13 research outputs found

    Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications

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    This book focuses on new sensing technologies, measurement techniques, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Specifically, the book briefly describes the potential of smart sensors in the aforementioned applications, collecting 24 articles selected and published in the Special Issue “Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications”. We proposed this topic, being aware of the pivotal role that smart sensors can play in the improvement of healthcare services in both acute and chronic conditions as well as in prevention for a healthy life and active aging. The articles selected in this book cover a variety of topics related to the design, validation, and application of smart sensors to healthcare

    Comunicações sem-fios de tempo-real para ambientes abertos

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    Doutoramento em Engenharia InformáticaWireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.As tecnologias de comunicação sem fios tornaram-se amplamente adoptadas, surgindo em aplicações heterógeneas que vão desde a localização de vítimas, pessoal médico e equipamentos em cenários de desastre à monitorização da condição física de máquinas em ambientes industrials. Muito frequentemente, as aplicações exigem uma resposta limitada no tempo que, geralmente, em sistemas distribuídos, é substancialmente dependente do desempenho da tecnologia de comunicação utilizada. Estes sistemas tendem a possuir requisitos de tempo-real uma vez que a comunicação de dados tem de ser conduzida dentro de limites temporais pré-definidos que, quando não cumpridos, podem comprometer o correcto funcionamento do sistema e resultar em perdas económicas ou colocar em risco vidas humanas. A potencial adopção de tecnologias sem-fios para um crescente número de cenários traduz-se num aumento da complexidade e heterogeneidade dos requisitos operacionais relativamente às tecnologias cabladas. A acompanhar esta tendência verifica-se uma crescente procura de sistemas distribuídos, caracterizados quer por uma boa relação custo-eficácia, quer pela simplicidade de instalação, manutenção e adaptação. Ao mesmo tempo, estes sistemas tendem a requerer flexibilidade operacional, que apenas pode ser assegurada se a tecnlogia de comunicação empregue supportar transmissões de dados dispoletadas quer por eventos (event-triggered), quer por tempo (timetriggered) e se, ao mesmo tempo, em funcionamento, permitir a alteração dos parâmetros de comunicação correspondentes. Frequentemente, as aplicações com comunicações sem fios caracterizam-se por exigências de instalação que apenas podem ser endereçadas usando alimentação através de baterias e/ou mecanismos de recolha de energia do ambiente envolvente. Estas aplicações têm tipicamente requisitos exigentes de autonomia e de tamanho, impedindo o recurso a baterias de grande dimensão. Dado que o suporte de comunicações pode representar uma parte significativa dos requisitos de energia da estação, o uso de tecnologias de comunicação de elevado consumo não é adequado. Desta forma, nestas aplicações, as tecnologias de comunicação de curto-alcance tornaram-se amplamente adoptadas uma vez que, apesar de se caracterizarem por taxas de transmissão inferiores, consomem apenas uma fracção da energia das tecnologias de maior alcance. resumo Em geral, os requisitos de pontualidade da comunicação de dados podem ser cumpridos através da garantia da disponibilidade do meio no instante em que qualquer estação inicie uma transmissão. Em ambientes controlados esta disponibilidade pode ser garantida, na medida em que existe um controlo de quais as estações que foram instaladas na área e qual a sua função. Contrariamente, em ambientes abertos, tal controlo é difícil de garantir uma vez que não existe conhecimento a priori de que estações ou tecnologias podem competir pelo meio, tornando o suporte de comunicações de temporeal um desafio difícil de implementar em cenários com estações de comunicação não controladas. As comunicações de baixo consumo têm sido o foco de um esforço de investigação bastante amplo, por exemplo, no domínio das redes de sensores sem fios. Embora possam permitir uma maior autonomia a estações baseadas em baterias, estas tecnologias são reconhecidas como sendo negativamente influenciadas por tecnologias semelhantes competindo pelo mesmo meio e, em particular, por tecnologias que utilizem níveis de potência de transmissão mais elevados em bandas de frequências comuns. De forma cada vez mais acentuada, a banda industrial, científica e médica (ISM) dos 2.4 GHz tem-se tornado mais saturada com tecnologias que competem entre si pelo acesso ao meio tais como, por exemplo, Bluetooth e ZigBee, dois padrões de comunicação que são a base de vários protocolos de tempo-real. Apesar destas tecnologias aplicarem mecanismos para melhorar a sua coexistência, são vulneráveis a transmissões de estações não controladas que usem as mesmas tecnologias ou que usem tecnologias com níveis de potência de transmissão mais elevados, impedindo, desta forma, o suporte de comunicações de tempo-real fiáveis em ambientes abertos. O protocolo de comunicação sem fios flexível disparado por tempo (WFTT) é baseado numa arquitectura mestre/múltiplo escravo alavancado na flexibilidade e pontualidade promovidas pelo paradigma FTT e na captura e manutenção determinística do meio suportadas pela técnica de bandjacking (captura de banda). Esta tese apresenta o protocolo WFTT e argumenta que este permite suportar serviços de comunicação de tempo-real com requisitos elevados de fiabilidade em ambientes abertos onde várias tecnologias de comunicação baseadas em contenção disputam o acesso ao meio. Adicionalmente, esta tese reivindica que é possível suportar comunicações sem-fios simultaneamente flexíveis e pontuais em ambientes abertos. O protocolo WFTT foi inspirado no paradigma FTT, do qual importa os serviços de alto nível como, por exemplo, o controlo de admissão. Após a observação da eficácia da técnica de bandjacking em assegurar o acesso ao meio e a correspondente manutenção, foi reconhecida a possibilidade de utilização deste mecanismo para o desenvolvimento de um protocolo de acesso ao meio, capaz de oferecer as funcionalidades do paradigma FTT em meios de comunicação sem-fios. O desempenho do protocolo WFTT é reportado nesta tese com uma descrição dos dispositivos implementados, da bancada de ensaios desenvolvida e dos resultados obtidos

    Urban Informatics

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    This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

    Urban Informatics

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    This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

    Enhanced Living Environments

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    This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

    Urban Informatics

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    This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

    Cognitive Buildings

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    Cognitive building is a pioneering topic envisioning the future of our built environment. The concept of "cognitive" provides a paradigm shift that steps from the static concept of the building as a container of human activities towards the modernist vision of "machine à habiter" of Le Corbusier, where the technological content adds the capability of learning from users' behavior and environmental variables to adapt itself to achieve major goals such as user comfort, energy-saving, flexible functionality, high durability, and good maintainability. The concept is based on digital frameworks and IoT networks towards the concept of a smart city

    LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volum

    12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science: GIScience 2023, September 12–15, 2023, Leeds, UK

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