Environmental Sensing by Wearable Device for Indoor Activity and Location Estimation

We present results from a set of experiments in this pilot study to investigate the causal influence of user activity on various environmental parameters monitored by occupant carried multi-purpose sensors. Hypotheses with respect to each type of measurements are verified, including temperature, humidity, and light level collected during eight typical activities: sitting in lab / cubicle, indoor walking / running, resting after physical activity, climbing stairs, taking elevators, and outdoor walking. Our main contribution is the development of features for activity and location recognition based on environmental measurements, which exploit location- and activity-specific characteristics and capture the trends resulted from the underlying physiological process. The features are statistically shown to have good separability and are also information-rich. Fusing environmental sensing together with acceleration is shown to achieve classification accuracy as high as 99.13%. For building applications, this study motivates a sensor fusion paradigm for learning individualized activity, location, and environmental preferences for energy management and user comfort.Comment: submitted to the 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON

Improve the Sustainability of Internet of Things Through Trading-based Value Creation

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely discussed over the past few years in technology point of view. However, the social aspects of IoT are seldom studied to date. In this paper, we discuss the IoT in social point of view. Specifically, we examine the strategies to increase the adoption of IoT in a sustainable manner. Such discussion is essential in today's context where adoption of IoT solutions by non-technical community is slow. Specially, large number of IoT solutions making their way into the market every day. We propose an trading-based value creation model based on sensing as a service paradigm in order to fuel the adoption of IoT. We discuss the value creation and its impact towards the society especially to households and their occupants. We also present results of two different surveys we conducted in order to examine the potential acceptance of the proposed model among the general public.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1307.819

AmbiGaze:direct control of ambient devices by gaze

Eye tracking offers many opportunities for direct device control in smart environments, but issues such as the need for calibration and the Midas touch problem make it impractical. In this paper, we propose AmbiGaze, a smart environment that employs the animation of targets to provide users with direct control of devices by gaze only through smooth pursuit tracking. We propose a design space of means of exposing functionality through movement and illustrate the concept through four prototypes. We evaluated the system in a user study and found that AmbiGaze enables robust gaze-only interaction with many devices, from multiple positions in the environment, in a spontaneous and comfortable manner

Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014 (Accepted for Publication

Immunochromatographic diagnostic test analysis using Google Glass.

We demonstrate a Google Glass-based rapid diagnostic test (RDT) reader platform capable of qualitative and quantitative measurements of various lateral flow immunochromatographic assays and similar biomedical diagnostics tests. Using a custom-written Glass application and without any external hardware attachments, one or more RDTs labeled with Quick Response (QR) code identifiers are simultaneously imaged using the built-in camera of the Google Glass that is based on a hands-free and voice-controlled interface and digitally transmitted to a server for digital processing. The acquired JPEG images are automatically processed to locate all the RDTs and, for each RDT, to produce a quantitative diagnostic result, which is returned to the Google Glass (i.e., the user) and also stored on a central server along with the RDT image, QR code, and other related information (e.g., demographic data). The same server also provides a dynamic spatiotemporal map and real-time statistics for uploaded RDT results accessible through Internet browsers. We tested this Google Glass-based diagnostic platform using qualitative (i.e., yes/no) human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and quantitative prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests. For the quantitative RDTs, we measured activated tests at various concentrations ranging from 0 to 200 ng/mL for free and total PSA. This wearable RDT reader platform running on Google Glass combines a hands-free sensing and image capture interface with powerful servers running our custom image processing codes, and it can be quite useful for real-time spatiotemporal tracking of various diseases and personal medical conditions, providing a valuable tool for epidemiology and mobile health

Anti-Theft Box: Arduino Safety Box with IoT Notifications

Theft cases often go unnoticed and are everywhere we are. It can happen in public, at school, at work or even in your own home. Things like this often happen to teens and older adults. Some of them do not have a safe place to store their valuables because of their carelessness. This is because they do not take this seriously. On the other hand, they already have their own safety box which is a great example of keeping items from being stolen or robbed. With the Internet of Things (IoT), this safety box can be improved by adding features that make it even safer to receive notifications on a mobile phone when the safety box is opened. With these improvements, property owners will become more aware of their goods because not everyone around us can be trusted. The use of these notifications is an update that will be created to improve the security of your goods. The methodology used to carry out this project is called Prototyping Method. In this way, prototype can be said to be both a design and an example of an existing system, but not yet fully functional. Prototypes will outline how a system works, and most prototype systems are not yet the perfect system to run

Smart technologies and beyond: exploring how a smart band can assist in monitoring children’s independent mobility & well-being

The problem which is being investigated through this thesis is not having a device(s) or method(s) which are appropriate for monitoring a child’s vital and tracking a child’s location. This aspect is being explored by other researchers which are yet to find a viable solution. This work focuses on providing a solution that would consider using the Internet of Things for measuring and improving children’s health. Additionally, the focus of this research is on the use of technology for health and the needs of parents who are concerned about their child’s physical health and well-being. This work also provides an insight into how technology is used during the pandemic. This thesis will be based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research, which will have been used to review the following areas covering key aspects and focuses of this study which are (i) Children’s Independent Mobility (ii) Physical activity for children (iii) Emotions of a child (iv) Smart Technologies and (v) Children’s smart wearables. This will allow a review of the problem in detail and how technology can help the health sector, especially for children. The deliverable of this study is to recommend a suitable smart band device that enables location tracking of the child, activity tracking as well as monitoring the health and wellbeing of the child. The research also includes an element of practical research in the form of (i) Surveys, the use of smart technology and a perspective on the solution from parents. (ii) Focus group, in the form of a survey allowing opinions and collection of information on the child and what the parents think of smart technology and how it could potentially help with their fears. (iii) Observation, which allows the collection of data from children who were given six activities to conduct while wearing the Fitbit Charge HR. The information gained from these elements will help provide guidelines for a proposed solution. In this thesis, there are three frameworks which are about (i) Research process for this study (ii) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are findings from the literature review and (iii) Proposed framework for the solution, all three combined frameworks can help health professionals and many parents who want an efficient and reliable device, also deployment of technologies used in the health industry for children in support of independent mobility. Current frameworks have some considerations within the technology and medical field but were not up to date with the latest elements such as parents fears within today’s world and the advanced features of technology

Taxonomic Classification of IoT Smart Home Voice Control

Voice control in the smart home is commonplace, enabling the convenient control of smart home Internet of Things hubs, gateways and devices, along with information seeking dialogues. Cloud-based voice assistants are used to facilitate the interaction, yet privacy concerns surround the cloud analysis of data. To what extent can voice control be performed using purely local computation, to ensure user data remains private? In this paper we present a taxonomy of the voice control technologies present in commercial smart home systems. We first review literature on the topic, and summarise relevant work categorising IoT devices and voice control in the home. The taxonomic classification of these entities is then presented, and we analyse our findings. Following on, we turn to academic efforts in implementing and evaluating voice-controlled smart home set-ups, and we then discuss open-source libraries and devices that are applicable to the design of a privacy-preserving voice assistant for smart homes and the IoT. Towards the end, we consider additional technologies and methods that could support a cloud-free voice assistant, and conclude the work