Antonio F. Skarmeta

Interconnection Framework for mHealth and Remote Monitoring Based on the Internet of Things

Communication and information access defines the basis to reach a personalized health end-to-end framework. Personalized health capability is limited to the available data from the patient. The data is usually dynamic and incomplete. Therefore, it presents a critical issue for mining, analysis and trending. For that reason, this work presents an interconnection framework for mobile Health (mHealth) based on the Internet of Things. It makes continuous and remote vital sign monitoring feasible and introduces technological innovations for empowering health monitors and patient devices with Internet capabilities. It also allows patient monitoring and supervision by remote centers, and personal platforms such as tablets. In terms of hardware it offers a gateway and a personal clinical device used for the wireless transmission of continuous vital signs through 6LoWPAN, and patient identification through RFID. In terms of software, this interconnection framework presents a novel protocol, called YOAPY, for an efficient, secure, and scalable integration of the sensors deployed in the patients personal environment. This paper presents the architecture and evaluates its capability to provide continuous monitoring, ubiquitous connectivity, extended device integration, reliability, and security and privacy support. The proposed interconnection framework and the proposed protocol for the sensors have been exhaustively evaluated in the framework of the AIRE project, which is focused on patients with breathing problem. This evaluates for the proposed protocol the data aggregation mechanism level, Round-Trip delay Time, impact of the distance, and the impact of the security. It has been concluded that secure continuous monitoring is feasible with the use of the proposed {YOAPY}} aggregation mechanisms and the capabilities from the proposed interconnection framework.

Mobile digcovery: discovering and interacting with the world through the Internet of things

The application of Internet-enabled devices in the real world for the development of Smart Cities, environmental monitoring, bus tracking, and parking requires scalability, extensibility, and integration of emerging resources to reach a suitable ecosystem for data acquisition and interaction with citizens. Internet of things needs to offer efficient support for global communications and access to services and information. It needs to enable homogeneous and seamless machine-to-machine communication for different solutions and applications. This work presents an homogeneous and suitable mechanism for global resource discovery, device access for deployed smart objects in different scenarios, and sensors and devices from end users (participative sensing). The integration of legacy and sensors already available from smart buildings and smart objects is presented. For this purpose, a resolution infrastructure called “digcovery” is defined for maximizing efficiency and sustainability of deployments. Digcovery architecture offers the framework to allow users to register/include their own sensors into a common infrastructure and access/discover the available resources through mobile digcovery. Mobile digcovery exploits the context-awareness, geo-location, and identification technologies available in mobile platforms such as smartphones to discover, interact, and access the resources through its ElasticSearch engine.

Toward a Lightweight Authentication and Authorization Framework for Smart Objects

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the current technology revolution that is intended to transform the current environment into a more pervasive and ubiquitous world. In this emerging ecosystem, the application of standard security technologies has to cope with the inherent nature of constrained physical devices, which are seamlessly integrated into the Internet infrastructure. This work proposes a set of lightweight authentication and authorization mechanisms in order to support smart objects during their life cycle. Furthermore, such mechanisms are framed within a proposed security framework, which is compliant with the Architectural Reference Model, recently presented by the EU FP7 IoT-A project. The resulting architecture is intended to provide a holistic security approach to be leveraged in the design of novel and lightweight security protocols for IoT constrained environments.

Semantic Web of Things: an analysis of the application semantics for the IoT moving towards the IoT convergence

The Internet of Things IoT is being applied for stovepipe solutions, since it presents a semantic description limited to a specific domain. IoT needs to be pushed towards a more open, interoperable and collaborative IoT. The first step has been the Web of Things WoT. WoT evolves the IoT with a common stack based on web services. But, even when a homogeneous access is reached through web protocols, a common understanding is not yet acquired. For this purpose, the Semantic Web of Things SWoT is proposed for the integration of the semantic web on the WoT. This work analyses the SWoT, presenting its different levels to offer an IoT convergence. Specifically, we analyse the trends for capillary networks and for cellular networks with standards such as IPSO, ZigBee, OMA, and the oneM2M initiative. This work also analyses the impact of the semantic-annotations/metadata in the performance of the resources.

An Analysis of M2M Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Internet of Things

IoT (Internet of Things) resources could be conceived as service end-points for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) platforms, i.e. Things/Resources as a Service (TaaS or RaaS). Moreover, technologies involved in this platforms, provide to devices the needed capabilities to expose their services in a straightforward manner. Consequently, a solid, well-designed M2M/IoT platform should provide the basis for the simplified management of resources. The goal of this paper is to provide an initial analysis of the requirements for an M2M platform together with the considerations about IoT technologies, which will serve as a starting point for defining the actual services for IoT devices via M2M. Towards this direction, the current state of the art in M2M communications, in terms of standardization and already deployed platforms are taken into account, and an analysis of several of this platforms is done, showing up its main focuses and how all them have to evolve, in order to meet with upcoming requirements. The new trends about interaction between real and virtual worlds, and the challenges and opportunities identified, form the basis upon which every M2M/IoT standard platform should be built.

An indoor localization system based on artificial neural networks and particle filters applied to intelligent buildings

Smart Buildings aim to provide users with seamless, invisible and proactive services adapted to their preferences and needs. These services can be offered intelligently by means of considering the static and dynamical status of the building and the location of its occupants. Furthermore, gathering data about the identity and location of users enables to provide more personalized services, while wasted energy in overuse is reduced. But to cope with these objectives, it is necessary to acquire contextual information, both from users and the environment, using nonintrusive, ubiquitous and cheap technologies. In this work, we propose a low-cost and nonintrusive solution to solve the indoor localization problem focused on satisfying the requirements, in terms of accuracy in localization data, to provide customized comfort services in buildings, such as climate and lighting control, or security, with the goal of ensuring users comfort while saving energy. The proposed localization system is based on RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) and IR (Infra-Red) data. The solution implements a Radial Basis Function Network to estimate the location of occupants, and a Particle Filter to track their next positions. This mechanism has been tested in a reference building where an automation system for collecting data and controlling devices has been setup. Results obtained from experimental assessments reveal that, despite our localization system uses a relative low number of sensors, estimated positions are really accurate considering the requirements of precision to provide user-oriented pervasive services in buildings.

Applicability of Big Data Techniques to Smart Cities Deployments

This paper presents the main foundations of big data applied to smart cities. A general Internet of Things based architecture is proposed to be applied to different smart cities applications. We describe two scenarios of big data analysis. One of them illustrates some services implemented in the smart campus of the University of Murcia. The second one is focused on a tram service scenario, where thousands of transit-card transactions should be processed. Results obtained from both scenarios show the potential of the applicability of this kind of techniques to provide profitable services of smart cities, such as the management of the energy consumption and comfort in smart buildings, and the detection of travel profiles in smart transport.

Survey of Internet of Things Technologies for Clinical Environments

This work carries out a technical survey about the technologies available for wireless communication of personal clinical devices. The technologies considered are the most extended Internet of Things technologies, they have different purposes and features in order to cover the gaps required to reach a Internet of Things ecosystem, where the clinical devices will be powered with new characteristics such as communications, alerts, analysis, and remote monitoring. These technologies are 6LoWPAN/IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth Low Energy (BT-LE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). Each one of these technologies has a function in the context of mhealth and eHealth. NFC is used by a patient to access their current health. BL-LE can be used to gather information from the same room, environment and pathology. And finally 6LoWPAN can be used to check the status of several rooms and even around the hospital by any IPv6 device. This work analyzes each one of the technologies and defines when each technology is more suitable.

User-centric smart buildings for energy sustainable smart cities

Over six billion people are expected to live in cities and surrounding regions by 2050. Consequently, in the near future, the autonomic and smart operation of cities may be a critical requirement to improve the economic, social, and environmental well-being of citizens. Smart urban technologies represent an important contribution to the sustainable development of cities, making smart cities a reality. In this sense, the energy sustainability of cities has become a global concern, bringing with it a wide range of research and technological challenges that affect many aspects of peoples lives. Because most of the human lifetime is spent indoors, buildings, which make up a city subsystem, require special attention. Indeed, buildings are the cornerstone in terms of power consumption and CO2 emissions on a global scale. In this paper, we analyze the role that buildings play in terms of their energy performance at city level and present an energy-efficient management system integrated in a building automation platform based on an Internet of Things approach. Occupants play a crucial role in the systems operation to achieve energy efficient building performance, and any impact on self-sustainable smart cities will be a consequence of efficient user-centric smart building designs. Our proposal represents a user-centric smart solution as a contribution to the energy sustainability of modern cities. The building management platform has been deployed in a real smart building, in which a set of tests were carried out to assess different concerns involved in the buildings infrastructure management. The first stages of this experiment have already resulted in an energy saving in heating of about 20% at building level, which could translate into a reduction of 8% in the energy consumption of buildings at a European city level. Copyright

IPv6 Addressing Proxy: Mapping Native Addressing from Legacy Technologies and Devices to the Internet of Things (IPv6)

Sensors utilize a large number of heterogeneous technologies for a varied set of application environments. The sheer number of devices involved requires that this Internet be the Future Internet, with a core network based on IPv6 and a higher scalability in order to be able to address all the devices, sensors and things located around us. This capability to connect through IPv6 devices, sensors and things is what is defining the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). IPv6 provides addressing space to reach this ubiquitous set of sensors, but legacy technologies, such as X10, European Installation Bus (EIB), Controller Area Network (CAN) and radio frequency ID (RFID) from the industrial, home automation and logistic application areas, do not support the IPv6 protocol. For that reason, a technique must be devised to map the sensor and identification technologies to IPv6, thus allowing homogeneous access via IPv6 features in the context of the IoT. This paper proposes a mapping between the native addressing of each technology and an IPv6 address following a set of rules that are discussed and proposed in this work. Specifically, the paper presents a technology-dependent IPv6 addressing proxy, which maps each device to the different subnetworks built under the IPv6 prefix addresses provided by the internet service provider for each home, building or user. The IPv6 addressing proxy offers a common addressing environment based on IPv6 for all the devices, regardless of the device technology. Thereby, this offers a scalable and homogeneous solution to interact with devices that do not support IPv6 addressing. The IPv6 addressing proxy has been implemented in a multi-protocol card and evaluated successfully its performance, scalability and interoperability through a protocol built over IPv6.