird species, is regarded as an agency acting to achieve several goals. In fact, the soundtope could be viewed as a specia...

The widespread diffusion of connected devices capable of receiving and decoding multimedia streams is in-ducing a change in the market of set-top boxes from dedicated proprietary appliances to software modules running on top of off-the-shelf devices. In spite of the large number of devices we use every day, smart phones are the favourite answer to...

Autonomous wireless sensor networks are subject to power, bandwidth, and resource limitations that can be represented as capacity constraints imposed to their equivalent flow networks. The maximum sustainable workload (i.e., the maximum data flow from the sensor nodes to the collection point which is compatible with the capacity constraints) is the...

Learning is a complex process that needs to be carefully taken under control by assessing its outcomes (direct monitoring) and by identifying the factors that might affect them (indirect monitoring). A large number of well-documented assessment techniques is available, but they are heterogeneous In nature and they are Independently applied even wit...

Autonomous wireless sensor networks are subject to power, bandwidth, and resource limitations that can be represented as capacity constraints imposed to their equivalent flow networks. The maximum sustainable workload of a sensor net work (i.e., the maximum data flow from the sensor nodes to the collection point which is compatible with the capacit...

A new class of wireless sensor networks that harvest power from the environment is emerging because of its intrinsic capability of providing unbounded lifetime. While a lot of research has been focused on energy-aware routing schemes tailored to battery-operated networks, the problem of optimal routing for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks...

Energy harvesting technologies make it possible to exploit environmental power to realize autonomous wireless sensor networks with unlimited lifetime. However, the actual autonomy of a wireless network depends on the energetic sustainability of its workload that depends, on its turn, on the algorithms adopted to route packets from the sensor nodes...

Environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (WSNs) exploit renewable energy sources to make the lifetime of sensor nodes theoretically unlimited. This perspective requires a paradigm shift in the design of energy-aware WSNs: Instead of maximizing the lifetime under given energy constraints, we need to maximize the workload that can be sustaine...

Virtual memory is considered to be an unlimited resource in desktop or notebook computers with high storage capabilities. However, in wireless mobile devices, like palmtops and personal digital assistants (PDAs), storage memory is limited or absent due to weight, size, and power constraints, so that swapping over remote memory devices can be consid...

Exploiting renewable energy sources in place of researchable batteries for powering portable electronic equipments is an attractive perspective. In practice, however, renewable energy sources are highly unreliable and the power closure of an energy harvesting system depends on the power profile of the source, on the efficiency of the energy scaveng...

Wireless mobile terminals have limited storage memory due to weight, size and power constraints. Potentially unlimited virtual memory could be found on remote servers made accessible through a wireless link, but power hungry wireless network interface cards (WNIC) may reduce the battery lifetime if not efficiently exploited, actually limiting the p...

One of the major issues in the design of a mobile computing device is reducing its power consumption. A commonly used technique is the adoption of a dynamic power management policy, which modifies the power consumption of the device based on certain run time conditions. The introduction of the dynamic power management within a battery-powered devic...