Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Enabling medicine reuse using a digital time temperature humidity sensor in an internet of pharmaceutical things concept

Medicinal waste due to improper handling of unwanted medicines creates health and environmental risks. However, the re-dispensing of unused prescribed medicines from patients seems to be accepted by stakeholders when quality and safety requirements are met. Reusing dispensed medicines may help reduce waste, but a comprehensive validation method is not generally available. The design of a novel digital time temperature and humidity indicator based on an Internet of Pharmaceutical Things concept is proposed to facilitate the validation, and a prototype is presented using smart sensors with cloud connectivity acting as the key technology for verifying and enabling the reuse of returned medicines. Deficiency of existing technologies is evaluated based on the results of this development, and recommendations for future research are suggested

Message threads: Exploring interpersonal communication through smartphones: how we weave our lives in a hypermediated world

This thesis is about human behaviour as it relates to computer mediated communication. Smartphones are an accepted part of everyday life. We use them to wake us up in the morning, we play games on them while we wait for the bus, and take photos with them. Smartphones also enable communication. We can phone while in transit, coordinate meeting up with friends, share our lives on social networking sites, and check in on email and text throughout the day. How does this technology affect how we interact? In public situations we retain contact online, but this multitasking affects how we relate to others socially. Smartphone texting allows us to keep in constant touch with friends and family, though interaction is fragmented and asynchronous. As we are always available, and never alone, these open lines of communication also affect how we see ourselves. In choosing the smartphone I critically question the attention and priority given to these devices in daily life. Mobile phones have changed the soundscape in public places: dialtones, beeps and people speaking in public on their phones is common. Users interact continually with their phones, store substantial data on them, communicate through, and consequently develop a bond to, the physical object. What could these ubiquitous portable computers tell us if, instead of being passive agents in a dependent relationship of user and phone, they actively listened, or could reflect back the nature of their role in our lives

QoS and trust prediction framework for composed distributed systems

The objective of this dissertation is to propose a comprehensive framework to predict the QoS and trust (i.e, the degree of compliance of a service to its specification) values of composed distributed systems created out of existing quality-aware services. We improve the accuracy of the predictions by building context-aware models and validating them with real-life case studies. The context is the set of environmental factors that affect QoS attributes (such as response time and availability), and trust of a service or a composed system. The proposed framework uses available context-QoS dependency information of individual services and information about the interaction patterns among the services to make predictions for the QoS and trust values of the composed system at the design phase of the development lifecycle. Such predictions made in the early phases of the system development lifecycle will reduce cost, time, and effort. We demonstrate the use of these predictions in selecting the optimum set of services to create composed systems using heuristic optimization algorithms. Additionally, the prediction model is used at runtime with fast heuristic techniques to build adaptable composed systems. The empirical results show the proposed context-dependent framework performs well in providing more accurate predictions than the prevalent approaches

Autonomous IoT Monitoring Matching Spectral Artificial Light Manipulation for Horticulture

This paper aims at demonstrating the energy self-sufficiency of a LoRaWAN-based sensor node for monitoring environmental parameters exploiting energy harvesting directly coming from the artificial light used in indoor horticulture. A portable polycrystalline silicon module is used to charge a Li-Po battery, employed as the power reserve of a wireless sensor node able to accurately monitor, with a 1-h period, both the physical quantities most relevant for the application, i.e., humidity, temperature and pressure, and the chemical quantities, i.e., O(2) and CO(2) concentrations. To this aim, the node also hosts a power-hungry NDIR sensor. Two programmable light sources were used to emulate the actual lighting conditions of greenhouses, and to prove the effectiveness of the designed autonomous system: a LED-based custom designed solar simulator and a commercial LED light especially thought for plant cultivation purposes in greenhouses. Different lighting conditions used in indoor horticulture to enhance different plant growth phases, obtained as combinations of blue, red, far-red and white spectra, were tested by field tests of the sensor node. The energy self-sufficiency of the system was demonstrated by monitoring the charging/discharging trend of the Li-Po battery. Best results are obtained when white artificial light is mixed with the far-red component, closest to the polycrystalline silicon spectral response peak