Michael is a truck driver and he is suffering from a chronic illness, diabetes, caused from obesity which has also the severe consequence of high blood pressure. Under the suggestion of his Practitioner, he joined a liaison community called Our-Health for patients like him. It is formed around a virtual community in which members but also doctors, dieticians and fitness instructors use internet and wireless technologies to stay in contact with each other anywhere, anytime, posing new ways of interacting socially. It uses peer pressure to help members stay on track with their diet and weight loosing programmes.

His health status and dietary nutrition need to be continuously monitored with a certain frequency even while he is at work. Being so often far from home due to his profession makes this task a bit more complicated, but with the support of the Hydra platform the surrounding environment is helping him in his daily activities. The setting of the scenario is in Spain where he is currently travelling; more precisely he arrived to Valencia for bringing some cows with his company truck from the DInteloord farm in The Netherlands to a local slaughterhouse. He lives in Copenhagen at the "Krøyers Plads" housing complex, so travelling so far with his kind of disease it’s not always easy. In any case the Hydra enabled tablet PC let him be constantly networked to his life at home and to his virtual community where he enjoy to share some moments with his friends and he exchange culinary ideas with other patients having the same prob-lem, but he also talks with doctors and tutors or trainers.

His house is equipped with the most recent devices in building automation as the possibility to travel for work allows him to see many of them. This is done especially for having the possibility to monitor his house while he is out from home, and for his wellbeing, because his health needs particular attention as regards the moni-toring system, for both his physical condi-tions and the food he can eat. He just re-ceived a service notification from home telling that the meter reading reports a sudden increase in the use of energy at home. He switched off the heating system before leaving, and at home it shouldn’t be too cold for an automatic start. Then he remembers at that time there’s the greenhouse light turning on. He built up a cute greenhouse in the terrace and he is absolutely proud of the little forest he was able to grow up in the last floor of the apartment complex. He gives a look via web cam to the interior of the glasshouse. He planted a few month ago some seeds from a tropical plant he saw at his doctor’s ambulatory, and now he is waiting that the plant sprouts with the help of the automatic lights. At the beginning he was using an halogen bulb lamp that was too much energy consuming, he got continu-ous alert from the meter reading that the power consumption had a sudden pick when the light was turned on and then a large use of power while the light was on, so he decided to change the lamp (last week) and now he programmed with the help of a fiend the automatic meter read-ing so that he receives both timing update on the power consumption and alert when there are pick of energy request. With the new greenhouse lamp it seems a bit bet-ter. Then he verifies the rain status, and as the external humidity is quite high, he switches off also the small irrigation sys-tems The carbon monoxide sensor alerts him the terrace need some fresh external air, so he open remotely the roof window, while the ammonia detector suggest him to spray some plant protection product. He closes the home connection with the idea to check his greenhouse and the energy consumption after a few time.

As he just arrived to his final destination he stopped at a big commercial complex close to the centre of Valencia and to a bug park. He likes gardens and the green and this looks as a great occasion to take a run. The calendar (TODO) function on his device reminds him that he has to check his blood pressure and the glucose level; he has a brand new system bought at a Siemens German reseller for a special price, where both blood pressure and glu-cose level can be controlled by two small wireless devices, and this operation is done within two minutes, really easily.

He wants to make this measures right before going running. After the physical “check” he was able to see the analysis of his biodata on his PDA; he feels relieved that everything is under control; via his mobile phone he sends the results to his personal data storage. The doctor, able to retrieve data as soon as they arrive, sends him a SMS containing a smiley: the latest body measures taken from Michael during his last trip and collected in his personal DB are showing that he is on the right way for not being considered anymore a “risky” patient.

Conjointly with a friend of the on-line social community, that he entered upon the advice of his medical assistants, he re-cently ordered on the Internet a new pair of sport shoes: Nike sent out a model equipped with a wireless device on the heels able to count steps, with a piezomet-ric fluid that takes into consideration the foot pressure and so it is able to measure the calories burnt. He takes again his PDA and after checking if his friend is on-line, he asks him via chat if the shoes have arrived or not. He is quite curious to try them and see if all the advertised features are really working. The shoes are still on their way. After the chat ends, he wears up his sport shorts and a t-shirt with the old running shoes (it’s a lovely day along the French coast) and he starts his jogging activity.
Half an hour run later he is back at his truck; he immediately connects with his home to download the music he prefers to listen while doing some stretching (he thinks that the Buddha Bar compilation is perfect in this situation). Physical exercise is really useful for the articulations; a few years ago he was suffering from some pain on the knees, so he takes care to do specific movements to relax his legs. Right after the stretching activity, he wants to measure his weight and the blood pres-sure, but he usually waits a little bit not to misrepresent the obtained data (right after a strong strain heartbeat and blood pressure are much higher than normal). His hotel for the day is near by, so he goes to the booked room for taking a shower.

Now he feels comfortable and hungry enough to get a nice meal. He really appreciates Spanish cuisine, especially be-cause the food is fresh and he thinks that the Mediterranean plates contain a limited amount of fat. This is extremely important for his dietary regulation, which needs a continuous control of the quantity of calories provided and the verification of the origin for the food. He enters in large su-permarket close to the commercial area and he observes a large crowd intensely looking at a small group of people using a PDA. He entered just to buy some ingredi-ents and prepare a light lunch, but he is attracted from the big audience. A woman holds a small PDA-like computer in her hand. She reaches forward, takes a package from the shelf and holds the PDA to it. She stares at the screen, as the little hourglass happily turns. He then discover that the woman is the Spanish Ministra de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación who has just inaugurated with other European politicians Spain’s and Europe’s first fully automated, integrated and networked system for tracking foodstuff. So Michael discovers it is possible to have specific information on the food he is going to buy just using his tablet PC where he will be able to see the entire history of the food that he buys. He decides to try immediately the new feature and after the login procedure to access the supermarket network, the screen displays a list of the entire value chain that the product has gone through in its lifecycle. Michael just took a package of veal meat. The gateway PDA has a RFID build-in reader able to read the entire history of these four steaks from the RFID embedded in the price tag. The small PC screen displays the steps that the meat has passed from the farm, via the slaughter house, the meat packager, until it reaches that shop. He is really surprised to see that originally the fillet of veal is ex-actly arriving from an animal bred at the farm where he is coming from, the DInteloord in Groeninghen, North of the Nether-lands.

He is happy to see the farm belongs to a group of food producers where natural biological protocols are used to cattle breed and cultivate vegetables and partly fruit. The nutritional data tell Michael this is exactly the kind of meat he should eat, accompanied from courgettes and red salad produced from the same farm. By using the information he really recognises the importance of this feature for consumer safety. As an example he is able to discover that the veal was 1 years old when he left the DInterloord farm; the feeding system, provided from the Nedap company, collected all the information about the veal and also his weight at each month was registered; there is the story of his mother, one of the oldest cow at the farm, and it is curious to see that the ani-mal left the farm the week before to go to the slaughterhouse in Valencia with a truck of his company driven from one of his colleagues, Gregg! If he eats this meal he’ll take the exact number of kCal he needs for lunch as reported in his special diet prepared with other friends from OurHealth community. He could also add a diet cola to the meal if he wish so.

All relevant information are automatically collected by thousands of local sensors and systems in the production, indexed and intelligently registered in the farmers own databases. Now he understands also why the meat packager in Valencia collects the travel data from the embedded system place in the truck: in this way it possible for them to discover the exact route followed from the animal but also the humidity, temperature and other important pa-rameters collected during the journey. IT is possible to visualise on a screen the precise map, the same he did during the night.

The Hydra tracking systems can perform automatic searches in these databases and extract information on animal han-dling, maximum and minimum tempera-tures during transportation and combine it with the actual route. All systems are equipped with elaborate trust models that protect the identity and privacy of the consumer while at the same time provid-ing full authorisation for customers of Mercadona and third party certification of the supplier of the data. As an example it is not possible to him to get any data from the truck system as his personal digital assistant do not have the electronic certificate for reading data even if he would have a RFID gateway. This is a security for the consumer and the involved stakeholders against repudiation and falsified, unsafe products.

The courgettes and red salad came with a different logistical enterprise, but still it is possible to see the entire journey to arrive to the Mercadona supermarket shelf. By navigating the site, he has access to the historical information database, where data are stored; he see that the DInterloord farm uses some special kind of agri-culture sensor that could work also in his private greenhouse, where ha had always the intention to plant some vegetables. There is a model made from Decagon company which is able to understand different terrain parameters if inserted in the soil, so he is curious to verify of they could work also in a jar.

Michael decides in this moment that the next time he will perform a mission to the Dutch farm, he will make a lot of ques-tions to the owner, Mr. Van Wieringen, and his assistant asking them about all the functioning of the sensors’ system installed in the farm. Then he could build up the same scheme in the greenhouse at home and remotely control how the plant and vegetable garden grows up.

Contact: Andrea Guarise
Innova Spa
a.guarise@innova-eu.net