Intelligent Personal Assistants Solutions in Ubiquitous Environments in the Context of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) will create the opportunity to develop new types of businesses. Every tangible object, biologic or not, will be identified by a unique address, creating a common network composed by billions of devices. Those devices will have different requirements, creating the necessity of finding new mechanisms to satisfy the needs of all the entities within the network. This is one of the main problems that all the scientific community should address in order to make Internet of Things the Future Internet. Currently, IoT is used in a lot of projects involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensors are generally cheap and small devices able to generate useful information from physical indicators. They can be used on smart home scenarios, or even on healthcare environments, turning sensors into useful devices to accomplish the goals of many use case scenarios. Sensors and other devices with some reasoning capabilities, like smart objects, can be used to create smart environments. The interaction between the objects in those scenarios and humans can be eased by the inclusion of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, IPAs have good reasoning capabilities, improving the assistance they give to their owners. Artificial intelligence (AI), new learning mechanisms, and the evolution assisted in speech technology also contributed to this improvement. The integration of IPAs in IoT scenarios can become a case of great success. IPAs will comprehend the behavior of their owners not only through direct interactions, but also by the interactions they have with other objects in the environment. This may create ubiquitous communication scenarios where humans act as passive elements, being adequately informed of all the aspects of interest that surrounds them. The communication between IPAs and other objects in their surrounding environment may use gateways for traffic forwarding. On ubiquitous environments devices can be mobile or static. For example, in smart home scenarios, objects are generally static, being always on the same position. In mobile health scenarios, objects can move from one place to another. To turn IPAs useful on all types of environments, static and mobile gateways should be developed. On this dissertation, a novel mobile gateway solution for an IPA platform inserted on an IoT context is proposed. A mobile health scenario was chosen. Then, a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is always monitoring a person, giving the real time feedback of his/her health status to another person responsible by him (designated caretaker). On this scenario, a mobile gateway is needed to forward the traffic between the BSN and the IPA of the caretaker. Therefore, the IPA is able to give warnings about the health status of the person under monitoring, in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype, where the more important aspects for IPAs and IoT networks are considered

Ubiquitous model for wireless sensor networks monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) belongs to a new technology trend where tiny and resource constrained devices are wirelessly interconnected and are able to interact with the surrounding environment by collecting data, such as temperature and humidity. Recently, due to the huge growth of mobile devices usage with Internet connection, smartphones are becoming the center of future ubiquitous wireless networks allowing users to access data network services, anytime and anywhere. According to the Internet of Things vision, interconnecting WSNs with smartphones and the Internet is a big challenge. Then, due to the heterogeneity of these devices new architectures are required. This dissertation focuses on the design and construction of a ubiquitous architecture for WSNs monitoring based on Web services, a relational database, and an Android mobile application. This architecture allows mobile users accessing real-time or historical data in a ubiquitous environment using smartphones. Besides that, a push notification system to alert mobile users when a sensor parameter overcomes a given threshold was created. The entire solution was evaluated and demonstrated using a laboratory WSN testbed, and is ready for use.As redes de sensores sem fios fazem parte de uma nova tendência tecnológica na qual pequenos dispositivos com recursos limitados comunicam entre si, sem fios, e interagem com o ambiente envolvente recolhendo uma grande diversidade de dados, tais como a temperatura e a humidade. Recentemente, devido ao enorme crescimento no uso de dispositivos móveis com ligação à Internet, os smartphones estão a tornar-se o centro das futuras redes sem fios ubíquas permitindo aos utilizadores aceder a dados, a qualquer hora e em qualquer lugar. De acordo com a visão da Internet of Things, interligar redes de sensores sem fios e smartphones usando a Internet é um grande desafio e novas arquitecturas são necessárias devido à heterogeneidade destes dispositivos. Esta dissertação centra-se na proposta e construção de uma arquitectura ubíqua para a monitorização de redes de sensores sem fios, baseada em serviços Web, apoiada numa base de dados relacional e uma aplicação móvel para o sistema operative Android. Esta arquitectura permite que os utilizadores móveis acedam a dados em tempo real e também a dados históricos, num ambiente móvel, usando smartphones. Além disso, foi desenvolvido um sistema de notificações push que alerta o utilizador quando um dado parâmetro de um sensor ultrapassa um limiar pré-definido. A solução construída foi testada e demonstrada utilizando uma testbed laboratorial e está pronta para utilização

System Design of Internet-of-Things for Residential Smart Grid

Internet-of-Things (IoTs) envisions to integrate, coordinate, communicate, and collaborate real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this paper studies the design of a large scale IoT system for smart grid application, which constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a backend server, unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and user interface for mobile devices. We discuss the features of such IoT system to support a large scale deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based on the requirements, we design an IoT system using the XMPP protocol, and implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the proposed IoT architecture.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, journal pape

iGateLink: A Gateway Library for Linking IoT, Edge, Fog and Cloud Computing Environments

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing in popularity, along with the increasingly important role played by IoT gateways, mediating the interactions among a plethora of heterogeneous IoT devices and cloud services. In this paper, we present iGateLink, an open-source Android library easing the development of Android applications acting as a gateway between IoT devices and Edge/Fog/Cloud Computing environments. Thanks to its pluggable design, modules providing connectivity with a number of devices acting as data sources or Fog/Cloud frameworks can be easily reused for different applications. Using iGateLink in two case-studies replicating previous works in the healthcare and image processing domains, the library proved to be effective in adapting to different scenarios and speeding up the development of gateway applications, as compared to the use of conventional methods

Combining Wireless Sensor Networks and Semantic Middleware for an Internet of Things-Based Sportsman/Woman Monitoring Application.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are spearheading the efforts taken to build and deploy systems aiming to accomplish the ultimate objectives of the Internet of Things. Due to the sensors WSNs nodes are provided with, and to their ubiquity and pervasive capabilities, these networks become extremely suitable for many applications that so-called conventional cabled or wireless networks are unable to handle. One of these still underdeveloped applications is monitoring physical parameters on a person. This is an especially interesting application regarding their age or activity, for any detected hazardous parameter can be notified not only to the monitored person as a warning, but also to any third party that may be helpful under critical circumstances, such as relatives or healthcare centers. We propose a system built to monitor a sportsman/woman during a workout session or performing a sport-related indoor activity. Sensors have been deployed by means of several nodes acting as the nodes of a WSN, along with a semantic middleware development used for hardware complexity abstraction purposes. The data extracted from the environment, combined with the information obtained from the user, will compose the basis of the services that can be obtained

An Intelligent Method for Predictive Monitoring of Patient Health Parameters using Data Mining Techniques

Now a day Internet of Things is suddenly increasing technology. IOT is the network of physical object or things embedded with software sensors, electronics and network connectivity. IOT is used to collect information and exchange data. In this paper, we are developing a system which will automatically monitor the industrial applications. IOT has given a powerful way to build industrial system by using wireless devices, and sensors. IOT concept is to monitor and control the industry. In phase I the hard ware was designed successfully using IOT. The input from sensor and data output can be displayed in the LCD (16*2).microcontroller (PIC16F887) which is used to collect data from sensors and displayed in LCD. The displayed data can be seen by server using IOT. The performances are verified experimentally using IOT. In Phase II the data from the server can be monitor through personal computer .The industrial data can be viewed through URL

Design for energy-efficient and reliable fog-assisted healthcare IoT systems

Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are two of the most dangerous diseases as they are the leading causes of death in all ages. Unfortunately, they cannot be completely cured with the current knowledge and existing technologies. However, they can be effectively managed by applying methods of continuous health monitoring. Nonetheless, it is difficult to achieve a high quality of healthcare with the current health monitoring systems which often have several limitations such as non-mobility support, energy inefficiency, and an insufficiency of advanced services. Therefore, this thesis presents a Fog computing approach focusing on four main tracks, and proposes it as a solution to the existing limitations. In the first track, the main goal is to introduce Fog computing and Fog services into remote health monitoring systems in order to enhance the quality of healthcare. In the second track, a Fog approach providing mobility support in a real-time health monitoring IoT system is proposed. The handover mechanism run by Fog-assisted smart gateways helps to maintain the connection between sensor nodes and the gateways with a minimized latency. Results show that the handover latency of the proposed Fog approach is 10%-50% less than other state-of-the-art mobility support approaches. In the third track, the designs of four energy-efficient health monitoring IoT systems are discussed and developed. Each energy-efficient system and its sensor nodes are designed to serve a specific purpose such as glucose monitoring, ECG monitoring, or fall detection; with the exception of the fourth system which is an advanced and combined system for simultaneously monitoring many diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Results show that these sensor nodes can continuously work, depending on the application, up to 70-155 hours when using a 1000 mAh lithium battery. The fourth track mentioned above, provides a Fog-assisted remote health monitoring IoT system for diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease. Via several proposed algorithms such as QT interval extraction, activity status categorization, and fall detection algorithms, the system can process data and detect abnormalities in real-time. Results show that the proposed system using Fog services is a promising approach for improving the treatment of diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease