Flexible Intelligent Heterogeneous Systems for Enhancing Quality of Life

Looking-ahead to the 10-15 years mid-term, users (people and other entities) will require the access, as simple and natural as possible, to a multiplicity of services and available applications (ideally ‘an universal service’) provided and supported by a convergent and integrated system of technologies (‘an integrated system of systems’). To this end ICT can provide a breakthrough by the integration of communication, localization and sensing functionalities made available to clouds of users by a self-consistent heterogeneous and flexible system. Key features of this strategy are: - the applicability to an as large as possible set of future services, having diversified and even divergent requirements; - system intelligence (sensing, learning, decision, action), reconfigurability, adaptability, energy efficiency and security; - context awareness (physical, environmental, situational localization); - exploitation of the benefits of clouds of users; - highly efficient communication systems to deliver all the necessary information in due time, where needed, with required quality of service (QoS) and energy efficiency; - effective and synergistic cooperation among all the potentially available technologies. Such features identify a system in line with the objective which have been explicitly defined by the European Initiative Horizon 2020, with a clear remind to the “Better Society” concept (i.e. “Longer and Healthier Lives” and “Inclusive Innovation and Secure Society”).