An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity

Design and evaluation of a person-centric heart monitoring system over fog computing infrastructure

Heart disease and stroke are becoming the leading cause of death worldwide. Electrocardiography monitoring devices (ECG) are the only tool that helps physicians diagnose cardiac abnormalities. Although the design of ECGs has followed closely the electronics miniaturization evolution over the years, existing wearable ECG have limited accuracy and rely on external resources to analyze the signal and evaluate heart activity. In this paper, we work towards empowering the wearable device with processing capabilities to locally analyze the signal and identify abnormal behavior. The ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal heart activity significantly reduces (a) the need to store the signals, (b) the data transmitted to the cloud and (c) the overall power consumption. Based on this concept, the HEART platform is presented that combines wearable embedded devices, mobile edge devices, and cloud services to provide on-the-spot, reliable, accurate and instant monitoring of the heart. The performance of the system is evaluated concerning the accuracy of detecting abnormal events and the power consumption of the wearable device. Results indicate that a very high percentage of success can be achieved in terms of event detection ratio and the device being operative up to a several days without the need for a recharge

Enabling stream processing for people-centric IoT based on the fog computing paradigm

The world of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is gradually moving from vertical single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organizations and people - A world of Internet of Things (IoT). The dominant approach for delivering IoT applications relies on the development of cloud-based IoT platforms that collect all the data generated by the sensing elements and centrally process the information to create real business value. In this paper, we present a system that follows the Fog Computing paradigm where the sensor resources, as well as the intermediate layers between embedded devices and cloud computing datacenters, participate by providing computational, storage, and control. We discuss the design aspects of our system and present a pilot deployment for the evaluating the performance in a real-world environment. Our findings indicate that Fog Computing can address the ever-increasing amount of data that is inherent in an IoT world by effective communication among all elements of the architecture

On the Deployment of Healthcare Applications over Fog Computing Infrastructure

Fog computing is considered as the most promising enhancement of the traditional cloud computing paradigm in order to handle potential issues introduced by the emerging Interned of Things (IoT) framework at the network edge. The heterogeneous nature, the extensive distribution and the hefty number of deployed IoT nodes will disrupt existing functional models, creating confusion. However, IoT will facilitate the rise of new applications, with automated healthcare monitoring platforms being amongst them. This paper presents the pillars of design for such applications, along with the evaluation of a working prototype that collects ECG traces from a tailor-made device and utilizes the patient's smartphone as a Fog gateway for securely sharing them to other authorized entities. This prototype will allow patients to share information to their physicians, monitor their health status independently and notify the authorities rapidly in emergency situations. Historical data will also be available for further analysis, towards identifying patterns that may improve medical diagnoses in the foreseeable future

Managing nonuniformities and uncertainties in vehicle-oriented sensor data over next generation networks

Detailed and accurate vehicle-oriented sensor data is considered fundamental for efficient vehicle-to-everything V2X communication applications, especially in the upcoming highly heterogeneous, brisk and agile 5G networking era. Information retrieval, transfer and manipulation in real-time offers a small margin for erratic behavior, regardless of its root cause. This paper presents a method for managing nonuniformities and uncertainties found on datasets, based on an elaborate Matrix Completion technique, with superior performance in three distinct cases of vehicle-related sensor data, collected under real driving conditions. Our approach appears capable of handling sensing and communication irregularities, minimizing at the same time the storage and transmission requirements of Multi-access Edge Computing applications

On the design of a fog computing-based, driving behaviour monitoring framework

Recent technological improvements in vehicle manufacturing may greatly improve safety however, the individuals' driving behaviour still remains a factor of paramount importance with aggressiveness, lack of focus and carelessness being the main cause of the majority of traffic incidents. The imminent deployment of 5G networking infrastructure, paired with the advent of Fog computing and the establishment of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a reliable and cost-effective service delivery framework may provide the means for the deployment of an accurate driving monitoring solution which could be utilized to further understand the underlying reasons of peculiar road behaviour, as well as its correlation to the driver's physiological state, the vehicle condition and certain environmental parameters. This paper presents some of the fundamental attributes of Fog computing along with the functional requirements of a driving behaviour monitoring framework, followed by its high level architecture blueprint and the description of the prototype implementation process

Utilising Fog Computing for Developing a Person-Centric Heart Monitoring System

Heart disease and stroke are becoming the leading causes of death worldwide. Electrocardiography monitoring devices (ECG) are the only tool that help physicians diagnose cardiac abnormalities. Although the design of ECGs has followed closely the electronics miniaturization evolution over the years, existing wearable ECGs have limited accuracy and rely on external resources to analyse the signals and evaluate heart activity. In this paper, we work towards empowering the wearable device with processing capabilities to locally analyse the signal and identify abnormal behaviour. The ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal heart activity significantly reduces (a) the need to store the signals, (b) the data transmitted to the cloud, (c) the overall power consumption and (d) the confidentiality of private data. Based on this concept, the HEART system presented in this work, combines wearable embedded devices, mobile edge devices, and cloud services to provide on-the-spot, reliable, accurate, and instant heart monitoring. The wearable device is remotely trained by a physician to learn to accurately identify critical events related to each particular patient. Following this, the wearable device becomes capable of interpreting a large number of heart abnormalities without relying on cloud services and edge resources, when the medical doctor is not present. The Fog computing approach extends the cloud computing paradigm by migrating data-processing closer to production site, thus accelerating the system's responsiveness to events. TheHEART system's performance concerning the accuracy of detecting abnormal events and the power consumption of the wearable device is evaluated. Results indicate that a very high success rate can be achieved in terms of event detection ratio and the battery is able to sustain operation up to a full week without the need for recharge

Utilising fog computing for developing a person-centric heart monitoring system

Heart disease and stroke are becoming the leading causes of death worldwide. Electrocardiography monitoring devices (ECG) are the only tool that helps physicians diagnose cardiac abnormalities. Although the design of ECGs has followed closely the electronics miniaturization evolution over the years, existing wearable ECGs have limited accuracy and rely on external resources to analyze the signals and evaluate heart activity. In this paper, we work towards empowering the wearable device with processing capabilities to locally analyze the signal and identify abnormal behaviour. The ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal heart activity significantly reduces (a) the need to store the signals, (b) the data transmitted to the cloud, (c) the overall power consumption and (d) the confidentiality of private data. Based on this concept, the HEART system presented in this work combines wearable embedded devices, mobile edge devices, and cloud services to provide on-the-spot, reliable, accurate, and instant heart monitoring. The wearable device is remotely trained by a physician to learn to accurately identify critical events related to each particular patient. Following this training session, the wearable device becomes capable of interpreting a large number of heart abnormalities without relying on cloud services and edge resources, when the medical doctor is not present. The Fog computing approach extends the cloud computing paradigm by migrating data-processing closer to the production site, thus accelerating the system's responsiveness to events. The HEART system's performance concerning the accuracy of detecting abnormal events and the power consumption of the wearable device is evaluated. Results indicate that a very high success rate can be achieved in terms of event detection ratio and the battery is able to sustain operation up to a full week without the need for a recharge

Architecture System Design of TERRA+: The wine production use case

The paper presents the architectural design and the technical details of the TERRA+ platform, an Ethereum based Blockchain infrastructure aiming to address the lack of confidentiality among consumers and producers in the agrifood sector. TERRA+ first application on the wine supply chain is presented; aiming to facilitate winemakers to build their brand's integrity via employing blockchain technology as the driving force of the proposed solution. Particularly, the presented approach, empowered by blockchain technology, is expected to (i) increase food confidence by leveraging blockchain technology and IoT, (ii) support brand integrity by providing all involved parties with data insights towards unique characteristics acquired from the vineyard origin and the producers and (iii) digitize food business models by allowing consumers and/or 3rd party services to capture robust data collections about each product