Internet of Robotic Things Intelligent Connectivity and Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and “things” have evolved significantly. “Things” now range from simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to smart wireless sensors, intelligent wireless sensors and actuators, robotic things, and autonomous vehicles operating in consumer, business, and industrial environments. The emergence of “intelligent things” (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). In IoRT, collaborative robotic things can communicate with other things, learn autonomously, interact safely with the environment, humans and other things, and gain qualities like self-maintenance, self-awareness, self-healing, and fail-operational behavior. IoRT applications can make use of the individual, collaborative, and collective intelligence of robotic things, as well as information from the infrastructure and operating context to plan, implement and accomplish tasks under different environmental conditions and uncertainties. The continuous, real-time interaction with the environment makes perception, location, communication, cognition, computation, connectivity, propulsion, and integration of federated IoRT and digital platforms important components of new-generation IoRT applications. This paper reviews the taxonomy of the IoRT, emphasizing the IoRT intelligent connectivity, architectures, interoperability, and trustworthiness framework, and surveys the technologies that enable the application of the IoRT across different domains to perform missions more efficiently, productively, and completely. The aim is to provide a novel perspective on the IoRT that involves communication among robotic things and humans and highlights the convergence of several technologies and interactions between different taxonomies used in the literature.publishedVersio

ARTIST - a reAl-time low-effoRt mulTi-entity Interaction System for creaTing reusable and optimized MR experiences

ARTIST is a research approach introducing novel methods for real-time multi-entity interaction between human and non-human entities, to create reusable and optimized Mixed Reality (MR) experiences with low-effort, towards a Shared MR Experiences Ecosystem (SMRE2). As a result, ARTIST delivers high quality MR experiences, facilitating the interaction between a variety of entities which interact in a virtual and symbiotic way within a mega, virtual and fully-experiential world. Specifically, ARTIST aims to develop novel methods for low-effort (code-free) implementation and deployment of open and reusable MR content, applications and tools, introducing the novel concept of an Experience as a Trajectory (EaaT). In addition, ARTIST will provide tools for the tracking, monitoring and analysis of user behaviour and their interaction with the environment and with other users, towards optimizing MR experiences by recommending their reconfiguration, dynamically (at run-time) or statically (at development time). Finally, it will provide tools for synthesizing experiences into new mega and still reconfigurable EaaTs, enhancing them at the same time using semantically integrated related data/information available in disparate and heterogeneous resources

IoT in healthcare: A scientometric analysis

This paper reviews scientific articles and patents about Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare. The aim is to explore both the domain of research and the one of practice simultaneously. We compare the annual growth, the country production, and the trend topics of publications and patents, by focusing on the most relevant themes concerning the IoT in the healthcare industry. The analysis started with the selection of the publications and patents for the period 2015–2020. Since this comparative analysis between scientometric data in healthcare is new, the findings of this study can represent the basis for future studies to determine novel research opportunities on IoT. The study provides scholars with a better understanding of IoT research in healthcare and simultaneously extends knowledge of entrepreneurship in this field. Practitioners may benefit from this review to understand new and underexplored opportunities

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

Exploring the potential of big data on the health care delivery value chain (CDVC): a preliminary literature and research agenda

Big data analytics (BDA) is emerging as a game changer in healthcare. While the practitioner literature has been speculating on the high potential of BDA in transforming the healthcare sector, few rigorous empirical studies have been conducted by scholars to assess the real potential of BDA. Drawing on the health care delivery value chain (CDVC) and an extensive literature review, this exploratory study aims to discuss current peer-reviewed articles dealing with BDA across the CDVC and discuss future research directions

Factors Affecting SMEs' Intention to Adopt a Mobile Travel Application based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT-2)

This study is part of a government research project which aims to synthesise the current evidence on the factors affecting the intention of mobile application adoption called ‘Tripper Notifier Application’ (TNA) for the hospitality and tourism industrial sector in Thailand. The focus is on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which emphasize restaurants, hotels, and attraction sites. The present article examines various factors influencing the intention to use such applications by employing the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT-2) as the theoretical underpinning of this research paradigm. Using 84 selected research papers in Scopus published between 2020 and 2022, A thematic analysis incorporating a grounded theory approach to systematically generate themes was conducted, and the findings found three main themes, including business transformation capabilities (BTC), digital transformation capabilities (DTC), and personal innovativeness (PI), as an extension of UTAUT-2 as mediator and moderator variables. To this end, the study fills the research gaps and extends the UTAUT-2 framework by including an initiative of twelve inside attributes-based lines, including performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, price value, habit behavior, behavioral intention, and use behavior, together with three moderators: age, gender, and experience. Finally, the context dimensions of the UTAUT-2 extensions were mapped to highlight all the constructs of the TNA adoption framework for future research directions. The novel contribution of this study is to fill the gap with both theoretical and practical knowledge. On the theoretical level, this study constitutes constructs based on UTAUT-2 theory as a research-based setting to fill a gap in research. On the practical level, it provides insights and information about new capabilities that SME owners, managers, and practitioners should consider in order to differentiate their own capabilities. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-SP1-014 Full Text: PD

Internet of Things data contextualisation for scalable information processing, security, and privacy

The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects billions of sensors and other devices (i.e., things) via the internet, enabling novel services and products that are becoming increasingly important for industry, government, education and society in general. It is estimated that by 2025, the number of IoT devices will exceed 50 billion, which is seven times the estimated human population at that time. With such a tremendous increase in the number of IoT devices, the data they generate is also increasing exponentially and needs to be analysed and secured more efficiently. This gives rise to what is appearing to be the most significant challenge for the IoT: Novel, scalable solutions are required to analyse and secure the extraordinary amount of data generated by tens of billions of IoT devices. Currently, no solutions exist in the literature that provide scalable and secure IoT scale data processing. In this thesis, a novel scalable approach is proposed for processing and securing IoT scale data, which we refer to as contextualisation. The contextualisation solution aims to exclude irrelevant IoT data from processing and address data analysis and security considerations via the use of contextual information. More specifically, contextualisation can effectively reduce the volume, velocity and variety of data that needs to be processed and secured in IoT applications. This contextualisation-based data reduction can subsequently provide IoT applications with the scalability needed for IoT scale knowledge extraction and information security. IoT scale applications, such as smart parking or smart healthcare systems, can benefit from the proposed method, which  improves the scalability of data processing as well as the security and privacy of data.   The main contributions of this thesis are: 1) An introduction to context and contextualisation for IoT applications; 2) a contextualisation methodology for IoT-based applications that is modelled around observation, orientation, decision and action loops; 3) a collection of contextualisation techniques and a corresponding software platform for IoT data processing (referred to as contextualisation-as-a-service or ConTaaS) that enables highly scalable data analysis, security and privacy solutions; and 4) an evaluation of ConTaaS in several IoT applications to demonstrate that our contextualisation techniques permit data analysis, security and privacy solutions to remain linear, even in situations where the number of IoT data points increases exponentially

Data supply chain (DSC): Research synthesis and future directions

In the digital economy, the volume, variety and availability of data produced in myriad forms from a diversity of sources has become an important resource for competitive advantage, innovation opportunity as well as source of new management challenges. Building on the theoretical and empirical foundations of the traditional manufacturing Supply Chain (SC), which describes the flow of physical artefacts as raw materials through to consumption, we propose the Data Supply Chain (DSC) along which data are the primary artefact flowing. The purpose of this paper is to outline the characteristics and bring conceptual distinctiveness to the context around DSC as well as to explore the associated and emergent management challenges and innovation opportunities. To achieve this, we adopt the systematic review methodology drawing on the operations management and supply chain literature and, in particular, taking a framework synthetic approach which allows us to build the DSC concept from the preexisting SC template. We conclude the paper by developing a set of propositions and outlining an agenda for future research that the DSC concept implies

Cyborgs as Frontline Service Employees: A Research Agenda

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose This paper identifies and explores potential applications of cyborgian technologies within service contexts and how service providers may leverage the integration of cyborgian service actors into their service proposition. In doing so, the paper proposes a new category of ‘melded’ frontline service employees (FLEs), where advanced technologies become embodied within human actors. The paper presents potential opportunities and challenges that may arise through cyborg technological advancements and proposes a future research agenda related to these. Design/methodology This study draws on literature in the fields of services management, Artificial Intelligence [AI], robotics, Intelligence Augmentation [IA] and Human Intelligence [HIs] to conceptualise potential cyborgian applications. Findings The paper examines how cyborg bio- and psychophysical characteristics may significantly differentiate the nature of service interactions from traditional ‘unenhanced’ service interactions. In doing so, we propose ‘melding’ as a conceptual category of technological impact on FLEs. This category reflects the embodiment of emergent technologies not previously captured within existing literature on cyborgs. We examine how traditional roles of FLEs will be potentially impacted by the integration of emergent cyborg technologies, such as neural interfaces and implants, into service contexts before outlining future research directions related to these, specifically highlighting the range of ethical considerations. Originality/Value Service interactions with cyborg FLEs represent a new context for examining the potential impact of cyborgs. This paper explores how technological advancements will alter the individual capacities of humans to enable such employees to intuitively and empathetically create solutions to complex service challenges. In doing so, we augment the extant literature on cyborgs, such as the body hacking movement. The paper also outlines a research agenda to address the potential consequences of cyborgian integration