===== Résumé des activités de recherche de W. De Morais =====

=== PAST RESEARCH ===
During his PhD, he focused mostly on software architectures to develop smart environments, such as smart homes.  Since 2009, he has responsible for developing different demonstrators of how home-based ICT can be employed to support active ageing, ageing in place and AAL. This involved the developed of serious games to support Tai-Chi training and a smart bedroom. However, the evolving diversity of people’s needs and preferences, as well as the heterogeneity and dynamicity of homes and involved technologies, lead to a number of technical challenges that hinder the actual adoption of smart homes and AAL systems in real life. In short, smart environments are difficult to build, configure, use and maintain. The main technical challenges are associated integratability, interoperability, extensibility, privacy, security, portability, scalability, dependability and usability. Thus, during the PhD, he has looked into different academic and commercial system architectures for smart homes and he observed that database management systems were used exclusively for data storage, and that the reactive and data processing capabilities of such system were not exploited. Thus, he proposed that modern database management systems could serve as a platform for smart homes and the main questions were:
1) how should a database-centric system architecture be designed to support smart home environments and AAL applications? and 
2) how should the functional and non-functional requirements of smart environments in a database management system be accommodated? 

As a result, he investigated and confirmed that modern DBMS can successfully serve as a platform for smart homes and AAL by showing that: 
1) functional requirements can be implemented as database extensions, 
2) heterogeneous technologies can be integrated via cross-platform resource adapters and can interoperate via the database, 
3) the reactive behavior and reasoning on collected data can be achieved with active in-database processing, which also lead to improved performance and security since the data is processed locally within the database instead of transferring data to be processed remotely, and 
4) the system is an extensible and scalable cross-platform solution.

Since 2015, the proposed database-centric architecture is used the smart home system at the Halmstad Intelligent Home, which contains more than 60 sensors and actuators and is a permanent demonstrator with a variety of always-on and easy-to-show services.

=== CURRENT RESEARCH ===
His current research focus on a concept that he defined as “Intelligent Age-Friendly Homes”. This concept is better described as “Smart homes that attractive to people when they are young and supportive of them as they age, i.e., smart homes systems that evolve to sense, reason and react to individual needs, preferences and behaviors as these change over time.” As might perceive, it includes Joseph f. Coughlin definition of smart homes, Diane Cook definition of AmI and WHO definition of Age-Friendly Environments. He focuses on technical questions regarding new sensing and actuation technologies that have the following properties:
- Zero effort Installation
- Zero effort Configuration
- Zero effort Maintenance
- Integrated
- Always on and ready to use
- Support multiple residents
- Personalization
- Privacy and integrity
- Security


He's also interested in non-technical challenges that commonly hinder acceptance and adoption:
- Perceived benefits
- Associated cost
- Fitness for purpose
- User friendliness
- Trustworthiness
- Ethics
- Regulations