Modern Forms and New Challenges in Medical Sensors and Body Area Networks

We believe that medical sensors and body area networks complement each other, with the ultimate goal of providing better services for patients and doctors. All related papers with the potential to improve methods in their fields or those that report on recent advances are welcome in the current Special Issue: “Medical Sensors and Body Area Networks”

A quarterly update on what's happening in the field of ferroelectricity

The Ferroelectricity Newsletter intends to meet expectations by providing information about upcoming meetings worldwide, highlights of recently held conferences, lists of papers to be published in proceedings, reports on research, patents, and other important developments, as well as a calendar of events in each issue, and a yearly index

Integrated system architecture for decision-making and urban planning in smart cities

Research and development of applications for smart cities are extremely relevant considering the various problems that population growth will bring to large urban centers in the next few years. Although research on cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, embedded devices, sensor and actuator networks, and participatory sensing, among other paradigms, is driving the growth of solutions, there are a lot of challenges that need to be addressed. Based on these observations, in this work, we present an integrated system architecture for decision-making support and urban planning by introducing its building blocks (termed components): sensing/actuation, local processing, communication, cloud platform, and application components. In the sensing/actuation component, we present the major relevant resources for data collection, identification devices, and actuators that can be used in smart city solutions. Sensing/actuation component is followed by the local processing component, which is responsible for processing, decision-making support, and control in local scale. The communication component, as the connection element among all these components, is presented with an emphasis on the open-access metropolitan area network and cellular networks. The cloud platform is the essential component for urban planning and integration with electronic governance legacy systems, and finally, the application component, in which the government administrator and users have access to public management tools, citizen services, and other urban planning resources15

Program Analysis of Commodity IoT Applications for Security and Privacy: Challenges and Opportunities

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) have enabled myriad domains such as smart homes, personal monitoring devices, and enhanced manufacturing. IoT is now pervasive---new applications are being used in nearly every conceivable environment, which leads to the adoption of device-based interaction and automation. However, IoT has also raised issues about the security and privacy of these digitally augmented spaces. Program analysis is crucial in identifying those issues, yet the application and scope of program analysis in IoT remains largely unexplored by the technical community. In this paper, we study privacy and security issues in IoT that require program-analysis techniques with an emphasis on identified attacks against these systems and defenses implemented so far. Based on a study of five IoT programming platforms, we identify the key insights that result from research efforts in both the program analysis and security communities and relate the efficacy of program-analysis techniques to security and privacy issues. We conclude by studying recent IoT analysis systems and exploring their implementations. Through these explorations, we highlight key challenges and opportunities in calibrating for the environments in which IoT systems will be used.Comment: syntax and grammar error are fixed, and IoT platforms are updated to match with the submissio

MIFTel: a multimodal interactive framework based on temporal logic rules

Human-computer and multimodal interaction are increasingly used in everyday life. Machines are able to get more from the surrounding world, assisting humans in different application areas. In this context, the correct processing and management of signals provided by the environments is determinant for structuring the data. Different sources and acquisition times can be exploited for improving recognition results. On the basis of these assumptions, we are proposing a multimodal system that exploits Allen’s temporal logic combined with a prevision method. The main object is to correlate user’s events with system’s reactions. After post-elaborating coming data from different signal sources (RGB images, depth maps, sounds, proximity sensors, etc.), the system is managing the correlations between recognition/detection results and events in real-time to create an interactive environment for the user. For increasing the recognition reliability, a predictive model is also associated with the proposed method. The modularity of the system grants a full dynamic development and upgrade with custom modules. Finally, a comparison with other similar systems is shown, underlining the high flexibility and robustness of the proposed event management method

A Multi-Sensor System for Enhancing Situational Awareness and Stress Management for People with ASD in the Workplace and in Everyday Life

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) present challenges for affected people at work and in everyday life. The barrier increases further with changing environmental situations. Deviations in factors like lighting or sound may lead to increased stress. The intervention plans to instil positive behaviour support (PBS) suggest that a customised environment can minimise the impacts due to these variations. This work proposes a novel framework which leverages the information from multi-sensor channels in a combined manner to customise the environment so that situational awareness (SA) can be improved. The proposed framework allows for monitoring the environment by combining the information from different sensor channels including both personal sensors (i.e. on board of a mobile device) as well as environmental sensors/actuators (i.e. embedded in smart-buildings). In this preliminary work, the system architecture is introduced. To demonstrate the potential of the proposed system, a case study is also considered through the development of a prototype for a mobile application and by reporting results on a scale model of a smart workplace with customisable environment