![2 E. Zdravevski et al.
1 Introduction
Enhanced and Assisted living environments (ELE/ALE) have been in focus of
the researches for more than decade [8]. Adaptation of novel technologies in
healthcare has taken a slow but steady pace, from the first wearable sensors for
chronic disease conditions and activity detection with offline processing towards
implantable or non-invasive sensors supported by advanced data analytics for
pervasive and preventive monitoring. The ELE/ALE progress is driven by the
rapid advances in key technologies in several complementary scientific areas over
the last decade: sensor design and material science; wireless communications and
data processing; as well as machine learning, cloud, edge, and fog technologies
[18,19,21].
The integration of novel sensors into consumer electronics increases gather-
ing of personal health data. The place and importance of different sensors for
healthcare, well-being, and fitness among consumer devices can be tracked by
their increasing share on Consumer Electronics Shows promoting self-care and
self-regulation. This creates enormous possibility in both healthcare and healthy
lifestyle. The availability of data in vast amounts can lead to: cost-effective,
personalized, and real-time monitoring, detection and recommendations, both
for the end users and healthcare providers [21]. These services (monitoring,
detection, recommendation) are significant research topic in ALE/ELE domain.
Thus, a large percent of typical ALE/ELE systems aim to monitor daily activi-
ties, detect specific events (e.g. falls, or false alarms), automate assistance, and
decrease caregiver burden [22]. Continuous vital signs monitoring is an important
application area and various sensors have been developed for this purpose. Sen-
sor devices are supported by various algorithms and computational techniques,
context modeling, location identification, and anomaly detection [19].
Human activity recognition stands for recognizing human activity patterns
from various types of low-level sensor data usually presented as time series data.
The activity itself can be represented and recognized at different resolutions, such
as a single movement, action, activity, group activity, and crowd activity. Recog-
nizing such activities can be useful in many applications, for example: detecting
physical activity level [25], promoting health and fitness [28], and monitoring
hazardous events such as falling [2,20].
The current trends in ALE/ELE systems research can be perceived from dif-
ferent perspectives [5]. In this work, we are investigating research topics in the
ALE/ELE systems and services domain applied to healthcare and well-being.
We identified potentially relevant articles with the following keywords: identifi-
cation and sensing technologies, activity recognition, risks and accidents detec-
tion, tele-monitoring, diet and exercise monitoring, drugs monitoring, vital signs
supervision, identification of daily activities, and user concerns like privacy and
security.
Systematic reviews, use formal explicit methods, of what exactly was the
question to be answered, how evidence was searched for and assessed, and how it
was synthesized in order to reach the conclusion. The “Preferred reporting items
for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement” [13,14] is one](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-22-320.jpg)
![Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 3
of the most widely used methodologies for achieving this. Recently, new forms
of reviews have emerged in response to urgent needs for information, for which
the existing systematic review model does not fit well [15]. The rapid review is
used when time is of the essence. The scoping review is applied when what is
needed is not detailed answers to specific questions but rather an overview of a
broad field [17]. The evidence map is similar to scoping reviews but is focused on
specific visual presentation of the evidence across a broad field. Finally, the realist
review is used where the question of interest includes how and why complex social
interventions work in certain situations, rather than assume they either do or do
not work at all.
Performing any of these reviews types is usually manual and very labor-
intensive work. Therefore, we have identified the opportunity to use Natural
Language Processing (NLP) and other software engineering methods to auto-
mate the analysis, identify relevant articles, generate visualizations of trends
and relationships, etc. We have implemented an NLP-based toolkit that per-
forms this, and, in this paper, we show our findings in the AAL/ELE domain.
By exploring the publications over the last decade, we have summarized
the state-of-the-art technologies, future research focus and publication statistics
related to the following key issues: enabling technology, typical applications and
services of ALE/ELE in healthcare and well-being.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 will elaborate
the different Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) we are using, while
also describing the processing the collected data. Section 3 presents the results
of our analysis in the AAL/ELE use case and discusses them. Finally, in the last
section we conclude the paper and point directions for future research.
2 Methodology
This work is an extension of our previous work presented in [3]. Namely, the
architecture was reworked for better reusability of intermediate results per the
architecture presented in [26], while ensuring compliance with the terms of use
of the digital libraries, in regard to the number of requests per unit time. Addi-
tionally, the plotting of aggregate results was integrated and streamlined using
the Matplotlib library [7] and Networkx [6].
2.1 Search Input Taxonomy
The user input is a collection of keywords that are used to identify potentially
relevant articles and a set of properties, which define what are we looking for
in the identified articles. In particular, this input is defined with the following
parameters, which are further enhanced by proposing synonyms to the search
keywords and properties by the NLP toolkit, as described in the following Sub-
sect. 2.4:
Keywords. Search terms or phrases that are used to query a digital library (e.g.
ambient assisted living, enhanced living environments, etc.). See example of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-23-320.jpg)
![4 E. Zdravevski et al.
searched keywords in Figs. 6 and 7. Note that keywords are being searched
for independently of each other and duplicates are being removed in a later
phase.
Properties. The properties are words or phrases that are being searched in
the title, abstract or keywords section of the identified articles. Exemplary
properties used in this study can be seen in Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11.
Property synonyms. In addition to the original form of the properties, also
their synonyms or words with similar meaning in the domain terminology,
are being searched for in the article’s abstract, title and keywords. For each
property, only one original form appears in the results for brevity, while the
synonyms are omitted. Note that a synonym can be a completely different
word, or another form of the same word, such as a verb in another tense
or an adjective (e.g. synonyms of Recognition: identification, identify, recog-
nize, recognise (intentionally misspelled), discern, discover, distinguish, etc.).
Therefore, instead of showing all those words, only one word per synonym set
is being displayed in the results. Synonyms can be provided by the user, or
proposed by the toolkit, with a possibility of fine-tuning the proposals. For
the considered use case, the list of used properties and property groups is
shown in Fig. 1.
Property groups. The property groups are thematically, semantically or other-
wise grouped properties for the purpose of more comprehensive presentation
of the results. Properties within property groups are being displayed together
in charts or tables. The property group has a name (e.g. Topics, Technology,
Concerns, etc.), and within a group, there are sets of properties, including
their synonyms, such as within the Concerns propriety group: privacy, secu-
rity and acceptance. Exemplary summary results per property group are pre-
sented in 7, while exemplary results per property within groups are shown in
Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11.
Start year. The start year (inclusive) of the articles that we are interested in.
Default: current year - 9.
End year. The end year (inclusive) of the articles that we are interested in.
Default: current year.
Minimum relevant properties. A number denoting the minimum number of
properties that an article has to contain in order to be considered as relevant.
Default: 2.
2.2 Enhanced Search Capabilities with WordNet
Before the actual searching starts, the user provided input in the form of
keywords and properties is enhanced by proposing synonyms from WordNet
[1,12,16], using the NLTK library [4] for Python. In most cases, this increases
the robustness of the searched properties by including synonyms that the user
might have neglected. However, considering that Word Net is a general-purpose
database, some of the proposed synonyms might not be appropriate or relevant.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-24-320.jpg)
![Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 5
Fig. 1. List of property groups and properties (main and the synonyms)
In such a case, the user can manually choose which of the proposed synonyms
to be included before the actual processing starts.
The toolkit also performs stemming of the properties and the abstract, for a
more robust searching. If none of the properties of interest are identified within
the abstract, then those articles are removed from the result set, which corre-
sponds to the eligibility step in the PRISMA statement. In addition to this, we
can specify the minimum number of properties that need to be identified within
an article for it to be considered eligible and potentially relevant.
2.3 Indexed Digital Libraries
As of this moment, the NLP toolkit indexes the following digital libraries (i.e.
sources): IEEE Xplore, Springer and PubMed. From PubMed all articles that
match the given search criteria (i.e. a keyword) are analyzed. IEEE Xplore results
include the top 2000 articles that match given criteria, sorted by relevance deter-
mined by IEEE Xplore. For the Springer digital library, the search for each key-
word separately is limited to 1000 articles or 50 pages with results, whichever
comes first, sorted by relevance determined by Springer.
2.4 Survey Methodology
The methodology used for the selection and processing of the research articles
in this section is based on “Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and
meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement” [13,14], as shown in Fig. 2. The goal
of PRISMA is to standardize surveys. The first part is gathering articles based
on certain criteria, in our case using the search keywords. After the articles
are collected, the duplicates are removed and some of the articles are discarded
for various reasons, such as relevance, missing meta-data, invalid publication
period, etc. Finally, from the selected subset of articles, a qualitative analysis is
performed and from those articles, only a certain number is selected for more
thorough screening. With this toolkit, we automate most of the steps in the
PRISMA approach to significantly reduce the number of articles that need to
be manually screened.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-25-320.jpg)
![6 E. Zdravevski et al.
Fig. 2. PRISMA statement workflow with total number of articles for the current
survey
Identification and Duplicate Removal. The proposed NLP toolkit performs
the identification automatically. First, the possible article candidates are iden-
tified by querying the integrated libraries with the same search terms (i.e. key-
words). While integrating the results from multiple sources (i.e. digital libraries),
duplicate removal is also performed by using the article DOI as their unique iden-
tifier. Articles that were already found in another source or because they were
identified by another search term, considering that an article can be found by
multiple search terms, are not processed again, but still, are counted towards
the number of identified articles per source. This means that the same article
can be considered to exist in more than one source, therefore the sets of articles
per source are not disjoint. After the candidate articles are identified, they are
processed, and the properties of the texts are used for selection of the relevant
articles. The process of article selection is the same as the one presented in
[13,14], except for the last part where articles are manually processed by several
researchers.
Augmented Screening and Eligibility Analysis by NLP. After the dupli-
cates were removed, during the screening process discards articles which were
not published in the required time period (e.g. last ten years) or for which the
title or abstract could not be analyzed due to parsing errors, unavailability or
other reasons.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-26-320.jpg)
![Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 7
Afterwards, the eligibility analysis is performed, which involves tokenization
of sentences [10,23], English stop words removal, stemming and lemmatization
[10] using the NLTK library [4] for Python. At the beginning, this is applied to
each property, based on which a reverse lookup is created from each stemmed
word and phrase to the original property. The same process is also applied to
the title, keywords and abstract of each article. As a result of the stemming, for
each property, the noun, verb and other forms are also considered. As a result of
the lemmatization and the initial synonym proposal, the synonyms of properties
are also considered. This results in a more robust analysis. Then, stemmed and
lemmatized properties are searched in the cleaned abstract and title and the
article is tagged with the properties it contains.
The identified articles are labeled as relevant only if they contain at least
the minimum relevant properties, defined as an input, in its title or abstract
(considering the above NLP-enhanced searching capabilities, thus performing
a rough screening. To help in the eligibility analysis, the remaining relevant
articles are sorted by number of identified property groups, number of identi-
fied properties, number of citations (if available) and year of publication, all
in descending order. For the relevant articles the toolkit automatically gener-
ates a Bibtex file with most important fields that can be included in an article
for simplified citations. An Excel file is also generated with the following fields:
DOI, link, title, authors, publication date, publication year, number
of citations, abstract, keyword, source, publication title, affiliations,
number of different affiliations, countries, number of different coun-
tries, number of authors, bibtex cite key, number of found property
groups, and number of found properties. The researcher can use this file
to drill down and find specific articles by more advanced filtering criteria (e.g.
by importing it in Excel). This can facilitate deciding which articles need to be
retrieved from their publisher and manually analyzed in more detail in order
to determine whether it should be included in the qualitative and quantitative
synthesis.
Visualization of Aggregate Results. The results of the processing and
retained relevant articles are aggregated by several criteria. The output con-
tains CSV files and charts in vector PDF files for each of the following aggregate
metrics:
– By source (digital library) and relevance selection criteria (see Fig. 3).
– By publication year (see Fig. 4a).
– By source and year (see Fig. 4b).
– By search keyword and source (see Fig. 5).
– By search keyword and year (see Fig. 6).
– By property group and year (see Fig. 7).
– By property and year, generating separate charts for each property group (see
Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11).
– By number of countries, number of distinct affiliations and authors, aiming
to simplify identification of multidisciplinary articles (e.g. written by multiple
authors with different affiliations) (See Fig. 14).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-27-320.jpg)
![DISCOURSE XIX.
THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP.
[Lincoln's Inn, 3d Sunday after Trinity, June 8, 1856.]
St. John X. 27-29.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never
perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no
man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.
A recent traveller in the Holy Land, who has looked on all its
localities with honest and reverent eyes, and has enabled his readers
to see them almost as clearly as himself, has suggested that the
Mount of Olivet was the scene of the conversation, in which Jesus
declared Himself as the Son of God to the man whose eyes He had
opened. The man whom He had healed at the Pool of Bethesda He
found in the Temple; but an excommunicated Israelite would not
have been allowed to enter those precincts. If we suppose our Lord
to have met him on that other ground which He visited so often, the
interview may have been secret. And the words, 'For judgment am I
come into the world,' which are so evident a commentary upon it,
may have been addressed to persons, His disciples and others,
whom He joined afterwards. Then it will appear how the concluding
verses of the 9th chapter may have formed part of the same
dialogue with the opening verses of the 10th,—how much closer a
relation there is between them outwardly and inwardly than we at
first perceive.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-35-320.jpg)
![DISCOURSE XX.
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS.
[Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Trinity, June 15th, 1856.]
St. John XI. 25.
Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.
The words, 'I and my Father are one;' 'The Father is in me and I in
Him,' which were spoken in the porch of the Temple at the feast of
Dedication, had the same effect as the words, 'Before Abraham was,
I am,' which were spoken after the feast of Tabernacles. In both
cases the Jews sought to take Jesus that they might stone Him; in
both Jesus escaped out of their hands. On the last occasion we are
told whither He retired: 'He went away again beyond Jordan into the
place where John at first baptized, and there He abode.' The
disciples who had been with Him in the crowd of the city found
themselves in the lonely place where they had first heard Him
proclaimed as the Lamb of God. Since that time there had been a
whirl of new thoughts and strange hopes in their minds. The
kingdom of God had appeared to be indeed at hand; they had seen
their Master exercising the powers of it; they had exercised those
powers themselves. Some day His throne would be established; they
should sit beside Him. The vision had passed away; they were the
companions of a fugitive; they were in the desert where they had
first learned, not that they were princes to sit and judge, but sinners
wanting a Deliverer.
I cannot doubt that He who was educating them, not only by His
speech but by all His acts, had devised this lesson for them, that it](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/46728-250429165524-7b553e34/85/Enhanced-Living-Environments-Algorithms-Architectures-Platforms-and-Systems-Ivan-Ganchev-56-320.jpg)
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- 4. Enhanced Living Environments State-of-the-Art Survey LNCS 11369 Algorithms, Architectures, Platforms, and Systems Ivan Ganchev Nuno M. Garcia Ciprian Dobre Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis Rossitza Goleva (Eds.)
- 5. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11369 Commenced Publication in 1973 Founding and Former Series Editors: Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen Editorial Board David Hutchison Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Takeo Kanade Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Josef Kittler University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Jon M. Kleinberg Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Friedemann Mattern ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland John C. Mitchell Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Moni Naor Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel C. Pandu Rangan Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India Bernhard Steffen TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany Demetri Terzopoulos University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Doug Tygar University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
- 6. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7409
- 7. Ivan Ganchev • Nuno M. Garcia Ciprian Dobre • Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis Rossitza Goleva (Eds.) Enhanced Living Environments Algorithms, Architectures, Platforms, and Systems
- 8. Editors Ivan Ganchev University of Limerick Limerick, Ireland and University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarski” Plovdiv, Bulgaria and Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Sofia, Bulgaria Nuno M. Garcia Instituto de Telecomunicações Universidade da Beira Interior Covilhã, Portugal and Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias Lisbon, Portugal Ciprian Dobre University Politehnica of Bucharest Bucharest, Romania and National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics Bucharest, Romania Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis University of Nicosia Nicosia, Cyprus Rossitza Goleva New Bulgarian University Sofia, Bulgaria ISSN 0302-9743 ISSN 1611-3349 (electronic) Lecture Notes in Computer Science ISBN 978-3-030-10751-2 ISBN 978-3-030-10752-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10752-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965473 LNCS Sublibrary: SL3 – Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI Acknowledgement and Disclaimer The work published in this book is supported by the European Union under the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Program and especially the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The book reflects only the authors’ views. Neither the COST Association nor any person acting on its behalf is responsible for the use, which might be made of the information contained in this publication. The COST Association is not responsible for external websites referred to in this publication. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and insti- tutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
- 9. European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) This publication is based upon work from COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)” supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation. www.cost.eu
- 10. To all colleagues in AAPELE Ivan Ganchev Nuno M. Garcia Ciprian Dobre Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis Rossitza Goleva
- 11. Foreword This book is one of the final dissemination activities of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE).” The main objective of this COST Action was to promote the synergy between ambient assisted living (AAL) and smart enhanced living environments (ELEs), based on the creation of a research and development (R&D) community of scientists and entrepreneurs. AAPELE has ended with about 160 management com- mittee members and substitutes from 32 countries, 400+ research papers and analytical reports published, three edited books, three special journal issues organized, and 56+ successful projects running (in parallel and/or as continuation) out of 100+ proposals submitted. The aim of this final AAPELE book is to raise even more the awareness of the academic and industrial communities of the AAL/ELE topic by taking into account also the increasing interest of the end-users to be informed and be able to self-manage different living issues of their own. The high interest and multiple running projects in the subject area as well as the large number of pilot platforms developed are a good proof of the importance of this COST Action. The COST Action AAPELE was supported by partners working in the following areas: (1) analysis of medical data; (2) mesh networking; (3) quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) as well as capacity planning analysis; (4) user behavior analysis and network traffic classification; (5) electronic health (eHealh) and mobile health (mHealth); and (6) AAL in specific use-cases. The main goal of AAPELE was to promote interdisciplinary research on AAL/ELE through the creation of an R&D community of scientists and entrepreneurs, working on different aspects of corresponding algorithms, architectures, and platforms, having in view the advance of the science in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions. To achieve this goal, the COST Action AAPELE set the following main objectives: 1. To facilitate research on specific AAL/ELE problems related to information and communications technologies (ICT), aiming for the development of new and innovative solutions that are driven by the interest to produce marketable techno- logical solutions that can be easily adopted by the users
- 12. 2. To synchronize and broaden the scientific activities of all involved partners working in this field in a research-friendly environment, while also allowing more countries and different types of organizations to contribute 3. To create and expand a European R&D community in the AAL/ELE area The achieved impact of AAPELE can be summarized as follows: • Creation of an AAL/ELE community of scientists and entrepreneurs acting as a critical mass of researchers with different scientific backgrounds • Broadening the AAL topic with the ELE concept • Collection of diverse data from medical, network, and protocol experiments for further analysis • Application of different statistical tools for big data management in the AAL/ELE area • End-user profiling for the purposes of AAL/ELE • Identification of a variety of AAL/ELE testing scenarios • Development of AAL platforms for conducting advanced experiments and case studies in different ELEs • Conducting corresponding QoS and QoE analysis • Designing and testing different ICT infrastructures that are able to integrate different types of devices (sensors, actuators, computers, mobile devices, etc.) from an AAL/ELE service perspective • Researching on personalized, intelligent algorithms for use in AAL/ELE • Researching on user interfaces and human–machine interactions (HMI) with special focus on older adults or disabled users • Studying and applying suitable (mobile) communications protocols for different AAL/ELE applications This book presents the final output from the AAPELE community and aims to become a cookbook for further activities in the field. November 2018 Nuno M. Garcia Rossitza Goleva Ivan Ganchev X Foreword
- 13. Preface The increase in medical expenses, due to societal issues such as demographic aging, puts strong pressure on the sustainability of health and social care systems, labor participation, and quality of life (QoL) for the elderly and people with disabilities. In addition, the understanding of the need to have active living and aging, and the cor- responding changes in work and family life, has set new challenges to developers and suppliers of new services within personal living environments. In this sense, the enhanced living environments (ELEs) encompass all information and communications technology (ICT) achievements supporting true ambient assisted living (AAL). ELEs promote the provision of infrastructures and services for independent or more auton- omous living, via the seamless integration of ICT within homes and residences, thus increasing the QoL for assisted people and autonomously maintaining their preferable living environment as long as possible, without causing disruption in the web of social and family interactions. Different AAL/ELE technologies are aiming today at creating safe environments around assisted people to help them maintain independent and active living. Most efforts toward the realization of AAL/ELE systems are based on the development of pervasive devices and the use of ambient intelligence to mix these devices together to create a safe environment. There is a missing interaction of multiple stakeholders needing to collaborate for ELEs, supporting a multitude of AAL services. There are also barriers to innovation in the concerned market, the governments, and the health-care sector that still do not take place at an appropriate scale. Many fundamental issues in ELE remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human beings and the importance of social connections. Societal activities are less noticed as well. Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, aiming to advance the science in this area and to develop new and innovative connected solutions. This book provides, in this sense, a platform for the dissemination of research and development efforts and for the presentation of advances in the AAL/ELE area that aim at addressing these challenges. The book aims to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing the progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies that are related to AAL/ELE. It was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Envi- ronments (AAPELE).” The book can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, postgraduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, health-care organizations, insurance companies, and research strate- gists working in this field. The book chapters were collected through an open, but selective, three-stage submission/review process. Initially, an open call for contributions was distributed among the COST AAPELE community in the summer of 2017. As a result, 24
- 14. expressions of interest were made in response to the call and, after some consolidation, a total of 15 extended abstracts were received. These were reviewed by the book editors and their authors were invited to the next stage of full-chapter submission. At the end of this stage, 14 full-chapter proposals were received. All submitted chapters were then peer-reviewed by independent reviewers (including reviewers outside the COST Action AAPELE), appointed by the book editors, and after the first round of reviews 12 chapters remained. These were duly revised according to the reviewers’ comments, suggestions, notes, etc., then reviewed again and finally accepted for publication in this book. The first chapter entitled “Automation in Systematic, Scoping, and Rapid Reviews by an NLP Toolkit: A Case Study in Enhanced Living Environments” analyzes the trends and the state of the art in the AAL/ELE area by utilizing a natural language processing (NLP)-powered tool for automating the surveying process of 70,000+ sci- entific articles indexed in reputable international digital libraries such as the IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and SpringerLink. The authors demonstrate the applicability of the toolkit in facilitating a robust and comprehensive “eligibility and relevance” analysis of articles, in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) surveying methodology. The presented case study demon- strates that, in addition to easing and speeding up the surveying process, the NLP toolkit can show valuable insights and pinpoint the most relevant articles, thus sig- nificantly reducing the number of articles that need to be manually assessed by researchers, while also generating informative tables, charts, and graphs. The analysis conducted shows increasing attention from the scientific and research communities toward AAL/ELE over the past 10 years and points to several trends in the specific research topics falling within this scope. In particular, the aggregated results show that there is more interest in ELEs that sense and recognize activities and aid exercising, thus helping the well-being of people. Monitoring and supervision of some more serious health issues, such as accidents and vital signs, have received less attention so far. Regarding the way the data are processed, the edge computing and cloud com- puting technologies receive a fair amount of attention. Furthermore, sensors and power consumption seem to be of greater interest than communications protocols and machine learning/deep learning. With respect to ELEs oriented toward activity recognition, the second chapter, “RDF Stores for Enhanced Living Environments: An Overview,” considers the han- dling of large knowledge bases of information from different domains as a complex problem, addressed in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) by adding semantic meaning to the data themselves. The authors explore the RDF store landscape with the aim of finding a specialized database, capable of storing and processing RDF data, which sufficiently meets the ELE storage needs. More specifically, they focus on a Smart Space platform aimed at running on a cluster setup of low-power hardware that can be run locally entirely at home with the purpose of logging data for a reactive assistive system involving activity recognition or domotics. A literature analysis of RDF stores is presented and promising candidates for implementation of consumer Smart Spaces are identified. Based on the insights provided, the authors suggest dif- ferent relevant aspects of RDF storage systems that need to be considered in AAL/ELE environments and provide a comparison of available solutions. XII Preface
- 15. This is followed by the chapter entitled “Combining Machine Learning and Meta- heuristics Algorithms for Classification Method PROAFTN,” which brings machine learning and data mining into the picture by showing how the combined metaheuristics with inductive learning techniques can improve the efficiency of the supervised learning classification algorithms for use within AAL/ELE environments for activity recognition and behavior analysis, based on the collected sensor data. The authors’ aim is to find a good, suitable, and comprehensive (interpretable) classification procedure that can be applied efficiently in such environments. In order to address the issues faced by the usual supervised learning approaches, especially when dealing with knowledge interpretation and with very large unbalanced labelled data sets, the authors have developed a fuzzy classification method PROAFTN for enabling determination of the fuzzy resemblance measures by generalizing the concordance and discordance indexes used in outranking methods. An improved version of PROAFTN is described in the chapter and compared with other well-known classifiers in terms of the learning methodology and classification accuracy. The authors show the ability of the meta- heuristics, when embedded into the PROAFTN, for improving the efficiency of classification. The next chapter, entitled “Development and Evaluation of Methodology for Per- sonal Recommendations Applicable in Connected Health,” proposes a methodology (and corresponding algorithm) for personal recommendations of outdoor physical activities, which is based solely on the user’s history data and without relying on collaborative filtering. The proposed recommendation algorithm consists of four pha- ses: data fuzzyfication, activity usefulness calculation, estimation of most useful activities, and activities classification. For the latter, several data mining techniques are compared for use, e.g., decision tree algorithm, decision rule algorithm, Bayes algo- rithm, and support vector machines. The performance of the proposed recommendation algorithm is evaluated based on a real dataset, collected from a community of 1,000 active users. The results show a high accuracy of 85–95%. The chapter “Touchscreen Assessment Tool” (TATOO), an Assessment Tool Based on the Expanded Conceptual Model of Frailty provides an overview of the state-of-the-art assessment models of frailty syndrome in the elderly and presents a tool prototype that utilizes mobile technology for assessing the elderly’s frailty. The tool is based on a conceptual model, which is expanded to incorporate new aspects related to the usage of technology by elderly, covering the complexity and multidimensionality of modern life. The authors’ plan is to further develop the tool as a continuous monitoring instrument of activities performed in daily life, combined with advanced sensor-based measurements and big-data analytics algorithms. The next chapter “Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Behavioural Implications of Bidirectional Activity-Based Ambient Displays in Ambient Assisted Living Envi- ronments” investigates the extent to which the real-time bidirectional exchange of activity information can influence context awareness, social presence, social connect- edness, and interpersonal activity synchrony in mediated AAL environments. The chapter contains a background on interpersonal activity synchrony, followed by a description of the design, development, and assessment of a bidirectional ambient display platform. The authors evaluate a conglomerate of activity-based lighting dis- plays in order to determine the effects of real-time bidirectional deployment on Preface XIII
- 16. behavior and social connectedness. The results presented show tendencies toward an increase in implicit social interactions, more positive social behaviors between the elderly and their caregivers in mediated AAL contexts, and sporadic moments of interpersonal activity synchrony. The chapter “Towards Truly Affective AAL Systems” considers affective comput- ing as a growing field of artificial intelligence, focused on detecting, obtaining, and expressing various affective states (including emotions, moods, and personality-related attributes), applicable to various affective contexts, including AAL/ELE. The authors discuss the need for integration of affective computing approaches and methods in the context of AAL/ELE systems in order to improve their functionality in terms of rational decision-making and enhancement of social interaction with people requiring the use of these systems. To enrich the emotional capacity of AAL/ELE systems, the authors go beyond simple emotion detection and showing only emotion expressions, and in addition consider the use of emotion generation and emotion mapping on rational thinking and system behavior. The chapter discusses the need and requirements for these processes in the context of various AAL/ELE application domains. The next chapter, entitled “Maintaining Mental Wellbeing of Elderly at Home,” focuses on the problem of providing the most cost-efficient and effective way of supporting mental well-being as well as methods for physical and mental rehabilitation for the elderly at home including recovery from accidents, particularly concentrating on those impacting brain activities. For this, an automated home ICT system, combining progress in applied clinical “know-how” with stimulating engagement through enter- tainment, rivalry, and “real feeling” of gaming environment in compliance with rehabilitation rules, is envisaged by the authors for utilization by patients, care pro- viders, and family members for the effective use of rehabilitation procedures in familiar home surroundings instead of unfriendly clinical settings. The authors propose a full system solution that integrates a set of state-of-the-art technologies, such as augmented/virtual reality gaming, multi-modal user interfaces, and innovative embedded micro-sensor devices, combined together in a Personal Health Record (PHR) system, supporting the delivery of individual, patient-centered electronic health (eHealth) services both at home, at hospital, or on the move. The formal technical validation tests performed confirm the usability of the developed system. The chapter “System Development for Monitoring Physiological Parameters in Living Environment” presents a system architecture for physiological parameters monitoring in ELEs. A corresponding laboratory experiment, a field trial, and a case study are described along with a subsequent analysis of the created dataset for finding correlation between monitored physiological parameters. The authors’ plan is to enhance the system by utilizing a fuzzy-logic decision algorithm for raising of alerts and to improve the visualization of collected data based on live streaming and cloud support. The next chapter “Healthcare Sensing and Monitoring” brings attention to the development of cost-effective, real-time, remote sensing and health-status monitoring solutions for elderly and disabled people to help them improve their QoL and create better living conditions in the environment of their choice. The authors provide an overview of relevant sensing technologies, vital signs monitoring techniques, risk and accident detection methods, activity recognition techniques, communications XIV Preface
- 17. technologies, etc., and conclude that new types of network paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), will extend traditional sensing and monitoring systems giving an advantage to control the environment. Staying on the IoT note, the next chapter “Semantic Middleware Architectures for IoT Healthcare Applications” delves into the technical and semantic solutions used to tackle the interoperability issues in IoT-based AAL/ELE heterogeneous environments. By suggesting the use of semantic middleware architectures (consisting of both tech- nical and semantic components) as a complete interoperable solution, the authors present an overview of the existing semantic middleware proposals that address many challenges and requirements regarding the interoperability in IoT systems. The authors then identify research challenges that still remain open, such as scalability, real-time reasoning, provision of a simple application programming interface (API) usable in various application domains, provision of a complete ontology that is able to describe both domains and sensors in IoT, etc. In this regard, the authors envisage the recently proposed Web of Things (WoT) architecture as one of the major candidates for solving the interoperability issues in IoT in general. The final chapter, entitled “The Role of Drones in Ambient Assisted Living Systems for the Elderly,” introduces some of the most recent and interesting applications of drones in creating AAL/ELE environments to help the elderly sustain a better inde- pendent lifestyle. A critical analysis and evaluation of drone-related technologies as a disruptive force in many industrial and everyday life applications, and their relationship with AAL/ELE, are presented along with suitable health-care models, different char- acteristics of relevant AAL/ELE systems and communications protocols, and the main challenges in accepting drones as “flying assistants” to extend the independent living environments of elderly. The book editors wish to thank all reviewers for their excellent and rigorous reviewing work, and for their responsiveness during the critical stages to consolidate the contributions provided by the authors. We are most grateful to all authors who have entrusted their excellent work, the fruits of many years’ research in each case, to us and for their patience and continued demanding revision work in response to reviewers’ feedback. We also thank them for adjusting their chapters to the specific book template and style requirements, completing all the bureaucratic but necessary paperwork, and meeting all the publishing deadlines. November 2018 Ivan Ganchev Nuno M. Garcia Ciprian Dobre Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis Rossitza Goleva Preface XV
- 18. Organization Reviewers Åke Arvidsson Kristianstad University, Sweden Serge Autexier German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany Sabina Barakovic University of Sarajevo/American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina Jasmina Barakovic Husic University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina An Braeken Vrije Universiteit, Belgium Torsten Braun Universität Bern, Switzerland Emmanuel Conchon Université de Limoges, France Ivan Chorbev Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, FYR Macedonia Marilia Curado University of Coimbra, Portugal Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez ENSTA ParisTech/Inria Flowers, France Ciprian Dobre University Politehnica of Bucharest/National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics, Romania Ivan Ganchev University of Limerick, Ireland/University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarski”, Bulgaria/Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria Nuno M. Garcia Instituto de Telecomunicações, Universidade da Beira Interior/Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Portugal Rossitza Goleva New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria Andrej Grgurić Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d., Croatia Krzysztof Grochla ITAI PAS, Poland Petre Lameski Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, FYR Macedonia Egons Lavendelis Riga Technical University, Latvia Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis University of Nicosia, Cyprus Rodica Potolea Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania Peter Pocta University of Zilina, Slovakia Vedran Podobnik University of Zagreb, Croatia Susanna Spinsante Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy Vladimir Trajkovik Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, FYR Macedonia Denis Trcek University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Carlos Valderrama University of Mons, Belgium Eftim Zdravevski Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, FYR Macedonia
- 19. Contents Automation in Systematic, Scoping and Rapid Reviews by an NLP Toolkit: A Case Study in Enhanced Living Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Eftim Zdravevski, Petre Lameski, Vladimir Trajkovik, Ivan Chorbev, Rossitza Goleva, Nuno Pombo, and Nuno M. Garcia RDF Stores for Enhanced Living Environments: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Petteri Karvinen, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Stefan Grönroos, and Johan Lilius Combining Machine Learning and Metaheuristics Algorithms for Classification Method PROAFTN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Feras Al-Obeidat, Nabil Belacel, and Bruce Spencer Development and Evaluation of Methodology for Personal Recommendations Applicable in Connected Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Cvetanka Smileska, Natasa Koceska, Saso Koceski, and Vladimir Trajkovik “Touchscreen Assessment Tool” (TATOO), an Assessment Tool Based on the Expanded Conceptual Model of Frailty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Alexandra Danial-Saad, Lorenzo Chiari, Yael Benvenisti, Shlomi Laufer, and Michal Elboim-Gabyzon Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Behavioural Implications of Bidirectional Activity-Based Ambient Displays in Ambient Assisted Living Environments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Kadian Davis-Owusu, Evans Owusu, Lucio Marcenaro, Carlo Regazzoni, Loe Feijs, and Jun Hu Towards Truly Affective AAL Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Mara Pudane, Sintija Petrovica, Egons Lavendelis, and Hazım Kemal Ekenel Maintaining Mental Wellbeing of Elderly at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Emmanouela Vogiatzaki and Artur Krukowski System Development for Monitoring Physiological Parameters in Living Environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Oliver Mladenovski, Jugoslav Achkoski, and Rossitza Goleva
- 20. Healthcare Sensing and Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 George Vasilev Angelov, Dimitar Petrov Nikolakov, Ivelina Nikolaeva Ruskova, Elitsa Emilova Gieva, and Maria Liubomirova Spasova Semantic Middleware Architectures for IoT Healthcare Applications . . . . . . . 263 Rita Zgheib, Emmanuel Conchon, and Rémi Bastide The Role of Drones in Ambient Assisted Living Systems for the Elderly. . . . 295 Radosveta Sokullu, Abdullah Balcı, and Eren Demir Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 XX Contents
- 21. Automation in Systematic, Scoping and Rapid Reviews by an NLP Toolkit: A Case Study in Enhanced Living Environments Eftim Zdravevski1(B) , Petre Lameski1 , Vladimir Trajkovik1 , Ivan Chorbev1 , Rossitza Goleva2 , Nuno Pombo3 , and Nuno M. Garcia3 1 Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia eftim.zdravevski@finki.ukim.mk 2 New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria 3 Instituto de Telecomunicaes, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilh, Portugal Abstract. With the increasing number of scientific publications, the analysis of the trends and the state-of-the-art in a certain scientific field is becoming very time-consuming and tedious task. In response to urgent needs of information, for which the existing systematic review model does not well, several other review types have emerged, namely the rapid review and scoping reviews. In this paper, we propose an NLP powered tool that automates most of the review process by automatic analysis of articles indexed in the IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and Springer digital libraries. We demonstrate the applicability of the toolkit by analyzing articles related to Enhanced Living Environments and Ambient Assisted Living, in accordance with the PRISMA surveying methodology. The rel- evant articles were processed by the NLP toolkit to identify articles that contain up to 20 properties clustered into 4 logical groups. The analy- sis showed increasing attention from the scientific communities towards Enhanced and Assisted living environments over the last 10 years and showed several trends in the specific research topics that fall into this scope. The case study demonstrates that the NLP toolkit can ease and speed up the review process and show valuable insights from the surveyed articles even without manually reading of most of the articles. Moreover, it pinpoints the most relevant articles which contain more properties and therefore, significantly reduces the manual work, while also generating informative tables, charts and graphs. Keywords: Enhanced living environments · Ambient assisted living NLP toolkit · Automated surveys · Scoping review · Rapid review Systematic review c The Author(s) 2019 I. Ganchev et al. (Eds.): Enhanced Living Environments, LNCS 11369, pp. 1–18, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10752-9_1
- 22. 2 E. Zdravevski et al. 1 Introduction Enhanced and Assisted living environments (ELE/ALE) have been in focus of the researches for more than decade [8]. Adaptation of novel technologies in healthcare has taken a slow but steady pace, from the first wearable sensors for chronic disease conditions and activity detection with offline processing towards implantable or non-invasive sensors supported by advanced data analytics for pervasive and preventive monitoring. The ELE/ALE progress is driven by the rapid advances in key technologies in several complementary scientific areas over the last decade: sensor design and material science; wireless communications and data processing; as well as machine learning, cloud, edge, and fog technologies [18,19,21]. The integration of novel sensors into consumer electronics increases gather- ing of personal health data. The place and importance of different sensors for healthcare, well-being, and fitness among consumer devices can be tracked by their increasing share on Consumer Electronics Shows promoting self-care and self-regulation. This creates enormous possibility in both healthcare and healthy lifestyle. The availability of data in vast amounts can lead to: cost-effective, personalized, and real-time monitoring, detection and recommendations, both for the end users and healthcare providers [21]. These services (monitoring, detection, recommendation) are significant research topic in ALE/ELE domain. Thus, a large percent of typical ALE/ELE systems aim to monitor daily activi- ties, detect specific events (e.g. falls, or false alarms), automate assistance, and decrease caregiver burden [22]. Continuous vital signs monitoring is an important application area and various sensors have been developed for this purpose. Sen- sor devices are supported by various algorithms and computational techniques, context modeling, location identification, and anomaly detection [19]. Human activity recognition stands for recognizing human activity patterns from various types of low-level sensor data usually presented as time series data. The activity itself can be represented and recognized at different resolutions, such as a single movement, action, activity, group activity, and crowd activity. Recog- nizing such activities can be useful in many applications, for example: detecting physical activity level [25], promoting health and fitness [28], and monitoring hazardous events such as falling [2,20]. The current trends in ALE/ELE systems research can be perceived from dif- ferent perspectives [5]. In this work, we are investigating research topics in the ALE/ELE systems and services domain applied to healthcare and well-being. We identified potentially relevant articles with the following keywords: identifi- cation and sensing technologies, activity recognition, risks and accidents detec- tion, tele-monitoring, diet and exercise monitoring, drugs monitoring, vital signs supervision, identification of daily activities, and user concerns like privacy and security. Systematic reviews, use formal explicit methods, of what exactly was the question to be answered, how evidence was searched for and assessed, and how it was synthesized in order to reach the conclusion. The “Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement” [13,14] is one
- 23. Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 3 of the most widely used methodologies for achieving this. Recently, new forms of reviews have emerged in response to urgent needs for information, for which the existing systematic review model does not fit well [15]. The rapid review is used when time is of the essence. The scoping review is applied when what is needed is not detailed answers to specific questions but rather an overview of a broad field [17]. The evidence map is similar to scoping reviews but is focused on specific visual presentation of the evidence across a broad field. Finally, the realist review is used where the question of interest includes how and why complex social interventions work in certain situations, rather than assume they either do or do not work at all. Performing any of these reviews types is usually manual and very labor- intensive work. Therefore, we have identified the opportunity to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other software engineering methods to auto- mate the analysis, identify relevant articles, generate visualizations of trends and relationships, etc. We have implemented an NLP-based toolkit that per- forms this, and, in this paper, we show our findings in the AAL/ELE domain. By exploring the publications over the last decade, we have summarized the state-of-the-art technologies, future research focus and publication statistics related to the following key issues: enabling technology, typical applications and services of ALE/ELE in healthcare and well-being. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 will elaborate the different Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP) we are using, while also describing the processing the collected data. Section 3 presents the results of our analysis in the AAL/ELE use case and discusses them. Finally, in the last section we conclude the paper and point directions for future research. 2 Methodology This work is an extension of our previous work presented in [3]. Namely, the architecture was reworked for better reusability of intermediate results per the architecture presented in [26], while ensuring compliance with the terms of use of the digital libraries, in regard to the number of requests per unit time. Addi- tionally, the plotting of aggregate results was integrated and streamlined using the Matplotlib library [7] and Networkx [6]. 2.1 Search Input Taxonomy The user input is a collection of keywords that are used to identify potentially relevant articles and a set of properties, which define what are we looking for in the identified articles. In particular, this input is defined with the following parameters, which are further enhanced by proposing synonyms to the search keywords and properties by the NLP toolkit, as described in the following Sub- sect. 2.4: Keywords. Search terms or phrases that are used to query a digital library (e.g. ambient assisted living, enhanced living environments, etc.). See example of
- 24. 4 E. Zdravevski et al. searched keywords in Figs. 6 and 7. Note that keywords are being searched for independently of each other and duplicates are being removed in a later phase. Properties. The properties are words or phrases that are being searched in the title, abstract or keywords section of the identified articles. Exemplary properties used in this study can be seen in Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11. Property synonyms. In addition to the original form of the properties, also their synonyms or words with similar meaning in the domain terminology, are being searched for in the article’s abstract, title and keywords. For each property, only one original form appears in the results for brevity, while the synonyms are omitted. Note that a synonym can be a completely different word, or another form of the same word, such as a verb in another tense or an adjective (e.g. synonyms of Recognition: identification, identify, recog- nize, recognise (intentionally misspelled), discern, discover, distinguish, etc.). Therefore, instead of showing all those words, only one word per synonym set is being displayed in the results. Synonyms can be provided by the user, or proposed by the toolkit, with a possibility of fine-tuning the proposals. For the considered use case, the list of used properties and property groups is shown in Fig. 1. Property groups. The property groups are thematically, semantically or other- wise grouped properties for the purpose of more comprehensive presentation of the results. Properties within property groups are being displayed together in charts or tables. The property group has a name (e.g. Topics, Technology, Concerns, etc.), and within a group, there are sets of properties, including their synonyms, such as within the Concerns propriety group: privacy, secu- rity and acceptance. Exemplary summary results per property group are pre- sented in 7, while exemplary results per property within groups are shown in Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11. Start year. The start year (inclusive) of the articles that we are interested in. Default: current year - 9. End year. The end year (inclusive) of the articles that we are interested in. Default: current year. Minimum relevant properties. A number denoting the minimum number of properties that an article has to contain in order to be considered as relevant. Default: 2. 2.2 Enhanced Search Capabilities with WordNet Before the actual searching starts, the user provided input in the form of keywords and properties is enhanced by proposing synonyms from WordNet [1,12,16], using the NLTK library [4] for Python. In most cases, this increases the robustness of the searched properties by including synonyms that the user might have neglected. However, considering that Word Net is a general-purpose database, some of the proposed synonyms might not be appropriate or relevant.
- 25. Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 5 Fig. 1. List of property groups and properties (main and the synonyms) In such a case, the user can manually choose which of the proposed synonyms to be included before the actual processing starts. The toolkit also performs stemming of the properties and the abstract, for a more robust searching. If none of the properties of interest are identified within the abstract, then those articles are removed from the result set, which corre- sponds to the eligibility step in the PRISMA statement. In addition to this, we can specify the minimum number of properties that need to be identified within an article for it to be considered eligible and potentially relevant. 2.3 Indexed Digital Libraries As of this moment, the NLP toolkit indexes the following digital libraries (i.e. sources): IEEE Xplore, Springer and PubMed. From PubMed all articles that match the given search criteria (i.e. a keyword) are analyzed. IEEE Xplore results include the top 2000 articles that match given criteria, sorted by relevance deter- mined by IEEE Xplore. For the Springer digital library, the search for each key- word separately is limited to 1000 articles or 50 pages with results, whichever comes first, sorted by relevance determined by Springer. 2.4 Survey Methodology The methodology used for the selection and processing of the research articles in this section is based on “Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement” [13,14], as shown in Fig. 2. The goal of PRISMA is to standardize surveys. The first part is gathering articles based on certain criteria, in our case using the search keywords. After the articles are collected, the duplicates are removed and some of the articles are discarded for various reasons, such as relevance, missing meta-data, invalid publication period, etc. Finally, from the selected subset of articles, a qualitative analysis is performed and from those articles, only a certain number is selected for more thorough screening. With this toolkit, we automate most of the steps in the PRISMA approach to significantly reduce the number of articles that need to be manually screened.
- 26. 6 E. Zdravevski et al. Fig. 2. PRISMA statement workflow with total number of articles for the current survey Identification and Duplicate Removal. The proposed NLP toolkit performs the identification automatically. First, the possible article candidates are iden- tified by querying the integrated libraries with the same search terms (i.e. key- words). While integrating the results from multiple sources (i.e. digital libraries), duplicate removal is also performed by using the article DOI as their unique iden- tifier. Articles that were already found in another source or because they were identified by another search term, considering that an article can be found by multiple search terms, are not processed again, but still, are counted towards the number of identified articles per source. This means that the same article can be considered to exist in more than one source, therefore the sets of articles per source are not disjoint. After the candidate articles are identified, they are processed, and the properties of the texts are used for selection of the relevant articles. The process of article selection is the same as the one presented in [13,14], except for the last part where articles are manually processed by several researchers. Augmented Screening and Eligibility Analysis by NLP. After the dupli- cates were removed, during the screening process discards articles which were not published in the required time period (e.g. last ten years) or for which the title or abstract could not be analyzed due to parsing errors, unavailability or other reasons.
- 27. Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 7 Afterwards, the eligibility analysis is performed, which involves tokenization of sentences [10,23], English stop words removal, stemming and lemmatization [10] using the NLTK library [4] for Python. At the beginning, this is applied to each property, based on which a reverse lookup is created from each stemmed word and phrase to the original property. The same process is also applied to the title, keywords and abstract of each article. As a result of the stemming, for each property, the noun, verb and other forms are also considered. As a result of the lemmatization and the initial synonym proposal, the synonyms of properties are also considered. This results in a more robust analysis. Then, stemmed and lemmatized properties are searched in the cleaned abstract and title and the article is tagged with the properties it contains. The identified articles are labeled as relevant only if they contain at least the minimum relevant properties, defined as an input, in its title or abstract (considering the above NLP-enhanced searching capabilities, thus performing a rough screening. To help in the eligibility analysis, the remaining relevant articles are sorted by number of identified property groups, number of identi- fied properties, number of citations (if available) and year of publication, all in descending order. For the relevant articles the toolkit automatically gener- ates a Bibtex file with most important fields that can be included in an article for simplified citations. An Excel file is also generated with the following fields: DOI, link, title, authors, publication date, publication year, number of citations, abstract, keyword, source, publication title, affiliations, number of different affiliations, countries, number of different coun- tries, number of authors, bibtex cite key, number of found property groups, and number of found properties. The researcher can use this file to drill down and find specific articles by more advanced filtering criteria (e.g. by importing it in Excel). This can facilitate deciding which articles need to be retrieved from their publisher and manually analyzed in more detail in order to determine whether it should be included in the qualitative and quantitative synthesis. Visualization of Aggregate Results. The results of the processing and retained relevant articles are aggregated by several criteria. The output con- tains CSV files and charts in vector PDF files for each of the following aggregate metrics: – By source (digital library) and relevance selection criteria (see Fig. 3). – By publication year (see Fig. 4a). – By source and year (see Fig. 4b). – By search keyword and source (see Fig. 5). – By search keyword and year (see Fig. 6). – By property group and year (see Fig. 7). – By property and year, generating separate charts for each property group (see Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11). – By number of countries, number of distinct affiliations and authors, aiming to simplify identification of multidisciplinary articles (e.g. written by multiple authors with different affiliations) (See Fig. 14).
- 28. 8 E. Zdravevski et al. In addition to that, the toolkit also generates graph visualization of the results, where nodes are the properties and the edges are the number of articles that contain the two properties it connects. Articles which do not contain at least two properties and properties that are not present in at least two articles are excluded. An example of this is presented in Figs. 12 and 13. For a clearer visualization, only the top 25% property pairs by number of occurrence are shown (i.e. ones above the 75-th percentile). A similar graph for the countries of the author affiliations is also generated (see Fig. 14). The top 50 countries by number of collaborations are considered for this graph. Additionally, we show only countries and an edge between them if the number of bilateral or multilateral collaborations between them in the top 5% (above 95-th percentile) within the top 50 countries. 3 Results In this use case, we used the NLP toolkit with the keywords shown in Fig. 6. We searched for these keywords and automatically identified and screened the articles, as shown in Fig. 2. A more detailed analysis was performed using the properties that were clustered into four groups of properties, each containing at least three property synonyms, as shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 3. Number of articles per relevance selection criteria In Fig. 3, we show the selection process based on the adopted methodology. From all identified articles based on the keywords, first, the system eliminates the ones with incomplete or invalid meta-data. Next, the duplicate entries are eliminated and finally, from the remaining ones, the relevant articles are selected if they contain the minimum number of properties (in this case 1). In Fig. 4a, we present the number of remaining and searched for articles from each year, and in Fig. 4b, the number of relevant articles from each source.
- 29. Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 9 (a) Number of remaining and relevant ar- ticles per year (b) Number of relevant articles from each digital library per year Fig. 4. Number of articles per year and source The number of relevant articles grouped by keywords from each source can be seen in Fig. 5. The top 3 keywords by the number of relevant articles are “assis- tive engineering”, “enhanced life environment” and “enhanced support environ- ment”. It is interesting to see that they vary in frequency between different sources, which can be expected, considering that for PubMed the number of analyzed articles is unlimited, unlike the other sources. Fig. 5. Number of relevant articles for each keyword from each source On Fig. 6, the distribution of articles per keyword for each year is shown. Notably, the number of papers for some of the keywords is increasing through the years, while for others it is relatively small.
- 30. 10 E. Zdravevski et al. Fig. 6. Number of articles for searched keyword per year Next, in Fig. 7 we can see the trends of articles mentioning at least one prop- erty from each property group, and evidently, all property groups are becoming more relevant. Apparently, the articles are not covering data management as often as the other themes (i.e. technology, topics and information delivery and prescriptive insight). Fig. 7. Number of articles mentioning each property group per year Properties and keywords follow a similar trend in the number of articles, with most of them reaching the highest number in 2015 and 2016. However, some terms, such as “smart environments”, is still on the rise. Note that the numbers from 2018 are inconclusive because, at the time of this analysis, 2018
- 31. Enhanced Living Environments: An NLP-Based Scoping Review 11 is not yet finished. Also, the number of articles is increasing in IEEE Xplore and Springer and the in PubMed the number of articles starts decreasing after 2016. After the initial property analysis, for each property group, we analyze the articles based on each property. In Fig. 8 the results about the Data Management property group is shown. Here, we consider the properties Cloud, Fog and Edge, and their synonyms. The observable trend is that all of the terms are increasing in popularity in the respective research communities. The most popular term in the articles is Edge followed by Cloud and finally Fog computing, which slowly and steadily increases in popularity. Fig. 8. Article distribution per year and properties in Data Management property group The second property group is the “Technology”, which is consisted of the properties: Battery, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Protocol and Sensor. These properties cover different technology groups within the surveyed articles. It can be observed that most of the published articles include Sensors and give observation regarding the power consumption, thus include the word battery. Communication is also one of the most popular topics, the word protocol is also often mentioned, while Machine Learning and Deep Learning are encountered sparsely, but are slowly increasing in popularity. The third property group “Topics” includes the properties: Activities, Acci- dents, Diet, Exercises, Mobile and Vital Signs. The topics show increasing trends in all of these properties, except for vital signs and accidents. We reason that this is due to the fact that most of the studies that are intended for Enhanced living environments are more interested in prevention and well-being instead of treat- ment. Accidents and vital signs measurements are also much harder to simulate and need specific hospitals environments to be treated. This does not mean that they are less relevant, rather that it is simply a less attractive research topic. The final group of properties, “Information delivery and prescriptive insight”, contains Sensing, Recognition, Monitoring and Supervision. It can be observed
- 32. 12 E. Zdravevski et al. Fig. 9. Article distribution per year and properties in technology property group Fig. 10. Article distribution per year and properties in topics property group that most of the publications are treating Sensing and Recognition and much less Monitoring and Supervision. The latter are much harder to study because of the special regulations related to ethical and processing of human data. The first two, Sensing and Recognition are much easier to simulate and there are many available datasets. Next, Figs. 12 and 13 show how different properties are related between each other in terms of how often they occur together in the same article. These graphs can be used for guiding the drilling down process and selection of articles that need to be analyzed manually. The darker an edge is, the more articles there are that have the connected keywords. Also it shows that some properties are not often encountered with others (e.g. Cloud and Supervision on Fig. 13).
- 33. Other documents randomly have different content
- 34. from which they spring and in which they terminate. Our Lord's words, those I took for my text, lead us into the heart of this mystery also; they explain some of the greatest contradictions in our own lives, and in the world's life. 'And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.' How is He come into the world for judgment when He came not to judge the world, but to save it? He has answered the question before. He answers it more fully here. What we want to be saved from is our darkness. We can only be saved from it by His light. That light brings us into judgment. It distinguishes—it condemns! It distinguishes between that in us which seeks light, and that in us which flies from light. It does not condemn us for being dark; it condemns us for not owning our darkness. It does not condemn us for not having a power and virtue in us to escape from the darkness; but for refusing to entertain the light which would raise us out of it. Our eyes are not formed to create light, but to receive it; if they will close themselves to that which is always seeking to open them and illuminate them, that is the sentence—that is the condemnation. The blind beggar washes in the Pool of Siloam, and comes seeing. He hears of the Son of God, and says, 'Lord, who is He that I might believe on Him?' The Pharisee grudges eyesight to the beggar,— denies that God may work good on His own Sabbath-day. He is satisfied with his power of seeing; and the light that would open God's glorious kingdom to him puts out the eyes that he had. Dear brethren, may Christ give us honesty and courage to confess our blindness, that we may turn to Him who can make us see! May He deliver us from all conceit of our own illumination, lest we should become hopelessly dark!
- 35. DISCOURSE XIX. THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEEP. [Lincoln's Inn, 3d Sunday after Trinity, June 8, 1856.] St. John X. 27-29. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. A recent traveller in the Holy Land, who has looked on all its localities with honest and reverent eyes, and has enabled his readers to see them almost as clearly as himself, has suggested that the Mount of Olivet was the scene of the conversation, in which Jesus declared Himself as the Son of God to the man whose eyes He had opened. The man whom He had healed at the Pool of Bethesda He found in the Temple; but an excommunicated Israelite would not have been allowed to enter those precincts. If we suppose our Lord to have met him on that other ground which He visited so often, the interview may have been secret. And the words, 'For judgment am I come into the world,' which are so evident a commentary upon it, may have been addressed to persons, His disciples and others, whom He joined afterwards. Then it will appear how the concluding verses of the 9th chapter may have formed part of the same dialogue with the opening verses of the 10th,—how much closer a relation there is between them outwardly and inwardly than we at first perceive.
- 36. 'And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. And some of the Pharisees which were with Him heard these words, and said unto Him, Are we blind also? Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.' These Pharisees may have fallen in by chance with Jesus and His disciples as they walked down the mount, or may have come expressly to catch Him in His words. They must have heard that He had spoken of blind leaders of the blind. They knew, at all events, that His strongest language had been directed against them,—the guides of the people,—those to whom the humble Israelites turned for light and teaching. The question, 'Are we blind also?' may have been asked in recollection of these former passages between them, or in mere scorn that a Galilæan who had learnt no letters should presume to judge them. The answer struck at the principle of the Pharisaic character. 'Alas! if you only felt that you were as blind as any of those whom you are professing to teach and show the right way, there would be no complaint to make of you. You would turn to the Source of light; you would allow the light that lighteth every man to illuminate you. But now ye say, We see. You are satisfied with the light that is in yourselves. You think that you have a light that does not belong to these poor wretches who know not the law. Therefore your sin remaineth. You stumble, and you cause those whom you guide to stumble.' If this conversation took place at eventide, on the slope of the hill, no spectacle (as the traveller to whom I have referred remarks) would be more likely to meet the eyes of our Lord and these Pharisees than that of a flock of sheep, gathered from the different pastures in which they had been wandering, and entering, one by one, through a little wicket-gate into their resting-place for the night, —the shepherd, as was and is the custom in that country, going through it before them, and leading them in. There may have been a pause after the words on which I have just commented,—then Jesus
- 37. may have said, pointing to the sheepfold: 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.' As if He had said, 'Look there; see how that shepherd is behaving. The sheep are not going through one door, and he through another. Of any one who took another nearer way you would say at once, not, He is doing so because he is a man and is wiser than the sheep, but simply, He is not the shepherd; the sheep do not belong to him; he is come to steal them, and to kill them. The sign of the shepherd— that which the porter at the gate owns at once—is, that he goes with the sheep. But it is not only the porter that makes this distinction. The sheep know their own shepherd as well as he does. They do not in the least confound his voice with those of other men. Whether he is, as now, leading them in for the night, or leading them out in the morning, still it is the same. He knows each of them; each of them knows him. He leads them because he does not stand aloof from them.' 'This parable,' says St. John, 'Jesus spake to them: but they understood not what things they were which He spake unto them.' They did not feel the application of it; they did not see what shepherds and sheepfolds had to do with them. They could hardly have given a greater proof how little they understood the things which were written in the books they prized most,—how their worship of the divine letter had destroyed all commerce between their minds and the realities which it is setting forth. For is not the Old Testament, from first to last, a book about shepherds? Was not Abraham a shepherd,—Moses a shepherd,—David a shepherd? Is not the shepherd of sheep, throughout, connected with the Shepherd of men? That name belongs to Greek poetry as much as
- 38. to Hebrew; it is found as often in Homer as in Isaiah; it is the most universal and human of all emblems. But the Hebrew seers are the great and consistent expounders of it; they carry it from the lowest ground to the highest. 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,' is the song of the individual Israelite. 'He shall feed His flock like a shepherd: He shall gather His lambs in His arms, and carry them in His bosom; and shall gently lead those that are with young,' contains the highest vision which the Prophet could see of the Divine care over his nation. And no applications of this language are so numerous as those which are directed against 'the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves, and will not feed the flock.' These passages might have occurred to those who knew them so well as the Pharisees. But they were divine texts merely,—they never connected themselves with the sheep and the shepherds that wandered over the hills in their day. The sheep would sell for so much in the market; the shepherds were hired for so much by the day or the week. There was no other measure of their worth. Clever teachers might, perhaps, resort to them occasionally for rhetorical illustrations. Secular and vulgar things might be converted, as the phrase is, to the service of religion. But it would always be felt that they were in themselves secular and vulgar things. God had nothing to do with them till they had been reclaimed. Thus the faith that all creation is divine,—that all occupations are divine,—that God has written His mind and purpose both upon the natural and the civil order of the world, had disappeared. Men no longer walked the earth as a holy place, filled with the presence of their Lord God; it had become utterly separated from Him,—sold and sacrificed to Mammon. Then came the Son of Man, interpreting the world which He had made, and which knew Him not; drawing forth out of it treasures new and old; deciphering the hieroglyphics which wise men had perceived in every rock and cave, in every tree, and in every grain of sand; showing that in Himself was to be found the solution of that sphynx-riddle by which all ages had been tormented.
- 39. But even His parables might be turned to an evil use. It might be supposed that we can only reach the kingdom of heaven through the forms of earth; that they are not the likenesses of the invisible substances, but that the invisible substances are the likenesses of them. This danger is of such continual recurrence, it belongs so essentially to the idolatrous nature which is in us all, that it must have exhibited itself in the Christian Church before St. John wrote. Long allegories—which seem invented rather to hide the truth from common eyes than to bring it forth that it might be a possession for the wayfarer—began to be produced immediately after the apostolical age, if not within it. Nothing like them is to be found in this Gospel. Those parts of our Lord's teaching in which the parable was not used are brought into most prominence. Yet the parable is justified; all His acts are shown to be signs. And a proverb (παροιμία) is introduced here and there, which enables us to understand in what the worth of these natural likenesses consists, and how much the divine art which draws out the spiritual truth that is latent in them differs from the elaborate artifice of the allegorizer. 'Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' The formal interpreter of parables would at once decide, that the most important object in the picture which is presented to the eye, must represent Christ the Son of Man. The supposition is a natural one; perhaps it may ultimately prove to be true. But our Lord's first words seem to confute it. His conversation with the Pharisees leads Him to speak of the gate through which both the sheep and the shepherd enter into the fold, before He speaks of the shepherd. And that gate, He says, is Himself. All kings, prophets, priests, teachers, had brought light and life into the minds of men,—had served to
- 40. bind men into one,—just so far as they had confessed a light and life from which theirs was derived, just so far as they had identified themselves with the people. And all that had come claiming to be the sources of life and light,—to have an independent authority,—to have a right to rule, because they were in themselves stronger, or wiser, or better than others, had been thieves and robbers, the tyrants and destroyers of the earth. There is no commentary on history, the history of the whole world, ancient and modern, so grand as this,—so perfectly able to abide the test of facts. Every prophet, and monarch, and priest of the Jews brought strength and freedom into his land, while he was the witness of an invisible Prophet, and Monarch, and Priest higher than himself, living then, one day to be made manifest. Every prophet, monarch, and priest was the cause of superstition, idolatry, and slavery to his land, when he exalted himself,—when he strove to prove that he had some rights of his own which were not conferred on him for the sake of his race,—which were not conferred that he might be a witness of the glory belonging to his race. If we read Pagan history and literature by the light of Scripture, we should find abundance of proofs that the maxim is equally true and satisfactory with reference to them; that every Greek or Roman patriot and sage, whom we ought to love, and whom only a heartless, atheistical religion can hinder us from loving, did good and was good, so far as he did not seek his own glory,—so far as he did not attribute his wisdom and power to himself,—so far as he was in communion, amidst whatever confusions, with the Light that lighteneth every man; and that every oppressor and invader of freedom, whose character it is our duty to hate, was so because he came in his own name, claiming to be a king, a Christ, a god. With tenfold momentum do the words bear upon the ages since the incarnation, and declare to every priest, pope, emperor, philosopher, and master of a sect or school,—'In so far as thou hast assumed to be the Son of Man,—in so far as thou hast set thyself to be something when thou art nothing,—in so far as thou hast claimed to have light, which has not come from the Fountain of light,—and
- 41. power, which is not imparted by the righteous Power,—so far thou hast been a thief and a robber, caring for nothing but to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.' But if in this sense it is true now, and has been true always, that Christ is the only Door through which any man enters, whose designs towards human beings are good and not murderous; can it be equally true that 'the sheep did not hear' the voices of false prophets, of usurping tyrants, who climbed up some other way? How then have they prevailed so mightily? Dare we say that no true men have given heed to them? Dare we judge all that have yielded to impostors,—all that have welcomed them as deliverers? Shall we not certainly be judged if we do? Assuredly we shall. And, therefore, let us proceed to judge ourselves first, and at once. We have listened to impostors,—have we not? We have been beguiled by men who we thought were to give us life, and really took life from us. Well, but was there nothing in us which refused to hear these teachers,—to follow these guides? Was there no inward protest against them? Where some strong external evidence, some evil fruits in ourselves, showed that a pernicious juice had issued from the tree, did we not feel that we might have known it before—that if we had been true to the light which was shining into us, we should have known it? And, even when the enchantment was strongest upon us, was there no crying for another guide,—no bleating after a better shepherd? Here, then, is the confirmation of our Lord's sentence; we need go no further to understand what He means. Something in us did follow the strange voice, but the sheep—the true man in us—did not. That could make no answer to the counterfeit voice; that detected the thief in the shepherd's dress; that was certain that there must be one who had a right to command, and whom it could obey. I say again, this sheep is the 'true man in us.' Each of us in himself knows that it is; we may know it also by the echo which the history of our race makes to the witness in our consciences. Why have the oppressors of mankind been so short-lived? How is it that, though
- 42. there may be a succession of lies, each lie wears itself out in a generation,—in much less than a generation? How is it that what seems for a while the weakest possible testimony against it waxes stronger and louder, till at last the world gives into it, and the lie and the liar are indignantly trampled underfoot? How is it, but because the spirit of humanity does not and cannot hear the voices of those who break into the fold by the wrong way? How is it, but because all their temporary power is only derived from the tones of the true Shepherd, which they are able to mimic? How is it, but because they bear witness, by their reign and by their downfal, that they do not rule the earth, and that He does? Yes, brethren, 'He who comes, that His sheep might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,' does not teach us to talk of ourselves as His sheep, and of other men as having no part in Him. This is the teaching of robbers and destroyers,—of those who would sever us from our kind,—of those who would persuade us that it is a privilege to have a selfish, separate life,—to have selfish, separate rewards. This selfish, separate life is what Christ promises to save us from. The wide, free pastures into which He would lead us, are those upon which we can only graze, because we are portions of a flock; the fold into which He would bring us is for those whom He has redeemed from their separate errings and strayings to rest together in Him. We cannot, therefore, make a more deadly misapplication of this discourse, than when we turn it into an excuse for drawing lines of separation between those for whom Christ has died. While we draw these lines, we never shall discover the deep line in ourselves between that which can only follow the Deliverer, and that which can only follow the destroyer. 'I am the good Shepherd: the good shepherd giveth His life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.'
- 43. You will say, 'The image is changed. Christ was the wicket-gate; but now He has become the person who passes through that gate.' Yes, and if you have followed the course of the thought; if you have seen why He is described as the door through which shepherd and sheep must enter in,—why the shepherds of Israel are reproved when they will not pass through that door,—you will see the necessity of the double image. You will feel that He whom all shepherds are bound to acknowledge, if they would have the sheep hear them, must be Himself, in the highest sense, the Shepherd. And the test that He is this Shepherd, explains the perpetual worth and significance of the other symbol. 'He gives His life for the sheep.' The false shepherds wish to find out a way for themselves, which is not the way that the sheep take. They do not like the thought of stooping—beings of another and higher race as they are—to the conditions of these silly creatures. He identifies Himself with them. They have to die. He dies. That is the first and obvious view of the sentence; and it is the one to which we come back at last, as the deepest and most wonderful of all. But before we can take it in its full force, we must recal the old sentence, 'In Him was life;' and the other which He has just uttered, 'I am come that they might have life more abundantly.' The property of death is, that it is solitary and incommunicable; the property of life is, that it must be communicated,—that from him in whom it dwells most it must be poured forth most. He in whom the source of life is, from whom all the streams of it have issued, comes into the world to encounter death, which appears to have got the mastery,—to claim them whom He has created capable of life, for life. But how can He give life? How can He overcome death? He must give up life. He must die. The highest life is the life that sacrifices itself. All older shepherds had shown that it was. For their country and their brethren they had poured out their life; that men had received as the proof that they were from God,—that they were quickened by Him. The good Shepherd, the Shepherd of shepherds, justifies the belief. He shows that they had done what they did by inspiration from Him. He shows that, in this instance also,—in this instance especially,—they were receiving of His fulness, and grace for grace. The Word takes flesh and blood, because the children are
- 44. partakers of flesh and blood. The Shepherd dies, because the sheep die. Thus, the doctrine which He has been preaching to the Pharisees is brought out in all its power. They claimed to be shepherds of the people, because they were above them,—because they did not share their weakness and blindness. His claim to be the Shepherd of the people was, that He would not be above them; that He would bear what they bore, and sink as low as they had sunk. And this not from some great effort,—in virtue of some arrangement,—but because He had the most intimate and original sympathy with them, because they had always been His, and because He had made Himself one with them in all things. This is the contrast which He draws between the good shepherd and the hireling. The one shepherd does his work because he looks to be paid for it. He feels altogether aloof from his sheep. He regards them as beings of a different nature from his own. He is to be very great and condescending to them. He is to fold them carefully at night,—to do all needful services for them by day; not because he cares for them, but because he has sold his work for so much, and he may lose his wages if he commits any serious oversight. And this motive serves him well enough till some great danger threatens the sheep, till the wolf breaks into the fold. Then the hireling feels rightly that life is more precious than money; it is wiser to lose his pay than to run the risk of being devoured. From whom do these hireling shepherds expect their wages? I do not think it signifies much whether they expect them from man or from God,—in this world or in another. The temper is the same; the result which our Lord prophesies must be the same. For he who does his work in hope of getting a reward hereafter for what he has done, will, in general, regard God as an uncertain, capricious Being, whom it is very hard to please, who may punish as well as reward. Therefore he will pause before he will risk death for the sake of his work. Death may bring him into the presence of the Being whom he dreads. Death may surprise him before he has done all that he ought to have done. If there is nothing better in us than this
- 45. expectation, we shall never throw away ourselves as soldiers do on the battle-field; we shall, perhaps, give ourselves credit for being better and holier than they are, because we do not. But are we not to serve the sheep from a sense of duty to God? Are we only to serve them from certain feelings of affection for them? Let us hear what our Lord tells us of Himself, then we shall know better what we are to be. 'I am the good Shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.' There are heights and depths in these verses which no man may look into; but the principle which is declared in them is needful for the daily practice of life, profound as it is. Christ declares that He knows His sheep. He opposes this knowledge to the motives and feelings of the hireling. Let us think of these. We can describe them to you; for, brethren, which of us may not say,—should not say,—in dust and ashes: 'They have been mine. I have felt cold and estranged from those I was seeking to guide; out of communion with their fears, their sorrows, their doubts, their temptations; ready to reprove the rich for being rich, and the poor for being poor, the tradesman for his basenesses, the lawyer for his; ready to condemn all the sins which I had no mind to commit; but not knowing them individually, not bearing their burdens, not feeling them as my own. And, therefore, when the wolf has come, which is always ready to divide the flock,—to rend them from each other,—to take away the life that should unite them,—I have not been ready to encounter him. How much less should I have been ready if he had come in the form of some terrible persecution, scattering them hither and thither!' We know the hireling's mind all too well; that we do not learn from report. And oh! that we might understand something of that other mind which is opposed to it,—of that which is expressed in the words, 'I know my sheep, and am known of mine!' If you would think rightly of the Son of Man, think of the Person who knows thoroughly everything that each one of you is feeling, and
- 46. cannot utter to others or to himself,—every temptation from riches, from poverty, from solitude, from society, from gifts of intellect, from the want of them, from the gladness of the spirit, from the barrenness and dreariness of it, from the warmth of affection and from the drying up of affection, from the anguish of doubt and the dulness of indifference, from the whirlwind of passion and the calm which succeeds it, from the vile thoughts which spring out of fleshly appetites and indulgences, from the darker, more terrible, suggestions which are presented to the inner will. Believe that He knows all these, that He knows you. And then believe this also, that all He knows is through intense, inmost sympathy, not with the evil that is assaulting you, but with you who are assaulted by it. Believe that knowledge, in this the Scriptural sense of it,—the human as well as the divine sense of it,—is absolutely inseparable from sympathy. But it is added, and 'am known of mine.' I am sure we should fix our minds upon those words which express His knowledge before we come to these, else they will either drive us to despair, or lead us to great presumption. When we have done this, we may say that the highest knowledge of Christ which any, the holiest, man, has attained,—that which we attribute to an à Kempis or to a Leighton,— is what is meant for the sheep of Christ,—their proper characteristic. But having said this, we should also say that every apprehension, which any man struggling with ever so much of evil, ever so much overcome by it, has of a higher and better life, of a Divine Teacher and Reprover, is part of this knowledge,—is in kind like theirs. We should say that to be absolutely without this knowledge is a dreadful possibility, which is threatening every one of us,—which those who are most occupied with divine mysteries must often feel to be near to themselves—but which is a reprobate condition, one into which we have no right to suppose that any person has sunk, so long as he has any perception of that which is good and true,—any, the faintest, desire to lay hold of it. Truly, the voice of him who was a liar and murderer from the beginning is speaking to us and in us all, —is tempting us all down into death. But the voice of the true Shepherd is also speaking to us, inviting us, claiming us as His
- 47. sheep. And there is not one who has not at times heard that voice,— who has not been sure that he had a right to follow it, and that no man or devil had a right to say, 'Thou art not His; thou hast not a claim on Him; and He does not desire thee to follow Him.' Brethren, if shepherds and sheep made more of an effort to understand each other,—if the shepherds were more sure that they could enter into all that is drawing the sheep astray, because the same evil is in themselves,—if the sheep thought that they might give the shepherds credit for knowing all that is worst in them, not as judges, but as fellow-sinners and fellow-sufferers,—we should each and all of us have more communion with the Chief Shepherd. Those who guide would be driven, by the sense of their own ignorance and coldness, to seek for light and warmth from Him; those who are guided would feel that the pastor on earth did not intercept their communication with the heavenly Pastor, but existed to show them what He is, and how near He is to them. All has gone wrong in ourselves from our losing this fellowship with each other,— from our forgetting that the Highest of all was the lowest of all,— that He proved His right to rule us by becoming one of us, and one with us. And yet there is a deeper error still at the root of our selfishness and want of sympathy. We do not confess the ground of Christ's own sympathy, of His own sacrifice. He declares to us here that His knowledge of the sheep, and the knowledge which the sheep have of Him, rests upon the Father's knowledge of Him and His knowledge of the Father. He has been telling us the same thing in previous discourses. This union of the Father with the Son,—this dependence of the Son upon the Father,—has been the mystery which the whole Gospel has been discovering to us. Those words, in which He tells us that this relation is at the basis of our relation to Him and to each other,—of all our social and spiritual sympathies,— do but carry us one step further in the revelation. Those words, in which He tells us that He lays down His life for the sheep, because He is one with His Father, do but bring out more fully that love of the
- 48. Father, of which His life and death were testimonies; a love to which He yielded Himself in simple obedience, when He gave the greatest proof He could give of love to the sheep. This is the answer to the question which was asked before, whether duty to God is not as good and powerful a motive as love to man? Yes, brethren, a more powerful motive, a deeper and safer ground to stand upon, if we accept what our Lord says here. He boasts of no love to man as dwelling in Himself,—it is all derived from His Father. He merely submits to His will, merely fulfils it. And because that will is a will of absolute love, the mere submission to it,—the mere consenting that it should be accomplished upon Him and in Him,—involved the most perfect love to men,—the most entire communion with them,—the dying for them. He says this expressly in the 17th and 18th verses, though there is one interposed between them and that which I last quoted, which it would be shameful indeed to pass over. 'And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.' Our translators have carelessly substituted fold for flock in the last clause of the first of these verses. But most readers, I think, have of themselves restored the true reading, and perceived that the Gentiles were not to be brought into the Jewish fold, but to form one flock with the Jews after the temporary enclosure of their fold had been broken down. Perhaps they have been more puzzled to understand why what we describe as the calling in of the Gentiles should be spoken of in connexion with Christ's laying down His life. The second, modern theology represents as an event necessary for the salvation of individual men; the first, as an event connected with the outward economy of the world. And so, modern theology is out of harmony with the language of the Scriptures to which it appeals.
- 49. For that represents the death of Christ as the uniting power which breaks down the barrier between man and man,—as the deliverance of each man from the selfishness which sets him apart from his fellows, and apart from His Father in heaven. If it is this, it is surely nothing strange to speak of the union of the two different classes into which the world was divided as the mighty effect of the death of Christ. If it is this, the calling in of the Gentiles belongs not to outward history, but to the most inward and spiritual part of God's dispensation. The recognition of Christ's other sheep as His sheep,— the acknowledgment of the heathen as having been always His, no less than those who had been called out to be a blessing to all the families of the earth,—was the mightiest witness that the Brother and Lord of man had met the wolf who was destroying the fold, had redeemed all from death by sharing their death. It was the witness, too, of that other profound truth which the 17th verse announces, that there was a Man in whom the Father was perfectly satisfied, and that the ground of His satisfaction was that this Man entirely loved men—entirely gave Himself up for men. He could be satisfied with nothing less than this; for nothing less than this was the expression of His own mind and will. In no act of less love than this could His love declare itself. The thought is so wonderful, the mystery is so deep, that men have shrunk from it as incredible, and have invented any reason to account for Christ's death but that which He gives Himself. That an entirely voluntary act should be yet the fulfilment of a commandment,—that the highest power of giving away life and taking it should be realized in the most perfect obedience; this idea clashes so much with our natural pride and self-glorification, that we would rather think Christ died because He was not one with the Father,—that it was not the Father's love that was satisfied, but His wrath and fury,—than accept a statement which shows us that His thoughts are not as our thoughts or His ways as our ways; that He is not made after our image, though He would have us conformed to His. But seeing that all our morality, all our relations to one another, depend upon the question, what He is and what He has made us to be, we must ask for strength to cast
- 50. away the schemes and theories of man's devising, and to receive simply, as little children, the teaching of Him who is the brightness of the Father's glory, our Brother and our Judge. 'There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these sayings. And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye Him? Others said, These are not the words of him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?' I do not know whether the Jews who held these different opinions were the Pharisees to whom He originally spoke, or whether His sayings were reported to those who were gathered at the feast of Dedication. The opinions themselves are exactly what one would expect that such sayings would call forth. 'How can you listen to a madman, a demoniac, who says that He shall lay down His life and take it again,—who denounces our teachers, and calls Himself the good Shepherd?' This is the language of the respectable citizen of Jerusalem, the representative of the feeling of the Jewish religious world. 'But do we not want a Shepherd who shall guide us to something better? Are we satisfied with our present state? May not He who can give sight to the blind be the Light of men, as He says that He is?' These would be the cautious suggestions of those in whom some cravings had been awakened, which the teachers of the day could not stifle. We may suppose that the former party would press this argument upon the others; 'But if He is the Christ, why has He not courage to call Himself by that name? Why does He adopt these phrases, Shepherd, Light of the world, Son of Man, which we do not understand, instead of that with which we are familiar, the purport of which we know?' Of some such suggestion the question in the following verses may have been the fruit: 'And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch. Then came the Jews round about Him, and said unto Him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.' The demand seemed most reasonable, 'Tell us plainly.' What an honest sound there is in those
- 51. words! What can be better than plain speaking? Why should He who denounced all lies have shrunk from it? The question is not a new one. To have said, 'I am the Christ,' would have been to deceive them, unless He showed them what the Christ was, unless He made them understand that He was in nearly all respects unlike the Christ they had imagined for themselves. 'May we not then, after His example, avoid direct answers? May we not use expressions which people call ambiguous?' Yes, if the answers we give are more perilous to ourselves than those we avoid, as His were; if the expressions that are called ambiguous bring the hearers more face to face with facts, than those which are called straight. This is our Lord's example. Let all who dare follow it. 'Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one.' He had told them that He had come from the Father; He had testified by acts what His Father was. He had shown them that the Father was working for them on common days and Sabbath-days to bless them. This act had begotten no faith in them; would the words, 'I am the Christ,' beget faith in them? Neither words nor acts, so long as they were not seeking as sheep for the true Shepherd. He had said to them before, that instead of looking for a shepherd who should point the way to them and the humblest Israelite,—who should fold them together,—they were aspiring to be independent shepherds; they were refusing to enter by the same door as the sheep. Those who were sheep,—those who needed a shepherd,— would own His voice. They did not want Him to tell them that He was the Christ. A sure and divine instinct would tell them, that He who gave up Himself, He who entered into their death, must be the
- 52. guide they were created to follow,—that there could be no other. And He would justify their confidence. They were longing for life,— for the life of spirits,—for the life of God; nothing less would satisfy them. He would give them that life,—that eternal life of love, in which He had dwelt with the Father. They were surrounded by enemies who were seeking to rob them of life, to draw them into death. He was stronger than these enemies. They should not perish; neither man nor devil should take them out of His hands. The eternal will which He came to fulfil was on their side. The Father who gave them to Him was greater than all. Those who were seeking to separate them from their Lord and Shepherd were at war with this Father; for He had owned them, they were His. To this mighty declaration all His discourse concerning the sheep and the shepherd has been tending; but at the ground of it lies a mightier still: 'I and my Father are one.' All that He has been teaching is without foundation, if it has not this foundation. The unity of the Father and the Son is the only ground of the unity between the shepherd and the sheep; undermine one, and you undermine both. And when I say this, I mean you undermine all unity among men, all the order and principles of human society. For if these do not rest upon certain temporary conventions; if they have not been devised to facilitate the exchange of commodities, and the operations of the money market; if there is not a lie at the root of all fellowship and all government, which will be detected one day, and which popular rage or the swords of armed men will cut in pieces;— we must recognise, at last, the spiritual constitution of men in one Head and Shepherd, who rules those wills which every other power has failed and shall fail to rule. We must recognise it. The existence of a Christendom either means this,—either affirms that such a constitution is, and that national unity and family unity imply it, and depend upon it;—or it means nothing, and will dissolve into a collection of sects and parties, which will become so intolerable to men, and so hateful to God, that He will sweep them from His earth. Do you think sects would last now for an hour, if there was not in the heart of each of them a witness for a fellowship, which
- 53. combinations and shibboleths did not create, and which, thanks be to God, they cannot destroy? The true Shepherd makes His voice to be heard, through all the noise and clatter of earthly shepherds; the sheep hear that voice, and know that it is calling them to follow Him into a common fold where all may rest and dwell together. And when once they understand that still deeper message which He is uttering here, and which the old creeds of Christendom are repeating to us, 'I and my Father are one;' whenever they understand that the unity of the Church and the unity of mankind depends on this eternal distinction and unity in God Himself, and not upon the authority or decrees of any mortal pastor, the sects will crumble to pieces, and there will be, in very deed, 'one flock and one Shepherd.' But, that we may enter thoroughly and deeply into the meaning of these words, we should meditate earnestly upon those which followed them, those especially in which our Lord justified what the Jews declared to be blasphemy. 'Then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered Him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of Him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in Him.' We are eager to quote these words of Jesus, as a proof that He is God. I fear that, very often, we only mean, that He took to Himself the name of God. We associate with that name a certain idea of power and absoluteness; we believe that He vindicated that power and absoluteness to Himself. No, brethren. He came—if we may believe His own words—to show us what God is; to deliver us from
- 54. our crude, earthly, dark notions of Him; to prevent us from identifying His nature with mere power and sovereignty, as the heathens did, as the Jews in that day were doing. He came to show us the Father. Instead, therefore, of eagerly grasping at the divine name, and appropriating it to Himself, the method which He takes of proving His unity with the Father is, to humble Himself, to identify Himself with men, to refuse to be separate from them. 'You charge me with calling myself God. But did not he call them gods, to whom the word of God came?' We are startled at the defence. We ask ourselves whether He was not abandoning the very claim which He had put forward; whether He was not allowing others to share the incommunicable glory with Him? No! but He was showing that a dignity and a glory had been put upon men by the word of God itself, which proved that there must be a Son of Man who was indeed the Son of God. It was not only heathen sages who had spoken of man's divine faculties, divine origin, divine destiny. The Scriptures had called those whom God had set over men, gods. Psalmists, who were most jealous for the honour of Jehovah, had not feared to use the language. Prophets could not maintain the truth of their own mission —could not declare that the word of God was speaking by them and in them—without falling into it. There was the greatest peril of men becoming Lucifers,—of their setting themselves up in the place of God. It is the very danger of which Christ has been speaking in this discourse,—the temptation into which kings, prophets, priests,— even teachers who pretended to no inspiration, who merely stood on the ground of their traditional greatness, or of men's preference for them,—had fallen. Nor was there any deliverance from such pretensions, and from the robberies and murders which were the consequence of them, unless One came who did not exalt Himself, who did the works of His Father, who simply glorified Him. Such a One could justify all the high words that had ever been spoken of our race, and yet could lay low the pride of those who had aspired to be the lords of it. He could show what the true man is; and, in doing so, could show what the true God is. By putting Himself into the
- 55. position of the lowest of the sheep, by enduring the death to which each one of the sheep had been subjected, He could prove that the glory of man is to serve; He could show that the true sons of God had been the true servants of men; He could show that the perfect servant of all must be the Son of God. All titles, honours, dignities among men, had derived their virtue and efficacy from Him. Their virtue and efficacy lay in His Sonship. He was content to be a Son, to be nothing else than a Son. So He showed forth His eternal consubstantial union with the Father. If God is merely absolute Power, then all this Christian theology is a dream and a falsehood,— then there is no Son of God or Son of Man, in any real sense of the words. But if God is absolute Love, then He who died for the sheep must be His perfect image and likeness, the 'only-begotten, full of grace and truth;' then to separate Him from the Father, to seek for the Father in any but Him, must lead to the denial of both, ultimately to the glorification of an evil spirit, a being of absolute selfishness, in place of both. From which frightful consummation, brethren, may the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one God, whose name is Love, preserve us and His whole Church!
- 56. DISCOURSE XX. THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. [Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Trinity, June 15th, 1856.] St. John XI. 25. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. The words, 'I and my Father are one;' 'The Father is in me and I in Him,' which were spoken in the porch of the Temple at the feast of Dedication, had the same effect as the words, 'Before Abraham was, I am,' which were spoken after the feast of Tabernacles. In both cases the Jews sought to take Jesus that they might stone Him; in both Jesus escaped out of their hands. On the last occasion we are told whither He retired: 'He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John at first baptized, and there He abode.' The disciples who had been with Him in the crowd of the city found themselves in the lonely place where they had first heard Him proclaimed as the Lamb of God. Since that time there had been a whirl of new thoughts and strange hopes in their minds. The kingdom of God had appeared to be indeed at hand; they had seen their Master exercising the powers of it; they had exercised those powers themselves. Some day His throne would be established; they should sit beside Him. The vision had passed away; they were the companions of a fugitive; they were in the desert where they had first learned, not that they were princes to sit and judge, but sinners wanting a Deliverer. I cannot doubt that He who was educating them, not only by His speech but by all His acts, had devised this lesson for them, that it
- 57. was just what they needed at that time. How often do we all need just such a discipline; the return to some old haunt that some past experience has hallowed; the return to that experience which we seem to have left far behind us, that we may compare it with what we have gone through since! How good it would be for us if when circumstances take us back to the past, we believed that the Son of Man had ordered those circumstances, and was Himself with us to draw the blessing out of them! Others beside the disciples were profiting, the Evangelist tells us, by this choice of a place. 'And many resorted unto Him, and said, John did no miracle: but all things that John spake of this Man were true.' They had perhaps contrasted John the preacher in the wilderness, with Jesus who ate with publicans and sinners; John, who said, Repent, with Jesus, who opened the eyes of the blind. Now they were reminded of the likeness between them. Jesus drew them away from earthly things, as John had done. Jesus made them conscious of a light shining into them, as John had done. Only what John had said was true. They needed a baptism of the Spirit, that the baptism for the remission of sins might not be in vain. They needed a Lamb of God and a Son of God, who should do for them what no miracles could do. Was He not here? 'And many believed on Him there.' I can conceive no diviner introduction than this to the story of the raising of Lazarus. It prepares us to understand that what we are about to hear of, is not one of those signs which Jesus rebuked His countrymen as sinful and adulterous for desiring; not one of those wonders which draw men away from the invisible to the visible,— from the object of faith to an object of sight; but just the reverse of this,—a witness that what John spake of Jesus was true,—a witness that in Him was Life, and that this Life always had been, was then, and always would be, the Life as well as the Light of men. With what care the story is related so that it shall leave this impression on our minds—how all those incidents contribute to it which would have been passed over by a reporter of miracles, nay, which would have
- 58. been rejected by him as commonplace, and therefore as interfering with his object—I shall hope to point out as we proceed. And I would thankfully acknowledge at the outset, that, on the whole, the mind of Christendom has responded to the intention of the divine narrator; that whatever scholars and divines may have made of the story, the people have apprehended its human and domestic characteristics, and have refused to be cheated of its application to themselves under the pretext that it would serve better as an evidence for Christianity if its meaning were limited to one age. I am still more thankful that the Church, by adopting the words of my text into her Burial Service, has sanctified this rebellion. An attempt, therefore, to discover the exact meaning of the Evangelist will not introduce novelties, but will deepen old faith. And I cannot help feeling that unless we do seek to deepen that faith, unless we are willing to learn again from St. John some of the lessons which we may think we know very perfectly, or have left behind us in our nurseries, we shall find that we have less of belief than many Jews and many heathens had before our Lord came in the flesh. 'Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.)' The story of Mary and the alabaster box of ointment has not yet been told by our Evangelist. But he had too distinct and high an object to care for preserving the conventional proprieties of a narrator. He never pretended to be giving those who read him their first information about the events that happened while our Lord was upon earth. Their memories, he knew, were stored with these events. What they wanted was to see further into the meaning of them; to see how they exhibited the life of the Son of Man and the Son of God. He will tell us afterwards what is the context and significance of Mary's act. Here he assumes that it was known at Ephesus,—as it was to be known wherever the Gospel was preached,—and he uses it to identify Lazarus. But how could Lazarus need to be identified? Must not his name and his fame have been spread as widely as his sister's? Was any other more likely to be
- 59. preserved in the first century, by tradition, if not by record? The answer is contained in the narrative. Lazarus, as a man who had been in a grave and had come forth out of it, might be spoken of then as he is spoken of now. A glorious halo might surround him. It would be shocking to connect him with ordinary feelings and interests. A like halo would encircle her head who had anointed the Lord's body for the burial. Men would refuse to look upon her as one of the common children of earth. It was just this which John dared to do, which it was essential to his purpose that he should do. He would have us know that Mary dwelt in the little town of Bethany; that she had a sister Martha; that Lazarus was her brother. The story is stripped of its fantastical ornaments. The hero and heroine have passed into the brother and sister. If they have to do with an unseen world, it is not with a world of dreams, but of realities; not with a heaven that scorns the earth, but with a heaven that has entered into fellowship with earth. 'Therefore his sisters sent unto Him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.' The man who was healed at the Pool of Bethesda, the blind man who was sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, were merely suffering Jews; the bread at Capernaum was given to five thousand men gathered indiscriminately; the nobleman of Capernaum seems to have heard for the first time of Jesus; the guests at the marriage-feast may have been His neighbours, or even His kinsmen, but we are not told that they were. This message is the first which directly appeals to the private affection of the Son of Man, which calls Him to help a friend because he is a friend. The words which follow of our Lord and of His Apostle are worthy of all study in reference to this point. 'When Jesus heard that, He said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same place where He was.' He had a work to do. This was the first thought of all. The sickness was to glorify God, just as the blindness of the man to whom He restored sight was to glorify God. The Son of God who had been revealed as
- 60. the Light of the world, was to be revealed as the Restorer of life. Death was not to be conqueror here, any more than darkness there. All other thoughts must give way to this. Yet 'Jesus loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus.' The individual sympathy was not crushed by the universal, but grew and expanded in the light and warmth of it. He did respond to the message in His inmost heart. The love which it assumed to be there—the love for that particular man—was there. And in spite of it, yea, because of it, He continued in the desert, and made no sign of moving towards Bethany. These sentences enable us to enter into the Divine humanity of Jesus, as a thousand prelections and discourses would not enable us to enter into it. They do not present to us first the Divine side of His life, and then the human, as if they were opposing aspects of the same Being. They make us feel that the one is the only medium through which we can behold the other. 'Then after that He saith to His disciples, Let us go into Judæa again. His disciples say unto Him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again? Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of the world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.' I suppose many persons have asked themselves, 'What does this sentence mean just here? why was it introduced?' I do not know that we, who are living easy and comfortable lives, can quite solve the question. But many a patriot and confessor, who has been concealing himself from the anger of those whom he wished to bless, has, I doubt not, learnt the meaning of the sentence, and has felt the support of it. If he tried to rush forth into danger, merely in obedience to some instinct or passion of his own, he was walking in the night, and was sure to stumble. If he heard a voice in his conscience bidding him go and do some work for God,—go and aid some suffering friend,—he would be walking in a track of light; it signified not what enemies might be awaiting him, what stones might be cast at him, he could move on fearlessly and safely. The
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