Special Issue “Body Sensors Networks for E-Health Applications”

Body Sensor Networks (BSN) have emerged as a particularization of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in the context of body monitoring environments, closely linked to healthcare applications. These networks are made up of smart biomedical sensors that allow the monitoring of physiological parameters and serve as the basis for e-Health applications. This Special Issue collects some of the latest developments in the field of BSN related to new developments in biomedical sensor technologies, the design and experimental characterization of on-body/in-body antennas and new communication protocols for BSN, including some review studies

Facilitating Internet of Things on the Edge

The evolution of electronics and wireless technologies has entered a new era, the Internet of Things (IoT). Presently, IoT technologies influence the global market, bringing benefits in many areas, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and entertainment. Modern IoT devices serve as a thin client with data processing performed in a remote computing node, such as a cloud server or a mobile edge compute unit. These computing units own significant resources that allow prompt data processing. The user experience for such an approach relies drastically on the availability and quality of the internet connection. In this case, if the internet connection is unavailable, the resulting operations of IoT applications can be completely disrupted. It is worth noting that emerging IoT applications are even more throughput demanding and latency-sensitive which makes communication networks a practical bottleneck for the service provisioning. This thesis aims to eliminate the limitations of wireless access, via the improvement of connectivity and throughput between the devices on the edge, as well as their network identification, which is fundamentally important for IoT service management. The introduction begins with a discussion on the emerging IoT applications and their demands. Subsequent chapters introduce scenarios of interest, describe the proposed solutions and provide selected performance evaluation results. Specifically, we start with research on the use of degraded memory chips for network identification of IoT devices as an alternative to conventional methods, such as IMEI; these methods are not vulnerable to tampering and cloning. Further, we introduce our contributions for improving connectivity and throughput among IoT devices on the edge in a case where the mobile network infrastructure is limited or totally unavailable. Finally, we conclude the introduction with a summary of the results achieved

Evaluation of Energy Consumption in Industry 4.0

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are significantly important in the advanced monitoring of applications for the Internet of Things, particularly in difficult-to-access locations where wired solutions are impractical or expensive. Critical elements and characteristics of WSNs in terms of power consumption are being characterized and evaluated. However, there is a gap in research in terms of selecting and structuring the most efficient (WSN) in consideration of energy sustainability and the amount of required energy by the WSN that can be supplied wirelessly. In this thesis, a systems-level approach was taken to evaluate the energy required for sensing, processing, and communication over a WSN for an industrial application. A literature review was also conducted to identify the power consumption of some transducers typically used in manufacturing, such as temperature, acceleration, and displacement transducers. Additionally, the power consumption of the commonly available local processing units used to produce “smart” sensors was compared in this work. Different data transmission protocols were also evaluated for power consumption in different operation modes for different microcontrollers. These requirements and results taken from the literature were used to identify the power consumption at each location in WSN. This was then used to create a framework for surveying the theoretical requirement (limits) to power each of these locations. Various power sources were considered as possible solutions, including energy storage (wired and wireless charging), power distribution, and power harvesting techniques. The framework can be used in one of two ways; the WSN can either be modified to reduce power consumption to meet supply (for example, changing the operational mode to a more energy-efficient one), or a different power supply can be proposed to meet demand. In this way, the framework provides a tool for the design of any industry-based WSN. Finally, a machine tool was used as a case study to show how the framework can be used, in consideration of the available energy harvesting techniques that can be used to power specific elements of the WSN. Further work should focus on investigating the possibility of using other techniques to optimize the power consumption of WSNs considering the available wireless energy sources, as well as suggest other efficient techniques

Формирование профессиональных компетенций юриста

В статье рассматривается проблема формирования профессиональных компетенций юриста в рамках дисциплины «Профессиональные навыки юриста» в условиях игрового состязательного судебного процесса, различные формы организации учебной деятельности студентов, которые способствуют приобретению студентами новых знаний, закреплению коммуникативных умений и навыков публичных выступлений

Распознавание точек привязки трехмерных объектов по стереоизображению в системах технического зрения

В процессе реконструкции формы трехмерного тела по стереоизображению возникает задача распознавания точек привязки на поверхности объекта. Эти точки используются в алгоритме триангуляции, когда формируется описание модели объекта. Один из способов уточнения координат точек привязки – анализ карты диспаритета для выделенного сегмента стереоизображения. Предлагаемый метод распознавания основан на использовании марковской сети для описания карты диспаритета, преобразовании графа этой сети путём анализа распределения яркостей пикселей изображения. Возможность выбора приоритетного направления смещения при обходе графа карты диспаритета обеспечивает эффективность работы алгоритма, основанного на описанном метод