Start up of the A-CUBE project coordinate by FBK and financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento.
Tuesday, 7 October in Povo (Trento) work begins.

(v.l.) Improving the quality of life for the elderly and disabled through technological progress. That is the goal of project A-CUBE, coordinated by Alessandro Cimatti of Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and financed with “Grand Projects” funding from the Autonomous Province of Trento.
Work officially starts on Tuesday, 7 Oct., at 9:00 in FBK’s Povo Conference Hall.
Participating at the conference will be representatives of the project consortium, which includes several research units from FBK, DISI - University of Trento, CreateNet, and Fondazione Don Gnocchi of Milano. Also participating will be an elderly care cooperative from the “SAD” social area, and the Assisted Living Consortium, which includes a number of Trentino province bodies with interests in assistance-related technology.
The morning will be dedicated to presenting the consortium and project goals. The afternoon will concentrate on discussing the technical choices of the project and planning of future activities.
A-CUBE’s goal is to study technologies for monitoring complex environments that can be applied in areas such as assisted living homes to help personnel, as well as to support the independence and safety of users. Using distributed sensor networks it will be possible to monitor, the areas of a rehabilitation center, an institution for Alzheimer sufferers, or similar facilities in order to detect events, situations, and activities even in complex scenarios with many people.
The base technology is a distributed sensor network (DSN) for collecting environmental data, which is connected to a computing system able to comprehend perceived changes and to develop and appropriate response.
A typical situation might include sensor detection of abrupt movements or of prolonged immobility which might indicate a fall or a patient in difficulty. In that event, the system could immediately send an alarm to personnel in the facility. DSNs are one of the most interesting emerging technologies in Information Technology. Made of highly autonomous wireless nodes with low environmental impact, they are able to sense, calculate, and communicate data. The goal of A-CUBE will be to build a high reliability, non-invasive DSN network at low cost. The A-CUBE DSN will need to configure itself automatically and operate intelligently in accordance with the data it senses. In the future, the system could be used in other environments, as well, such as intelligent monitoring and surveillance of public space, museums, schools, and stations.
“The project will  be able to count on a first rate consortium which brings together a vast amount of complementary abilities, and whose aim is to create new generation monitoring systems”, underlines Alessandro Cimatti, manager of Embedded Systems research unit of the FBK's Center for Information Technology.