Miguel A. Zamora

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can we tackle energy efficiency in IoT based smart buildings

Nowadays, buildings are increasingly expected to meet higher and more complex performance requirements. Among these requirements, energy efficiency is recognized as an international goal to promote energy sustainability of the planet. Different approaches have been adopted to address this goal, the most recent relating consumption patterns with human occupancy. In this work, we analyze what are the main parameters that should be considered to be included in any building energy management. The goal of this analysis is to help designers to select the most relevant parameters to control the energy consumption of buildings according to their context, selecting them as input data of the management system. Following this approach, we select three reference smart buildings with different contexts, and where our automation platform for energy monitoring is deployed. We carry out some experiments in these buildings to demonstrate the influence of the parameters identified as relevant in the energy consumption of the buildings. Then, in two of these buildings are applied different control strategies to save electrical energy. We describe the experiments performed and analyze the results. The first stages of this evaluation have already resulted in energy savings of about 23% in a real scenario.

Drugs interaction checker based on IoT

Providing effective and appropriate healthcare is one of the most important objectives of information and communication technologies (ICT). Internet of things (IoT) is one of the last advances in ICT, providing a global connectivity and management of sensors, devices, users and information. Our contribution is a solution to examine drug related problems based on IoT technologies, i.e. smart phones and Web to support ubiquitous Access, 6LoWPAN technology to support ubiquitous data collection of patients, sensors and hospitals, and RFID/NFC to support global identification. These technologies offer a wide range of applications in healthcare, which improves the quality of services, reduce mistakes, and even detect health anomalies from vital signs. This paper presents how IoT technology is applied in a pharmaceutical system to examine drugs in order to detect Adverse Drugs Reaction (ADR), harmful effects of pharmaceutical excipients, allergies, complications and contraindications related with liver and renal defects, and harmful side effects during pregnancy or lactation. Thereby, the system provides an enhanced approach assisting physicians in clinical decisions and drug prescribing. The solution presented is based on NFC (Near Field Communication) and barcode identification technologies, which have been integrated in common devices such as smart-phones, PDAs and PCs. The drug ID is matched with the Pharmaceutical Intelligent Information System to detect whether a specific drug is suitable with respect to the patients health record or not.

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.

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

Knowledge Acquisition and Management Architecture for Mobile and Personal Health Environments Based on the Internet of Things

Personalized health capability is limited to the available data from the patient, which is usually dynamic and incomplete. Therefore, it is presenting a critical issue for knowledge mining, analysis and trending. For that reason, this work presents a knowledge acquisition and management platform based on the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is presenting the capability to connect any object to Internet. These Smart Objects are providing an enormous quantity of data. This work is focused on the personal and mobile health areas, where the integration of clinical devices in the patients environment, this will enable new services with capabilities to predict health anomalies in real time, send alerts, reminders and offer an enriched feedback to the patient. This feedback will help and motivate to the patients with the treatments adherence and compliance and to follow a healthy lifestyle. In order to reach these services and feedback capabilities, it is required a full integration of the clinical devices and efficient processing of the collected data. The presented knowledge acquisition and management architecture is composed of, on the one hand, a gateway and a personal clinical device used for the integration of clinical devices, wireless transmission of continuous vital signs through 6LoWPAN, and patient identification through RFID. On the other hand, it is complemented with a data model and pre-processing module called YOAPY, which analyses the data from the sensors at the personal devices level. This offers an enriched data to the knowledge-based systems, and this also aggregate the data acquired in order to improve the performance of the communications to the constrains from the Smart Objects in aspects such as low bandwidth, frame size and power consumption. This architecture is being evaluated with an extended set of sensors required for patients with breathing problem in the framework of the AIRE project, it has evaluated the capabilities to provide knowledge acquisition and management from continuous monitored vital signs, the capabilities for diagnosis and detection of anomalies, and finally the support for security and privacy.