Trust and obfuscation principles for quality of information in emerging pervasive environments

Non peer reviewedPostprin

Building Blocks for a Pervasive Computing Environment

Pervasive Computing is a relatively new field which deals with making technology less invasive (with respect to human interaction), smarter and more productive. In the context of this thesis, Pervasive Computing is being used to create smart spaces that a computer system can monitor and control. Sensors and actuators, embedded in the surroundings, are used to provide the basic input and output for the system, and these communicate over arbitrary networking technologies to a central intelligence, which coordinates the functioning of the system. Currently, Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, and Berkeley all have research programs which are similar in aims and goals to this thesis project (see Chapter 2). Their approaches range from PC based (Microsoft [7]), to embedded controller based (MOTES [4]), through to highly futuristic solutions (CMU’s Project Aura [6]). Microsoft has managed to implement moderately accurate ‘people tracking and PC session following’ which is one of the secondary goals of this thesis; however they have achieved this at enormous costs and technology complexity. The approach being investigated by this thesis is to create an inexpensive and simple hardware sensor (and possibly actuator) network which will communicate via Elvin events (see Section 2.1) to a central server running event correlation software (being developed by Ryan Wishart). This thesis aims to look at the development of hardware devices and the communications framework that could be used in such a Pervasive Computing system, and the issues and concepts behind it. A description of and specifications for a system, and working prototype implementations will be created and demonstrated. The items being demonstrated will include sensors (light/sound levels, door beams, etc), networking technologies (RS232, Ethernet), and displays

Tracking Human Behavioural Consistency by Analysing Periodicity of Household Water Consumption

People are living longer than ever due to advances in healthcare, and this has prompted many healthcare providers to look towards remote patient care as a means to meet the needs of the future. It is now a priority to enable people to reside in their own homes rather than in overburdened facilities whenever possible. The increasing maturity of IoT technologies and the falling costs of connected sensors has made the deployment of remote healthcare at scale an increasingly attractive prospect. In this work we demonstrate that we can measure the consistency and regularity of the behaviour of a household using sensor readings generated from interaction with the home environment. We show that we can track changes in this behaviour regularity longitudinally and detect changes that may be related to significant life events or trends that may be medically significant. We achieve this using periodicity analysis on water usage readings sampled from the main household water meter every 15 minutes for over 8 months. We utilise an IoT Application Enablement Platform in conjunction with low cost LoRa-enabled sensors and a Low Power Wide Area Network in order to validate a data collection methodology that could be deployed at large scale in future. We envision the statistical methods described here being applied to data streams from the homes of elderly and at-risk groups, both as a means of early illness detection and for monitoring the well-being of those with known illnesses.Comment: 2019 2nd International Conference on Sensors, Signal and Image Processin

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them