The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201

Comparison of Open-Source Electronic Health Record Systems Based on Functional and User Performance Criteria

Objectives: Open-source Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have gained importance. The main aim of our research is to guide organizational choice by comparing the features, functionality, and user-facing system performance of the five most popular open-source EHR systems. Methods: We performed qualitative content analysis with a directed approach on recently published literature (2012-2017) to develop an integrated set of criteria to compare the EHR systems. The functional criteria are an integration of the literature, meaningful use criteria, and the Institute of Medicine's functional requirements of EHR, whereas the user-facing system performance is based on the time required to perform basic tasks within the EHR system. Results: Based on the Alexa web ranking and Google Trends, the five most popular EHR systems at the time of our study were OSHERA VistA, GNU Health, the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS), Open Electronic Medical Record (OpenEMR), and OpenEHR. We also found the trends in popularity of the EHR systems and the locations where they were more popular than others. OpenEMR met all the 32 functional criteria, OSHERA VistA met 28, OpenMRS met 12 fully and 11 partially, OpenEHR-based EHR met 10 fully and 3 partially, and GNU Health met the least with only 10 criteria fully and 2 partially. Conclusions: Based on our functional criteria, OpenEMR is the most promising EHR system, closely followed by VistA. With regards to user-facing system performance, OpenMRS has superior performance in comparison to OpenEMR

Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

Reporting an Experience on Design and Implementation of e-Health Systems on Azure Cloud

Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated networks, physical computers, and locally managed software platforms that make it susceptible to many serious limitations including: 1) lack of on-demand scalability during critical situations; 2) high administrative overheads and costs; and 3) in-efficient resource utilization and energy consumption due to lack of automation. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate the ICT systems in the e-Health sector from traditional in-house Client/Server (C/S) architecture to the virtualised cloud computing environment. To this end, we developed two cloud-based e-Health applications (Medical Practice Management System and Telemedicine Practice System) for demonstrating how cloud services can be leveraged for developing and deploying such applications. The Windows Azure cloud computing platform is selected as an example public cloud platform for our study. We conducted several performance evaluation experiments to understand the Quality Service (QoS) tradeoffs of our applications under variable workload on Azure.Comment: Submitted to third IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC 2013

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application