Integration of heterogeneous devices and communication models via the cloud in the constrained internet of things

As the Internet of Things continues to expand in the coming years, the need for services that span multiple IoT application domains will continue to increase in order to realize the efficiency gains promised by the IoT. Today, however, service developers looking to add value on top of existing IoT systems are faced with very heterogeneous devices and systems. These systems implement a wide variety of network connectivity options, protocols (proprietary or standards-based), and communication methods all of which are unknown to a service developer that is new to the IoT. Even within one IoT standard, a device typically has multiple options for communicating with others. In order to alleviate service developers from these concerns, this paper presents a cloud-based platform for integrating heterogeneous constrained IoT devices and communication models into services. Our evaluation shows that the impact of our approach on the operation of constrained devices is minimal while providing a tangible benefit in service integration of low-resource IoT devices. A proof of concept demonstrates the latter by means of a control and management dashboard for constrained devices that was implemented on top of the presented platform. The results of our work enable service developers to more easily implement and deploy services that span a wide variety of IoT application domains

Pain Points for Novice Programmers of Ambient Intelligence Systems: An Exploratory Study

This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at identifying the pain points that novice programmers experience, from the software engineering perspective, when developing and deploying smart and distributed systems, that may be classified as Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. The exploratory study was conducted among undergraduate students, that worked in groups for developing AmI projects during a university course. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the pain points were identified and prioritized over a common architecture and a set of software development activities. The quantification of the pain points was based on the difficulty level that the students perceived on the development activities and the time they spent completing them. Results represent a starting point for the design of tools and methodologies targeted at overcoming the complexity that novice programmers face when developing AmI systems

IoT Garden Frost Alarm

Home gardeners are faced with yearly challenges due to spring frosts harming young plants. This is frequently mitigated by covering crops with frost blankets, but only on nights when a frost is predicted. In areas with less predictable climate, an unexpected frost can kill vulnerable plants, reducing the amount of food produced. A system is proposed and designed here to use internet of things (IoT) technology to enable a small weather station in the home garden to report current climate data and predict frosts, then alert the gardener in time for them to cover their plants. The system as designed consists of an IoT endpoint, powered by a microcontroller in a watertight housing and connected to a weatherproof temperature and humidity sensor, as well as cloud services configured to collect and analyze weather data, and finally an iOS app for gardeners to monitor the conditions in their gardens and receive push notifications about incoming frosts. To make the system accessible to home gardeners, the design was required to cost under $200 to construct and be as inexpensive as possible in operating costs, measure temperature to within half a degree centigrade, be capable of operating at temperatures down to -20ºC, support ethernet connections for gardens far from the house, and must allow the gardener to configure a temperature threshold below which they will always be notified, whether or not the dew point indicates an incoming frost. An ESP32 microcontroller, coded in C++ in the Arduino environment, was used for the final endpoint design, along with an ethernet shield and the SHT31 temperature and humidity sensor. Google Cloud services were used for the cloud data pipeline, and Google Firebase was used for a database and for communication with the iOS app. The iOS app was developed in Swift using the SwiftUI framework, with significant support from Firebase libraries for communication with the cloud. All design goals were met by the final design except for the low yearly operating cost. This was due to the unexpected requirement of having an Apple Developer account, which costs$99 per year, in order to send push notifications to iOS apps. Due to this unexpectedly high cost, several alternative notification solutions, including an Android app and a secondary physical endpoint with alarm functionality, are proposed at the end of this report, as well as suggestions for potential commercialization

Software Engineering in the IoT Context: Characteristics, Challenges, and Enabling Strategies

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

An IoT Framework for Addressing Parents Concerns about Safety of School Going Children

In this paper, we have proposed a novel application using Internet of things (IOT). This application is focused to address the concerns of the parents towards their school going kids. Mainly the concerns of the parents are to ensure the safety of their kids in school bus as well as at school premises. In this paper, we have tried to provide detailed technical implementation about how different sensing, communication technologies clubbing together provides a platform in terms of IoT, where proposed application can be implemented to ensure safety of school going children as it is the priority and concern for parents. In Proposed application, parents get notification when his child boards the bus for school and gets down the bus at home’s doorstep. Parents also get notification when child enters his Class Room first time in a day. Parents any time can access the location his child or school bus in which his child is travelling. In case of emergency, child can disseminate the signal to parents / Single point of contact (SPOC) at school to make them aware about emergency

Arm Mbed – AWS IoT System Integration [Open access]

This project explores the different Internet of Things (IoT) architectures and the available platforms to define a general IoT Architecture to connect Arm microcontrollers to Amazon Web Services. In order to accommodate the wide range of IoT applications, the architecture was defined with different routes that an Arm microcontroller can take to reach AWS. Once this Architecture was defined, a performance analysis on the different routes was performed in terms of communication speed and bandwidth. Finally, a Smart Home use case scenario is implemented to show the basic functionalities of an IoT system such as sending data to the device and data storage in the Cloud. Furthermore, a Cloud ML algorithm is triggered in real time by the Smart Home to receive a prediction of the current Comfort Level in the room

Design for energy-efficient and reliable fog-assisted healthcare IoT systems

Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are two of the most dangerous diseases as they are the leading causes of death in all ages. Unfortunately, they cannot be completely cured with the current knowledge and existing technologies. However, they can be effectively managed by applying methods of continuous health monitoring. Nonetheless, it is difficult to achieve a high quality of healthcare with the current health monitoring systems which often have several limitations such as non-mobility support, energy inefficiency, and an insufficiency of advanced services. Therefore, this thesis presents a Fog computing approach focusing on four main tracks, and proposes it as a solution to the existing limitations. In the first track, the main goal is to introduce Fog computing and Fog services into remote health monitoring systems in order to enhance the quality of healthcare. In the second track, a Fog approach providing mobility support in a real-time health monitoring IoT system is proposed. The handover mechanism run by Fog-assisted smart gateways helps to maintain the connection between sensor nodes and the gateways with a minimized latency. Results show that the handover latency of the proposed Fog approach is 10%-50% less than other state-of-the-art mobility support approaches. In the third track, the designs of four energy-efficient health monitoring IoT systems are discussed and developed. Each energy-efficient system and its sensor nodes are designed to serve a specific purpose such as glucose monitoring, ECG monitoring, or fall detection; with the exception of the fourth system which is an advanced and combined system for simultaneously monitoring many diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Results show that these sensor nodes can continuously work, depending on the application, up to 70-155 hours when using a 1000 mAh lithium battery. The fourth track mentioned above, provides a Fog-assisted remote health monitoring IoT system for diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease. Via several proposed algorithms such as QT interval extraction, activity status categorization, and fall detection algorithms, the system can process data and detect abnormalities in real-time. Results show that the proposed system using Fog services is a promising approach for improving the treatment of diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease