RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Real-time monitoring of the prototype design of electric system by the ubidots platform

In this paper, a prototype DC electric system was practically designed. The idea of the proposed system was derived from the microgrid concept. The system contained two houses each have a DC generator and load that consists of four 12 V DC lamps. Each house is controlled fully by Arduino UNO microcontroller to work in Island mode or connected it with the second house or main electric network. House operating mode depends on the power generated by its source and the availability of the main network. Under all operating cases, the minimum price of electricity consumption should satisfy as possible. Information between the houses about the operating mode and the main network state was exchanging wirelessly with the help of the RF-HC12. This information uploaded to the Ubidots platform by the Wi-Fi-ESP8266 included in the node MCU microcontroller. This platform has several advantages such as capture, visualization, analysis, and management of data. The system was examined for different cases to verify its working by varying the load in each building. All tested states showed that the houses transfer from one mode to another automatically with high reliability and minimum energy cost. The information about the main grid states and the sources of the houses were monitored and stored at the Ubidots platform

A Human-Machine Interface Based on Eye Tracking for Controlling and Monitoring a Smart Home Using the Internet of Things

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STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING IN A TURBULENT BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT: A DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES FRAMEWORK FOR QUANTITY SURVEYING PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS IN IRELAND

The construction industry contributes significantly to the socio-economic development of nations through infrastructure development, and job creation culminating into the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Quantity Surveying Professional Service Firms (QSPSFs) play a critical role in the construction industry by ensuring that projects are delivered within cost, required quality and duration by providing technical and knowledge-intensive services to clients, contractors and stakeholders. Irish QSPSFs are facing challenges such as tender price inflation, intense competition, a skills shortage and disruptive technology. These challenges coupled with the cyclicality of the sector create a turbulent business environment for Irish QSPSFs, yet there remains a paucity of empirical evidence pertaining to how strategic decisions are made by these firms. Strategic planning is critical to addressing the challenges confronting business organisations such as the Irish QSPSFs; however, to date strategic planning has focused to a greater extent on manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, consumer products and light manufacturing, whereas there remains limited empirical investigation within the construction industry. This study aims to address this gap by examining the strategic decision-making process of Irish QSPSFs operating in the changing environment of the construction industry. What sets the research apart is that a Dynamic Capabilities (DC) perspective has been used with focus on sensing; seizing; and transformation, culminating into its integration into the development of a strategic decision-making framework. This study is entrenched in the pragmatist philosophical stance with emphasis on the positivist and interpretivist position and adopts mixed method by using quantitative and qualitative approaches over two phases. The first phase involves a survey administered with support from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI) to 350 member practices whereby a single senior Quantity Surveyors (QS) in each practice was invited to participate. Seventy-two usable survey questionnaires completed by respondents were prepared for data analysis. The second phase of the research comprised of interview with ten chief executives or managing directors of Irish QSPSFs. The study found the most preferred strategic choice at the corporate level of QSPSFs as the expansion of services to new markets and sectors. At the business level, the investigation discovered the differentiation of services as the main strategic choice of QSPSFs. Furthermore, participation in strategic decision-making is very critical to the success of strategy formulation in organisations. This study identifies the factors that drive participation in strategic decision-making as the knowledge and competence of staff; personality traits; and the ability of people to make decision at the operational level of the organisation. The investigation also found that strategic change has occurred in QSPSFs over the past ten years. This strategic change is attributable to turbulent environmental conditions such as economic recession, in particular reference to the prolong economic recession 2008-2013. The investigation identified the specific strategic changes that occurred in QSPSFs as growth and expansion into new markets; agglomeration, and changes in the ownership and management structure. The negative and positive impacts of economic recession on QSPSFs have also been identified in this investigation. For instance, a radical shift in strategic response from being proactive to reactive; and self-preservation of ownership structure are the ii adverse effects of economic recession identified by the study while knowledge acquisition; and risk profiling for identification and capturing of opportunities are the positive impacts of economic recession. The study found significant statistical evidence to confirm a strong relationship between the turbulent business environment and the strategic decision-making process characteristics of QSPSFs. A strategic decision-making framework was developed on the basis of field work undertaken which was subsequently validated by respondent practices. The framework is the first of its kind pertaining to construction PSFs

A smart home application based on the Internet of Things management platform

The Internet of Things is an emerging research area promising many interesting solutions to various problems encountered in various domains. The ever-expanding networks of sensors, actuators and smart devices on the Internet of Things, will raise interesting challenges for service and network management. This paper explores these challenges and expands on an already proposed management platform for the Internet of Things. The platform offers a management solution for things, specifically constrained things that suffer from limited computation and power resources. Also, this work introduces and demonstrates some of the monitoring and control management capabilities provided by the proposed platform. The results of a smart home experiment conducted to show the advantages of this platform are also reported