Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems
People’s workflow has become more complex and demanding; time is limited and workforce is expensive or hard to come by. Electronic assistance systems can support in this case and contribute to a more user-friendly, time and resource-efficient dealing with complex tasks. By now, electronic assistance systems are a matter of course in vehicles, but they aren’t as widespread in other fields yet. Electronic assistance system solutions of Fraunhofer IMS bring that added value of these systems into the work and living environment as well as other application fields like medicine or leisure.
From novel assistance systems for more efficiency in the care, doctor and hospital area, for more energy efficiency and transparency in industry, trade and private households, in the area of facility management up to solutions for the office of the next generation – Fraunhofer IMS offers electronic system solutions in the business field “Electronic Assistance Systems” to benefit manufacturers, operators and end users.
In this context an electronic assistance system in the form of a medical device (EQUIVert) for patients with dizziness symptoms has been developed to support both the doctor in diagnosing and finding therapy solutions to relieve him in the vertigo therapy of the patient, as well as the patient in enabling an autonomous regular training. In addition, data about performance and progress of the training at home is made available to the doctor for adaption of the therapy.
In the context of industry 4.0 the data should be used in a profitable way for optimization of processes and monitoring of machines and plants. That includes monitoring of energy flows in industry and trade for calculation of product costs. Energy management and saving efforts have been impeding in the past, because the cause of increased energy consumption couldn’t be derived directly from the total consumption. Identifying device-specific energy-saving measures and irregularities in the operation: That is the core idea of Nonintrusive Load Monitoring, in short NILM.
Apart from application in the industrial environment, Nonintrusive Load Monitoring is also suitable as a base technology in the living environment for the development of ambient assistance systems. With NILM the daily routine of persons needing care can be monitored in their own homes by the energy consumption of electrical appliances to be able to call for help in critical situations.
In brainstorming, conception and development of electronic assistance systems Fraunhofer IMS has the possibility to use already available components as well as develop new components on the basis of Fraunhofer IMS technology and to integrate them into complex systems to offer customers solutions from one provider. These Fraunhofer IMS technologies include special sensors, customer-specific electronic components, wireless systems and embedded systems.
From the mentioned applications of electronic assistance systems there usually results data with complex connections that are hard to analyze and evaluate through standard processes or manual evaluation. Machine learning techniques offer themselves as possible technologies for data processing. With NILM there are, for example, clustering processes employed; for other applications the use of artificial neural networks can be suitable. For these purposes, especially for resource limited target systems, the business field provides a suitable software library (AIfES).