Antonio F. Gómez Skarmeta

An internet of things---based personal device for diabetes therapy management in ambient assisted living (AAL)

Diabetes therapy management in AAL environments, such as old people and diabetes patients homes, is a very difficult task since many factors affect a patient’s blood sugar levels. Factors such as illness, treatments, physical and psychological stress, physical activity, drugs, intravenous fluids and change in the meal plan cause unpredictable and potentially dangerous fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Right now, operations related to dosage are based on insulin infusion protocol boards, which are provided by physicians to the patients. These boards are not considering very influential factors such as glycemic index from the diet, consequently patients need to estimate the dosage leading to dose error, which culminates in hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia episode. Therefore, right insulin infusion calculation needs to be supported by the next generation of personal-care devices. For this reason, a personal device has been developed to assist and consider more factors in the insulin therapy dosage calculation. The proposed solution is based on Internet of things in order to, on the one hand, support a patient’s profile management architecture based on personal RFID cards and, on the other hand, provide global connectivity between the developed patient’s personal device based on 6LoWPAN, nurses/physicians desktop application to manage personal health cards, glycemic index information system, and patient’s web portal. This solution has been evaluated by a multidisciplinary group formed by patients, physicians, and nurses.

Cyclone: a novel design schema for hierarchical DHTs

Recent research efforts have improved the existing flat distributed hash tables to accommodate hierarchical structure. Nevertheless, many problems still remain to be solved regarding scalability issues, autonomous systems, connection degree, and network proximity. In this paper, we present a new hierarchical DHT called Cyclone that aims to solve the aforementioned issues with a near-optimal architecture. Cyclone provides optimal logarithmic routing hops without establishing unnecessary connection links to other nodes. Our approach follows a horizontal and uniform leaf-based approach that considerably reduces the overall number of links per node. Furthermore, Cyclone also offers a disjoint multipath routing scheme that benefits from network proximity and thus creates a more robust overlay infrastructure.

An Architecture Based on Internet of Things to Support Mobility and Security in Medical Environments

Recently the problem of providing effective and appropriate healthcare to elderly and disable people is an important field in relative to the aging of population problems. The objective of information and communication technologies (ICT) is to focus on the new technologies the medical environments, so that it can provide management to accelerate and improve the clinical process. Our contribution is to introduce an approach based on Internet of things (IoT) in medical environments to achieve a global connectivity with the patient, sensors and everything around it. The main goal of this globality feature is to provide a context awareness to make the patients life easier and the clinical process more effective. To achieve this approach, firstly has been developed an architecture which has been designed to offer great potential and flexibility of communications, monitoring and control. This architecture includes several advanced communication technologies; among them are 6LoWPAN and RFID/NFC, which are the basis ofthe IoT. Moreover the research deal with the problems related to the mobility and security that happens when IoT is applied in medical environments. The mobility issue requires developing a protocol over 6LoWPAN network to be carried out in sensor networks with high specification related with low power consumption and capacity. While in the RFID/NFC technologies need to support secure communications, our proposal is to introduce a set of security techniques and cryptographic SIM card to authenticate, encrypt and sign the communications with medical devices. The preliminary results showed a reduction of time in the handover process with the protocol for mobility defined, by omitting the stages of addressing and simplifying the MIPv6 protocol. In addition to increase the security in the communications carried out by NFC devices enhanced with the inclusion of cryptographic SIM card.

Smart Lighting Solutions for Smart Cities

Smart cities play an increasingly important role for the sustainable economic development of a determined area. Smart cities are considered a key element for generating wealth, knowledge and diversity, both economically and socially. A Smart City is the engine to reach the sustainability of its infrastructure and facilitate the sustainable development of its industry, buildings and citizens. The first goal to reach that sustainability is reduce the energy consumption and the levels of greenhouse gases (GHG). For that purpose, it is required scalability, extensibility and integration of new resources in order to reach a higher awareness about the energy consumption, distribution and generation, which allows a suitable modeling which can enable new countermeasure and action plans to mitigate the current excessive power consumption effects. Smart Cities should offer efficient support for global communications and access to the services and information. It is required to enable a homogenous and seamless machine to machine (M2M) communication in the different solutions and use cases. This work presents how to reach an interoperable Smart Lighting solution over the emerging M2M protocols such as CoAP built over REST architecture. This follows up the guidelines defined by the IP for Smart Objects Alliance (IPSO Alliance) in order to implement and interoperable semantic level for the street lighting, and describes the integration of the communications and logic over the existing street lighting infrastructure.

Glowbal IP: An adaptive and transparent IPv6 integration in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things IoT requires scalability, extensibility and a transparent integration of multi-technology in order to reach an efficient support for global communications, discovery and look-up, as well as access to services and information. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to enable a homogenous and seamless machine-to-machine M2M communication mechanism allowing global access to devices, sensors and smart objects. In this respect, the proposed answer to these technological requirements is called Glowbal IP, which is based on a homogeneous access to the devices/sensors offered by the IPv6 addressing and core network. Glowbal IPs main advantages with regard to 6LoWPAN/IPv6 are not only that it presents a low overhead to reach a higher performance on a regular basis, but also that it determines the session and identifies global access by means of a session layer defined over the application layer. Technologies without any native support for IP are thereby adaptable to IP e.g. IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Low Energy. This extension towards the IPv6 network opens access to the features and methods of the devices through a homogenous access based on WebServices e.g. RESTFul/CoAP. In addition to this, Glowbal IP offers global interoperability among the different devices, and interoperability with external servers and users applications. All in all, it allows the storage of information related to the devices in the network through the extension of the Domain Name System DNS from the IPv6 core network, by adding the Service Directory extension DNS-SD to store information about the sensors, their properties and functionality. A step forward in network-based information systems is thereby reached, allowing a homogenous discovery, and access to the devices from the IoT. Thus, the IoT capabilities are exploited by allowing an easier and more transparent integration of the end users applications with sensors for the future evaluations and use cases.

A Global Perspective of Smart Cities: A Survey

The technological revolution that has taken place in recent decades, driven by advances and developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has revolutionized the way people communicate, work, travel, live, etc. Cities need to evolve towards intelligent dynamic infrastructures that serve citizens fulfilling the criteria of energy efficiency and sustainability. This article provides an overview of the main smart city applications, and their implementation status in major cities around the world. We also present a study of patents on basic smart city technologies in order to show which countries and companies are making greater efforts to register the intellectual property. The relation between patented technologies and current ongoing smart city applications is also investigated.

Design of web-based collaborative learning environments. Translating the pedagogical learning principles to human computer interface

Seven pedagogical principles guided the development of a collaborative virtual environment, within an international project called ITCOLE. The progressive inquiry model as a theoretical framework had a large impact on describing these principles. Furthermore, this article describes the two web-based software systems - Synergeia and FLE3 - that were developed in the project. Teachers evaluated this software in the light of two perspectives: user friendliness (ease of use) and user satisfaction (especially the pedagogical usability). It is concluded that the participants find the software easy to use. The user satisfaction ranges between good and average. Details about the different types of evaluation are reported in the paper.

A novel methodology for constructing secure multipath overlays

One technique for securely delivering data in structured overlays is to increase the number of disjoint paths among peers. However, most overlays do not offer a substrate to accommodate multiple paths. The binary-equivalence relationship-based Cyclone methodology is decoupled from the overlay architecture, which insulates it from such limitations. It fortifies existing routing algorithms to defend against data-forwarding attacks.

ANTS framework for cooperative work environments

Designed to facilitate computer-supported cooperative work, ANTS overcomes the major deficiencies found in earlier groupware toolkits at the conceptual, architectural, and technological levels.

HWSN6: Hospital Wireless Sensor Networks Based on 6LoWPAN Technology: Mobility and Fault Tolerance Management

Mobility is one of the most important issues in the next generation of Wireless Sensor Networks. In the future internet oriented to internet-of-things and awareness context solutions is essential to support mobility and global addressing. Furthermore, in medical environments it is crucial to support fault tolerance, since human life depends on these systems. This paper presents an architecture to support medical sensor networks based on 6LoWPAN, where we have defined a protocol to carry out inter-WSN mobility. This protocol shows how we exploit the other elements of the architecture (sink nodes and gateways) with high capacity and resources, hence mobile nodes decrease the number of interchanged messages it needs with regard to other solutions for mobility like MIPv6. Moreover, from this mobility protocol we can support fault tolerance too, considering that a node fails it is a special case of mobility. All this with a suitable security support, therefore we can assure the protection of the patient’s information.