Decentralising the Internet of Medical Things with Distributed Ledger Technologies and Off-Chain Storages: a Proof of Concept

The privacy issue limits the Internet of Medical Things. Medical information would enhance new medical studies, formulate new treatments, and deliver new digital health technologies. Solving the sharing issue will have a triple impact: handling sensitive information easily, contributing to international medical advancements, and enabling personalised care. A possible solution could be to decentralise the notion of privacy, distributing it directly to users. Solutions enabling this vision are closely linked to Distributed Ledger Technologies. This technology would allow privacy-compliant solutions in contexts where privacy is the first need through its characteristics of immutability and transparency. This work lays the foundations for a system that can provide adequate security in terms of privacy, allowing the sharing of information between participants. We introduce an Internet of Medical Things application use case called “Balance”, networks of trusted peers to manage sensitive data access called “Halo”, and eventually leverage Smart Contracts to safeguard third party rights over data. This architecture should enable the theoretical vision of privacy-based healthcare solutions running in a decentralised manner

Problematising transparency through LARP And deliberation

Information technology is increasingly designed to increase information transparency as a way to increase trust. However, it can be hard to comprehend and anticipate the social implications of information visibility, people's competing expectations of transparency versus privacy, and the role of enabling technologies. We devised Live Action Role Play (LARP) as a means for people to explore the potential and consequences of transparency, within a social context of daily transactions related to food, fashion, and finance. Through the process of deliberation, we enabled participants to critically assess their co-created LARP experience and articulate their transparency expectations for design considerations. We report on insights into their expectations and perceived limitations of information technology in delivering transparency, including social measures required to realise the full potential of technology, as well as transparency, while minimising unintended consequences

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API

The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of location information on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive information, it also raises serious privacy concerns. We analyze the manner and extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides mechanisms to support privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the specification and its use in the wild, and recommend some modifications to the API as a result of our analysis