SocIoTal - The development and architecture of a social IoT framework

In this paper the development and architecture of the SocIoTal platform is presented. SocIoTal is a European FP7 project which aims to create a socially-aware citizen-centric Internet of Things infrastructure. The aim of the project is to put trust, user-control and transparency at the heart of the system in order to gain the confidence of everyday users and developers. By providing adequate tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry, it will encourage citizen participation in the Internet of Things. This adds a novel and rich dimension to the emerging IoT ecosystem, providing a wealth of opportunities for the creation of new services and applications. These services and applications will be able to address the needs of society therefore improving the quality of life in cities and communities. In addition to technological innovation, the SocIoTal project sought to innovate the way in which users and developers interact and shape the direction of the project. The project worked on new formats in obtaining data, information and knowledge. The first step consisted of gaining input, feedback and information on IoT as a reality in business. This led to a validated iterative methodology which formed part of the SocIoTal toolkit.This work was supported by the SocIoTal project under grant agreement No 609112

Design and implementation of a cloud-based platform for unleashing the personal and communal Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day´s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.This work has been partially funded by the research project SOCIOTAL, under FP7-ICT-2013.1.4 (ref. 609112) of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. This work has been also supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE “Dynamic Provisioning of Connectivity in High Density 5G Wireless Scenarios” (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

Interconnecting IoT devices to improve the QoL of elderly people

Es un borrador de: Flores-Martin, D., Pérez-Vereda, A., Berrocal, J., Canal, C., & Murillo, J. M. (2020). Interconnecting IoT Devices to Improve the QoL of Elderly People. In Mendes, D., Fonseca, C., Lopes, M. J., García-Alonso, J., & Murillo, J. M. (Ed.), Exploring the Role of ICTs in Healthy Aging (pp. 148-165). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-1937-0.ch009The rate at which the Internet is growing is unstoppable due to the large number of connected smart devices. Manufacturers often develop specific protocols for their own devices that do not usually follow any standards. This hinders the interconnection and coordination of devices from different manufacturers, limiting the number of daily activities that can be supported. Some works are proposing different techniques to reduce this barrier and avoid the vendor lock-in issue. Nevertheless, this interconnection should also depends on the context. In this chapter, the authors propose a system to dynamically identify the interconnections required each specific situation depending on the context. This proposal has been tested in case studies focused in elderly people with the aim of automating their daily tasks and improving their quality of life. Further, in a world with an accelerated population aging, there is an increasing interest on developing solutions for the elderly living assistance through IoT systems.This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and by 4IE project (0045-4IE-4-P) funded by the Interreg V-A España-Portugal (POCTEP) 2014-2020 program, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project RTI2018-094591-B-I00 (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and by the Department of Economy and Infrastructure of the Government of Extremadura (GR18112, IB18030)

Fostering IoT service replicability in interoperable urban ecosystems

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen's quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certi cate for smart cities. To assess the bene ts of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus con rming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme [SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond)] under Grant 732240, and in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, MINECO-FEDER) through the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00

Understanding Needs, Identifying Opportunities: ICT in the View of Universal Design

This article provides food for thoughts elaborated by peer researchers who, basing on their studies and on current literature on relationships between Universal Design (UD) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), wish to share few key issues related to the challenges offered by the involvement of final users in designing product and services. Referring to approaches from different disciplines, key questions will be highlighted on which a debate could start, focused on the issue of promoting inclusion and how a close relationship among these different areas of knowledge can contribute to bridge the gap between the potential of new technologies and the real and diversified need by persons. Thus, actively contributing toward the empowerment of the community of belonging

Coordinación de Dispositivos IoT mediante Web Semántica y Ontologías en Situational-Context

El ritmo al que crece Internet de las Cosas (IoT) es imparable. Existen multitud de fabricantes que desarrollan dispositivos IoT, siguiendo sus propias especificaciones y sin atender a un estándar que todavía no existe como tal. Esto nos lleva a una situación donde la gran heterogeneidad de dispositivos que podemos encontrar en el mercado, provoca que esta interconexión sea compleja o incluso no sea posible, impidiendo así que los dispositivos puedan coordinarse para desarrollar tareas colaborativas. Esta interconexión además depende del contexto, pues los dispositivos IoT deben adaptar su comportamiento dependiendo de las características de las personas que les rodean. Con nuestra propuesta, abordamos esta situación proponiendo un sistema que permita identificar una interconexión dinámica de dispositivos IoT que surja de situaciones cambiantes. Gracias a nuestro trabajo conseguimos que esta interconexión sea dependiente del contexto, creando un entorno colaborativo entre personas y dispositivos.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Building the Hyperconnected Society- Internet of Things Research and Innovation Value Chains, Ecosystems and Markets

This book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber-physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. All this is happening in a global context, building towards intelligent, interconnected decision making as an essential driver for new growth and co-competition across a wider set of markets. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment.The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in future years. The concept of IoT could disrupt consumer and industrial product markets generating new revenues and serving as a growth driver for semiconductor, networking equipment, and service provider end-markets globally. This will create new application and product end-markets, change the value chain of companies that creates the IoT technology and deploy it in various end sectors, while impacting the business models of semiconductor, software, device, communication and service provider stakeholders. The proliferation of intelligent devices at the edge of the network with the introduction of embedded software and app-driven hardware into manufactured devices, and the ability, through embedded software/hardware developments, to monetize those device functions and features by offering novel solutions, could generate completely new types of revenue streams. Intelligent and IoT devices leverage software, software licensing, entitlement management, and Internet connectivity in ways that address many of the societal challenges that we will face in the next decade