Pablo Lopez

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.

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.

Lightweight MIPv6 with IPSec support

Mobility management is a desired feature for the emerging Internet of Things IoT. Mobility aware solutions increase the connectivity and enhance adaptability to changes of the location and infrastructure. IoT is enabling a new generation of dynamic ecosystems in environments such as smart cities and hospitals. Dynamic ecosystems require ubiquitous access to Internet, seamless handover, flexible roaming policies, and an interoperable mobility protocol with existing Internet infrastructure. These features are challenges for IoT devices, which are usually constrained devices with low memory, processing, communication and energy capabilities. This work presents an analysis of the requirements and desirable features for the mobility support in the IoT, and proposes an efficient solution for constrained environments based on Mobile IPv6 and IPSec. Compatibility with IPv6-existing protocols has been considered a major requirement in order to offer scalable and inter-domain solutions that were not limited to specific application domains in order to enable a new generation of application and services over Internet-enabled dynamic ecosystems, and security support based on IPSec has been also considered, since dynamic ecosystems present several challenges in terms of security and privacy. This work has, on the one hand, analysed suitability of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec for constrained devices, and on the other hand, analysed, designed, developed and evaluated a lightweight version of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec. The proposed solution of lightweight Mobile IPv6 with IPSec is aware of the requirements of the IoT and presents the best solution for dynamic ecosystems in terms of efficiency and security adapted to IoT-devices capabilities. This presents concerns in terms of higher overhead and memory requirements. But, it is proofed and concluded that even when higher memory is required and major overhead is presented, the integration of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec for constrained devices is feasible.

Interaction of Patients with Breathing Problems through NFC in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the technologies, in conjunction with Bluetooth and 6LoWPAN, which makes feasible the wireless transmission of information from small objects and sensors to Internet-enabled devices. This presents a new technological generation, denominated Internet of Things (IoT), which is able to integrate in Internet the sensors and objects located surround us. Our research work is focused on the evaluation of the capabilities from the mentioned technologies for the integration of a continuous data transmission model. Specifically, this paper analyzes the capabilities for transmitting continuous data from NFC. This presents special considerations and constrains, since it was not originally designed for this purpose. Specifically, it has been considered, for this evaluation, a sensor with high requirements in data transmission, an electrocardiogram (ECG). Over this sensor is presented an evaluation of the performance with the native communication model from the sensor, i.e. sending via NFC all the collected data, concluding that it is necessary to perform data compression when the amount of data to send is too large, since this introduces a delay of 2 bytes for each 127 bytes. Therefore, this work also presents a solution of pre-processed and data compression to make feasible the communication with NFC technology.

Lightweight Mobile IPv6: A mobility protocol for enabling transparent IPv6 mobility in the Internet of Things

Mobility management is a desired feature for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). Mobility aware solutions increase the connectivity and enhance adaptability to changes of the location and infrastructure. IoT is enabling a new generation of dynamic ecosystems in environments such as smart cities and hospitals. Dynamic ecosystems require ubiquitous access to Internet, seamless handover, flexible roaming policies, and an interoperable mobility protocol with existing Internet infrastructure. These features are challenges for IoT devices, which are usually constrained devices with low memory, processing, communication and energy capabilities. This work has, on the one hand, analysed suitability of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec for constrained devices, and on the other hand, analysed, designed, developed and evaluated a lightweight version of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec. The proposed solution of lightweight Mobile IPv6 with IPSec is aware of the requirements of the IoT and presents the best solution for dynamic ecosystems in terms of efficiency and security adapted to IoT-devices capabilities. This presents concerns in terms of higher overhead and memory requirements. But, it is proofed and concluded that even when higher memory is required and major overhead is presented, the integration of Mobile IPv6 and IPSec for constrained devices is feasible.

YOAPY: a data aggregation and pre-processing module for enabling continuous healthcare monitoring in the internet of things

Wireless transmissions of continuous vital signs are gaining importance for providing rich patient-care data in ambient assisted living environments, these monitoring systems are moving towards the Internet of Things, which offers a global and end-to-end connectivity with technologies such as 6LoWPAN. This work analyzes the requirements to transmit the continuous vital sign from an electrocardiogram to a remote server. Specifically, this presents the impact from the security in the performance, in issues such as overload, latency, and power consumption i.e. patient monitoring system lifetime, for different cryptographic primitives. For that reason, a pre-processing module is also proposed, denominated YOAPY, to reach a trade-off among the requirements from the continuous vital signs data transmission, security/privacy level, and lifetime.

Extending near field communications to enable continuous data transmission in clinical environments

There are several communication technologies that make feasible the integration of things into Internet. NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi Low Power and 6LoWPAN are some of the most extended technologies, which are making possible the wireless transmission for sensor networks communication and integrate this networks with the Internet, in order to reach an Internet of Things (IoT). These networks allow us collect a lot of information process and understand it and act, according to the situation required, effectively. Our research work is focused for the integration of NFC to control the heart status of a patient continuously. This work analyzes the capabilities from NFC to make feasible the integration of continuous data transmission. The main goal of this continuous data transmission is enable a new generation of mobile health tools that make feasible to analyze process and make a preliminary diagnosis of the state of a patients heart anytime/anywhere. For this purpose, it is presented how an electrocardiogram clinical device is integrated with a mobile phone enabled with NFC. This is evaluated the performance with the native communication model from the sensor concluding that it is necessary some preprocessing to work properly in real time. For that reason, it is also proposed, evaluated and prototyped a preprocessing module to solve the mentioned communication challenges for NFC in clinical environments.