Gregorio López

LOBIN: E-Textile and Wireless-Sensor-Network-Based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments

This paper describes a novel healthcare IT platform developed under the LOBIN project, which allows monitoring several physiological parameters, such as ECG, heart rate, body temperature, etc., and tracking the location of a group of patients within hospital environments. The combination of e-textile and wireless sensor networks provides an efficient way to support noninvasive and pervasive services demanded by future healthcare environments. This paper presents the architecture, system deployment as well as validation results from both laboratory tests and a pilot scheme developed with real users in collaboration with the Cardiology Unit at La Paz Hospital, Madrid, Spain.

A Review on Architectures and Communications Technologies for Wearable Health-Monitoring Systems

Nowadays society is demanding more and more smart healthcare services that allow monitoring patient status in a non-invasive way, anywhere and anytime. Thus, healthcare applications are currently facing important challenges guided by the u-health (ubiquitous health) and p-health (pervasive health) paradigms. New emerging technologies can be combined with other widely deployed ones to develop such next-generation healthcare systems. The main objective of this paper is to review and provide more details on the work presented in “LOBIN: E-Textile and Wireless-Sensor-Network-Based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments”, published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, as well as to extend and update the comparison with other similar systems. As a result, the paper discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of using different architectures and communications technologies to develop wearable systems for pervasive healthcare applications.

ENERsip: M2M-based platform to enable energy efficiency within energy-positive neighbourhoods

This paper presents the main features of the EU R&D project ENERsip. The main objective of this FP7 ICT project is to design, develop, and test an adaptive service-oriented M2M-based platform that enables optimizing, in near real-time, and saving energy by remotely monitoring, controlling and coordinating power generation and consumption within neighborhoods with energy-positive buildings. The paper describes the system architecture designed to meet such requirements, putting special emphasis on the M2M communication infrastructure. The novel services that will be delivered on top of such M2M communication infrastructure and the potential users who will enjoy them are also presented. Finally, the ENERsip platform validation plan is outlined.

Modeling the Neighborhood Area Networks of the Smart Grid

ICT and M2M communications will definitely play a key role on making the Smart Grid dream comes true. However, there are many available communications technologies that can be applied to this area, so an effective method to evaluate and compare them is required. Simulations represent a powerful, flexible, and cost-effective solution to achieve this goal, but the relevance of their results tightly depends on how well the model behind the simulations fits real world scenarios. This paper presents a model to evaluate the typical M2M communications architecture for the Neighborhood Area Networks of the Smart Grid. This model considers bidirectional real-time communications in realistic scenarios, which have been developed based on data collected from the EU FP7 project ENERsip. In order to maximize the impact of the model, medium to long-term scenarios are also considered.

Modeling Smart Grid neighborhoods with the ENERsip ontology

We model the domain of knowledge of energy efficiency in Smart Grid neighborhoods.The resulting ontology is developed using Ontology Web Language.The ontology captures vocabulary, taxonomy, and engineering and business semantics.The ontology is a valuable reference for project development and validation.The ontology is a valuable reference for further research in this field. The electricity consumption in the buildings sector has been steadily increasing during the last decade, up to the point that energy efficiency in this sector has become a major problem for governments, utilities, customers, and the environment. The foreseen high penetration of distributed micro-generation facilities based on renewables can help to reduce the environmental footprint of buildings and households, although the complexity of managing effectively the electric grid increases dramatically under these conditions. The IEEE 2030 standard for interoperability in the Smart Grid remarks upon the importance of well-defined data models in such complex scenarios and puts emphasis on the benefits of ontologies and OWL (Web Ontology Language) for this purpose. This paper presents an OWL-based ontology that formally defines the vocabulary and taxonomy and captures the engineering and business semantics of this domain of knowledge (i.e., energy efficiency in the so-called nZEN - nearly Zero-Energy Neighborhoods). This ontology has been defined under the scope of the EU (European Union) research project ENERsip. The paper also highlights the main benefits the ontology brought to all the phases of the project life cycle, as well as how future work can make the most out of it.

Location-aware system for wearable physiological monitoring within hospital facilities

This paper describes a medical IT platform based on Wireless Sensor Networks and e-textile which supports indoor location-aware services as well as monitoring physiological parameters, such as ECG, heart rate, body temperature, etc., from a group of patients within hospital facilities. The paper presents the architecture, system deployment and validation results based on local test as well as on a pilot scheme developed with real users in collaboration with the Cardiology Unit at La Paz Hospital in Madrid (Spain).

Planning and Performance Challenges in Power Line Communications Networks for Smart Grids

The Smart Grid represents a revolution especially at distribution and customer levels, bringing monitoring and control capabilities, traditionally available up to the primary substations, down to the secondary substations, and beyond. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications networks are key to enable managing the huge number of sensors and actuators distributed all over the low voltage and medium voltage networks. Such M2M communications networks must meet demanding requirements from the technical perspective (e.g., low latency, high availability), since eventually the stability of the grid may rely on them, and from the economic perspective (e.g., low deployment and operational costs), due to the huge volume of devices to be monitored and controlled. Thus, Power Line Communications (PLC) technologies are winning momentum in these scenarios because they represent a great trade-off between both perspectives. However, electrical networks also represent a harsh communications medium, mainly because they are not designed for data communications, but for power transmission. Consequently, although much research has been carried out on this topic recently, PLC networks still present technological problems and challenges. This paper highlights some of the most relevant challenges in this area and presents a set of cutting-edge software tools which are being developed to overcome them, facilitating the planning, deployment, and operation of this kind of networks.

Smart CEI Moncloa: An IoT-based Platform for People Flow and Environmental Monitoring on a Smart University Campus

Internet of Things platforms for Smart Cities are technologically complex and deploying them at large scale involves high costs and risks. Therefore, pilot schemes that allow validating proof of concepts, experimenting with different technologies and services, and fine-tuning them before migrating them to actual scenarios, are especially important in this context. The IoT platform deployed across the engineering schools of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in the Moncloa Campus of International Excellence represents a good example of a test bench for experimentation with Smart City services. This paper presents the main features of this platform, putting special emphasis on the technological challenges faced and on the solutions adopted, as well as on the functionality, services and potential that the platform offers.

Machine-to-machine communications infrastructure for smart electric vehicle charging in private parking lots

The great concern about climate change and fossil fuel dependency is strongly encouraging the development and use of electric vehicles. However, the wide adoption of such vehicles is not possible without the deployment of charging infrastructures capable of integrating them into current and future electricity grids. There are many on-going research efforts and even products that propose different solutions to this problem. Standing out among them is the Spanish research project DOMOCELL, which aims at designing and developing a smart charging infrastructure for private parking lots. In this paper, we present its communications architecture, designed under the guidelines of efficiency, reliability, and scalability. In addition, we describe, supported by some practical use cases and emulations, how user authentication and authorization, as well as accounting and billing of power consumption, are performed even in roaming scenarios. Copyright

On the Impact of Virtual Private Network Technologies on the Operational Costs of Cellular Machine-to-Machine Communications Platforms for Smart Grids

Due to the fact that the information managed in the so-called Smart Grids is extremely sensitive, security is a key requirement for their wide deployment and adoption. However, the use of secure mechanisms entails not only technical costs but also economic costs. This paper discusses several protocols commonly used to establish VPN (Virtual Private Networks) and assesses the impact of using them on the operational costs of a cellular M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communications platform aiming to reduce power consumption and integrate distributed micro-generation at district level.