Valentina Bianchi

University of Parma | UNIPR · Department of Engineering and Architecture

The Internet of Things paradigm has expanded the possibility of using sensors ubiquitously, particularly if connected to a cloud service for data sharing. There are several ways to connect sensors to the cloud: wearable or portable devices often lean on a smartphone that acts as a gateway, while other sensors, such as smart sensors for continuous m...

An IoT-WiFi smart and portable electrochemical immunosensor for the quantification of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was developed with integrated machine learning features. The immunoenzymatic sensor is based on the immobilization of monoclonal antibodies directed at the SARS-CoV-2 S1 subunit on Screen-Printed Electrodes functionalized with gold nanopar...

In recent years portable potentiostats have increased in popularity allowing to perform electrochemical analyses outside the laboratories, moving them to home or point of care environments. In this context, the idea of performing multiple acquisitions at the same time is particularly attractive to deal with replicates or with simultaneous multiple...

Nowadays, lithium-ion is among the most used chemistry for batteries and shows an increasing market growth rate. However, to reduce failure or safety risks, the battery State-of-Charge (SoC) must be accurately monitored and predicted by a suitable Battery Management System (BMS). Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been extensively applied...

The potential of a voltammetric E-tongue coupled with a custom data pre-processing stage to improve the performance of machine learning techniques for rapid discrimination of tomato purées between cultivars of different economic value has been investigated. To this aim, a sensor array with screen-printed carbon electrodes modified with gold nanopar...

This paper presents a low power and portable sensing electronic system, exploiting a screen-printed organic electrochemical transistor (OECT), on flex substrate. The OECT device can operate in liquid hostile environments, at very low power, and it can be exploited in precision agriculture. In this context, the battery assisted readout circuit with...

This paper presents a wireless biosensor for in vivo and real-time plant monitoring, with a dedicated remote server, web interface, and cloud data storage. The biosensor is based on a two-wire organic electrochemical transistor nested in the plant stem. When stimulated, the device provides relevant information on the concentration of nutrients in t...

Ambrosini, L, Presta, V, Vitale, M, Menegatti, E, Guarnieri, A, Bianchi, V, De Munari, I, Condello, G, and Gobbi, G. A higher kick frequency swimming training program optimizes swim-to-cycle transition in triathlon. J Strength Cond Res XX(X): 000–000, 2023—The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of an 8-week swimming training program o...

This paper presents a wireless biosensor based on an organic electrochemical transistor and a low-power electronic system, with NB-Iot/Cat-M1 radio interface. The biosensor, implanted in the plant stem, allows the in-vivo evaluation of the concentration of nutrients dissolved as cations in the sap. The electronic circuit enables the real-time monit...

Innovative and highly performing smart voltammetric immunosensors for rapid and effective serological tests aimed at the determination of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were developed and validated in human serum matrix. Two immunosensors were developed for the determination of immunoglobulins directed against either the nucleocapsid or the spike viral anti...

Monitoring sports training performances with automatic, low cost, low power, and ergo-nomic solutions is a topic of increasing importance in the research of the last years. A parameter of particular interest, which has not been extensively dealt with in a state-of-the-art way, is the count of kicks during swimming training sessions. Coaches and ath...

In this paper, a portable potentiostat, based on the ad-hoc designed Analog Front End (AFE) and equipped with a microcontroller including a Wi-Fi network processor is presented. Unlike the most common portable sensors that lean on a smartphone or personal computers, the device exploits the cloud service for data storage. This feature enhances the d...

Monitoring the State of Charge (SoC) in battery cells is necessary to avoid damage and to extend battery life. Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms and Machine Learning techniques in general can provide real-time SoC estimation without the need to design a cell model. In this work, an SVM was trained by applying an Ant Colony Optimization method...

Recent advances in Internet-of-Things technology have opened the doors to new scenarios for biosensor applications. Flexibility, portability, and remote control and access are of utmost importance to move these devices to people's homes or in a Point-of-Care context and rapidly share the results with users and their physicians. In this paper, an...

Monitoring State of Charge battery cells is necessary for all the most common batteries to avoid damages and to extend lifetime. State of Charge must be estimated since it can not be directly measured on the cell. Among all developed techniques, Equivalent Circuit Models is one of the most interesting and it is based on modeling the behavior of the...

In a multiple parallel-connected inverters system, limiting the circulating current phenomenon is mandatory since it may influence efficiency and reliability. In this paper, a new control method aimed at this purpose and conceived to be implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device is presented. Each of the inverters, connected in pa...

Multiplication is a fundamental operation in most signal and image processing applications. In this paper, a new architecture for a Vedic multiplier implementing ‘Urdhava-tiryakbhyam’ methodology is proposed. The presented architecture is completely modular and is conceived to be implemented in model-based designs where the configurability is of ut...

Nowadays, analytical techniques are moving towards the development of smart biosensing strategies for the point-of-care accurate screening of disease biomarkers, such as human epididymis protein 4 (HE4), a recently discovered serum marker for early ovarian cancer diagnosis. In this context, the present work represents the first implementation of a...

The design of an FPGA hardware architecture requires, traditionally, its description in a dedicated language (Hardware Description Language, HDL), which is often not well suited to manage wide and complex models. The design process can be simplified if the entire architecture can be described in a high abstraction level framework such as Simulink....

Recent research in wearable sensors have led to the development of an advanced platform capable of embedding complex algorithms such as machine learning algorithms, which are known to usually be resource-demanding. To address the need for high computational power, one solution is to design custom hardware platforms dedicated to the specific applica...

In modular distributed architectures, the adoption of a communication method that is at the same time robust and has a low and predictable latency is of utmost importance in order to support the required system dynamics. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the consequences of the random jitter on machine drives distributed control, caused by the m...

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are one of the most used solutions for error correction logic in data communications. RS decoders are composed of several blocks: among them, many efforts have been made to optimize the error magnitude evaluation module. This paper aims to assess the performance of an innovative algorithm introduced in the literature by Lu e...

The measurement of the analyte concentration in electrochemical biosensors traditionally requires costly laboratory equipment to obtain accurate results. Innovative portable solutions have recently proposed, but usually they lean on PC or smartphones for data elaboration and they exhibit poor resolution or portability and proprietary software. This...

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is currently recognized as a key element of a more general framework designed to perform continuous monitoring of human behaviors in the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), well-being management, medical diagnosis, elderly care, rehabilitation, entertainment and surveillance in smart home environments. In this pa...

Location-based services have increased in popularity in recent years and can be fruitfully exploited in the field of smart homes, opening the doors to a wide range of personalized services. In this context, radio technology can be widely employed since, other than connecting devices in the home system, it offers solutions for the user localization...

The trend toward technology ubiquity in human life is constantly increasing and the same tendency is clear in all technologies aimed at human monitoring. In this framework, several smart home system architectures have been presented in literature, realized by combining sensors, home servers, and online platforms. In this paper, a new system archite...

A new compact diagnostic device exploiting the integration of screen printed electrode-based immunosensors and remote-controlled IoT-WiFi acquisition board has been realized and validated for diagnosis of Celiac Disease as case of study. The immunodevice is based on chemisorption of open tissue transglutaminase enzyme on the surface of gold nanopar...

Among sensible goals of active and assisted living paradigm is the unobtrusive monitoring of daily living activities. Based on such monitoring, anomalies and trends can be discovered, which possibly allows for early assessment of health issues and for prevention policies. However, when dealing with the home environment, and especially with older ad...

Continuous monitoring of daily life activities within the home environment is among most appealing and challenging goals of technologies supporting the Active and Assisted Living paradigm. The HELICOPTER (AAL-JP) project aims at merging conventional telemedicine and home monitoring into a unique, holistic framework. To this purpose, a network of he...

This paper focuses at features introduced in the wearable sensor MuSA, to support behavioral analysis within the context of the HELICOPTER project, funded in the AAL European joint program. In particular, the wearable device performs two key function: on one hand it is used as a behavioral data source, continuously monitoring the quantity of user p...

Continuous monitoring of safety and health conditions are among the primary goals of Ambient Assisted Living technologies. Effective solutions, aimed at fostering independent life of elderly persons, need for carefully balancing system intrusiveness, perspicacity, reliability and cost features. Heterogeneous networks, including different combinatio...

In this paper, novel features introduced in the design of the wearable Multi Sensor Assistant (MuSA1) platform are discussed, underlining the pivotal role MuSA plays in the assisted living environments it is conceived for. In particular, we exploit MuSA to enable user-aware behavioral analysis based on environmental devices as well. Method MuSA is...

In this paper, the infrastructure supporting the HELICOPTER AAL-JP project is described. The project aims at introducing behavioral analysis features for early detection of age-related diseases: to this purpose, a heterogeneous sensor network has been designed and implemented, encompassing in the same vision environmental, wearable and clinical sen...

As the average age of the EU population increases, ICT solutions are going to play a key role in order to find answers to the new challenges the demographic change is carrying on. At the University of Parma an AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) system named CARDEA has been developed during the last 10 years. Within CARDEA, behavioral analysis is carried...

EU population is getting older, so that ICT-based solutions are expected to provide support in the challenges implied by the demographic change. At the University of Parma an AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) system, named CARDEA, has been developed. In this paper a new feature of the system is introduced, in which environmental and personal (i.e., wea...

World population is facing deep demographic changes. A number of societal challenges are to be tackled, and possible support from ICT is sought for. AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) technologies, aimed at fostering independent life of elderly people, are therefore becoming increasingly important. Based on the AAL-system named CARDEA and previously dev...

In this paper a wearable multi-sensor device is used for a Behavioral Analysis (BA) focused on Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and Indoor Localization (IL). The analysis exploit a wearable device equipped with inertial sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope and compass in order to evaluate quantity and quality of movements.

The European population is becoming older and older, causing AT and AAL topics to become more and more important. A ZigBee based low-cost home automation system named CARDEA has been developed at the University of Parma, with the aim to permit elderly people to live their lives autonomously and independently. In this paper is presented a new featur...

The European population is becoming older and older, causing AT (Assistive Technology) and AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) topics to become increasingly important. A ZigBee based low-cost home automation system named CARDEA has been developed at the University of Parma, with the aim to allow elderly people to live their lives autonomously and indepen...

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an alternative/augmentative communication device that can provide users with a different interaction path, based on the interpretation of his/her brain activity. Such technology, applied to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) contexts, could potentially make the full set of features of such systems accessible to users...

Purpose: As the population ages, there is a need for more care for the elderly, challenging health services and calling for tools supporting and integrating elderly care strategies1. Among ICT-based tools employed in the home to preserve autonomy and support independent life2, a variety of fall detectors have been designed and are already available...

Purpose: Among daily-living activities, kitchen tasks may profit most for ICT-based, elderly-assistive solutions: (i) for safety; (ii) for complex and cognitively-demanding tasks; and (iii) since most home technology is found in kitchen appliances. Food-related activities, moreover, play a major role in social and cultural life, and could be exploi...

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology can provide users lacking voluntary muscle control with an augmentative communication channel, based on the interpretation of her/his brain activity. Such technologies, combined with AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) systems, can potentially have a great impact on daily living, extending the scope of the ageing...

Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) can provide severely impaired users with alternative communication paths, by means of interpretation of the user's brain activity. Among BCI operating paradigms, SSVEP is largely exploited for its potentially high throughput and reliability. In this paper, two novel SSVEP processing algorithms are presented, focused...

This paper describes the MyCmon Cloud-Based Smart Home Monitoring System including a home automation system permanently connected through the internet to a Cloud-based control system. MyCmon aims at supporting independent living of elderly people and people with disabilities, by making monitoring functionalities available to their loved ones or to...

MuSA (Multi Sensor Assistant) is a wearable multi-sensor device designed for elderly people monitoring. The system features healthcare services equipping a fall detector, a user alarm button, heartbeat, breathing rate and body temperature evaluation. By integrating MuSA in an ambient-assisted living framework, CARDEA, data fusion approaches can be...

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an alternative/augmentative communication device that can provide users (for example, individuals lacking voluntary muscle control) with an interaction path, based on the interpretation of his/her brain activity. In this paper, the design and implementation of a flexible, low-cost BCI development platform is pres...

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology can provide users lacking voluntary muscle control with an augmentative communication channel, based on the interpretation of his brain activity extracted, for example, from the EEG. In this paper, a low cost BCI development platform is presented; it consists in a customized EEG acquisition unit and a Matla...

MuSA, Multi Sensor Assistant, is a wearable device designed for elderly people monitoring. The system provides healthcare services as a fall detector, a user alarm button, heartbeat, breathing rate and body temperature measurement. The full integration of MuSA in the ambient-assisted living framework CARDEA allows to provide the user with remote he...

Purpose Modern ICT-technologies can positively impact the current agingpopulation scenario: ambient assisted living (AAL) techniques aim to make the home environment more intelligent and cooperative and help to accomplish daily living tasks, whereas ICTbased assistive technologies (AT) deal with specific needs of people with disabilities. In this a...

In this paper, a novel multi-sensor wearable device, called MuSA, is introduced. MuSA aims at integrating in the CARDEA ambient-assisted-living framework: on the one hand, MuSA provides CARDEA with useful ambient-intelligence features, such as localization and identification; on the other hand, it may borrow many infrastructural and communication c...

In this paper, design, implementation and test of a framework aimed at supporting Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications is discussed. A suite of HW/SW tools, was developed, aiming at versatility, interoperability, accessibility and low cost. Such features were sought for by strictly relying on most diffused standards: TCP/IP protocols are expl...

In this paper, a novel multi-sensor wearable device, called MuSA, is introduced. MuSA aims at integrating in the CARDEA ambient-assisted-living framework: on the one hand, MuSA provides CARDEA with useful ambient-intelligence features, such as localization and identification; on the other hand, it may borrow from the environmental control system ma...

A wide range of technologies is already available for supporting independent life of elderly people and people with disabilities. However, turning technology potentialities into actual services involves many further aspects, mostly related to caregiving policies and financial sustainability. In this paper, the experience carried out in the Parma Pr...

Objective Ambient Assisted Living is regarded as a promising tool to support independent life at home. CARDEA [1] is an environmental monitoring and control system suitable for implementing AAL services, aimed at low cost and fostering device interoperability. The adoption of standardized and massively diffused communication protocols, together wit...

In questa ricerca è stato sviluppato un sensore indossabile per il monitoraggio personale, con particolare attenzione all'analisi della qualità della camminata e alla rivelazione della caduta. Il sensore sul quale si basa il sistema è un accelerometro MEMS. Sono presentati due tipi di realizzazione della piattaforma: una utilizzando componenti disc...

A home control and monitoring system is discussed, fully based on standard Internet communication techniques Its main features include wide interoperability, flexibility and low costs Special care has been devoted to the system reliability as well The system is fully accessible from remote locations, enabling telecare and surveillance services Fiel...

In this paper, we discuss the full integration of a wearable fall detector into a comprehensive home control network, as an effective way to reduce implementation costs and to improve the service functionality. Instead of accounting for a stand-alone fall-detection system, we consider the detector as a component of a wider, multi-functional wireles...

In this paper, the development of a prototypal wearable sensor, suitable for home monitoring purposes, is described. The sensor analyzes the data stream coming from a MEMS tri-axial accelerometer to infer fall occurrences and to evaluate the gait quality. Data processing is carried out locally, to limit energy-demanding radio transmission. Smart al...

A versatile, reliable and inexpensive home automation system is presented, suited for assisting and monitoring elderly and disabled people in home daily living. A smart interface module has been fabricated, which allows for straightforward integration of a wide variety of devices in a standard LAN. A pilot installation provides successfully HW and...

In this paper, the development of a prototypal wireless sensor platform is described, aimed at assisting elderly people and people with disabilities in their daily living activities at home. The wireless sensor network is embedded into a more general home control and monitoring network, from which it can borrow remote communication and supervision...

A home control system is presented, based on standard IP LAN techniques. The system features large flexibility, dynamic reconfigurability, fault-tolerance and low costs. An integrated hardware/software framework has been conceived, which support device interoperability, complex task management and graceful degradation under fault conditions. The sy...

In this paper, a novel solution is proposed for the integration of safety, home assistance and monitoring tasks within a highly-hierarchical, distributed network architecture. All services are distributed over standard IP protocols, granting several advantages over dedicated home-networking approaches, in terms of costs, performance and choice of i...