COIN: Opening the internet of things to people's mobile devices

People's interaction with IoT devices such as proximity beacons, body-worn sensors, and controllable light bulbs is often mediated through personal mobile devices. Current approaches usually make applications operate in separate silos, as the functionality of IoT devices is fixed by vendors and typically accessed only through low-level proprietary APIs. This limits the flexibility in designing applications and requires intense wireless interactions, which may impact energy consumption. COIN is a system architecture that breaks this separation by allowing developers to flexibly run a slice of a mobile app's logic onto IoT devices. Mobile apps can dynamically deploy arbitrary tasks implemented as loosely coupled components. The underlying runtime support takes care of the coordination across tasks and of their real-time scheduling. Our prototype indicates that COIN both enables increased flexibility and improves energy efficiency at the IoT device, compared to traditional architectures

An IoT-aware AAL System to Capture Behavioral Changes of Elderly People

The ageing of population is a phenomenon that is affecting the majority of developed countries around the world and will soon affect developing economies too. In recent years, both industry and academia are focused on the development of several solutions aimed to guarantee a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. In this context, the behavioral analysis of elderly people can help to prevent the occurrence of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty problems. The innovative technologies enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) can be used in order to capture personal data for automatically recognizing changes in elderly people behavior in an unobtrusive, low-cost and low-power modality. This work aims to describe the ongoing activities within the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission, mainly focused on the use of IoT technologies to develop an innovative AAL system able to capture personal data of elderly people in their home and city environments. The proposed architecture has been validated through a proof-of-concept focused mainly on localization issues, collection of ambient parameters, and user-environment interaction aspects

Modelling Collaboration Processes Through Design Patterns

Enterprise 2.0 has been introduced in the SME (Small Medium Enterprise) modifying common organizational and operative practices. This brings the `knowledge workers' to change their working practices through the use of web 2.0 communication tools. Unfortunately, these tools do not allow intercepting and tracing the exchanged data, which can produce a loss of information. This is an important problem in an enterprise context because knowledge of the exchanged information can increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the company. In this article we demonstrate that it is possible to extract this knowledge by an abstraction process of the new operative practices, named collaboration processes, thanks to the use of design patterns. Therefore, we propose design patterns for the collaboration processes useful for modelling typical Enterprise 2.0 activities, having the goal of making more flexible and traceable the use of emerging operative practices

A Framework to Generate 3D Learning Experience

A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a ‘hosting’ 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it users provided with graphical embodiments called avatars that convey their identity (presence, location, movement etc.), can meet and interact with other users, with agents or with virtual objects. Even if graphics hardware and 3D technologies are rapidly evolving and the increased Internet connection speed allows the sharing of amounts of data and information among geographically distributed users, the development of networked three-dimensional applications is still complicated and requires expert knowledge. Although some collaborative 3D Web technologies and applications have already been developed, most of them are particularly concerned with offering a high level realistic representation of the virtual world since increasing the level of detail increases the sense of ‘virtual presence’ in the 3D world. However, these developments have not, at the same time supported a high level, non-expert authoring process and the concepts of programming flexibility and component re-use have rarely been taken into account. In this introduction, we discuss our research experience in the field of Collaborative Virtual Environments. We will outline our approach which has been based on both multi-channel integration and on high performances issues

An IoT-aware Architecture to improve Safety in Sports Environments

The introduction of Internet of Things enabling technologies into the sport and recreational activities domain provide an interesting research challenge. Their adoption could significantly improve the sport experience and also the safety level of team sports. Despite this, only few attempts have been done to demonstrate the benefits provided by use of IoT technologies in sport environments. To fill this gap, this paper propose an IoT-aware Sport System based on the jointly use of different innovative technologies and standards. By exploiting the potentialities offered by an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN), composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities, the system is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and players’ physiological data. Sensed data are then delivered to a Cloud platform where a monitoring application makes them easily accessible via REST Web Services. A simple proof of concept has demonstrated the appropriateness of the proposed solution

A Cross-Layer Approach to Minimize the Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency represents one of the primary challenges in the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since communication is the most power consuming operation for a node, many current energy-efficient protocols are based on duty cycling mechanisms. However, most of these solutions are expensive from both the computational and the memory resources point of view and; therefore, they result in being hardly implementable on resources constrained devices, such as sensor nodes. This suggests to combine new communication protocols with hardware solutions able to further reduce the nodes' power consumption. In this work, a cross-layer solution, based on the combined use of a duty-cycling protocol and a new kind of active wake-up circuit, is presented and validated by using a test bed approach. The resulting solution significantly reduces idle listening periods by awakening the node only when a communication is detected. Specifically, an MAC scheduler manages the awakenings of a commercial power detector connected to the sensor node, and, if an actual communication is detected, it enables the radio transceiver. The effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer protocol has been thoroughly evaluated by means of tests carried out in an outdoor environment

IDA-Pay: a secure and efficient micro-payment system based on Peer-to-Peer NFC technology for Android mobile devices

The evolution of modern mobile devices towards novel Radio Frequency (RF) capabilities, such as Near Field Communication, leads to a potential for delivering innovative mobile services, which is still partially unexplored. Mobile proximity payment systems are going to enhance the daily shopping experience, but the access to payment security resources of a mobile device (e.g. the “Secure Element”) by third party applications is still blocked by smartphone and Operating System manufacturers. In this paper, the IDA-Pay system is presented, an innovative and secure NFC micro-payment system based on Peer-to-Peer NFC operating mode for Android mobile phones. It allows to deliver mobile-to-POS micro-payment services, bypassing the need for special hardware. A validation scenario and a system evaluation are also reported to demonstrate the system effectiveness and performance

An RFID-Based Tracing and Tracking System for the Fresh Vegetables Supply Chain

The paper presents an innovative gapless traceability system able to improve the main business processes of the fresh vegetables supply chain. The performed analysis highlighted some critical aspects in the management of the whole supply chain, from the land to the table of the end consumer, and allowed us to reengineer the most important processes. In particular, the first steps of the supply chain, which include cultivation in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables, were analyzed. The re-engineered model was designed by exploiting the potentialities derived from the combined use of innovative Radio Frequency technologies, such as RFID and NFC, and important international standards, such as EPCglobal. The proposed tracing and tracking system allows the end consumer to know the complete history of the purchased product. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential benefits of the reengineered processes in a real supply chain, a pilot project was implemented in an Italian food company, which produces ready-to-eat vegetables, known asIV gammaproducts. Finally, some important metrics have been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefits derived from the use of the re-engineered model

Discovery and Mash-up of Physical Resources through a Web of Things Architecture

The Internet of Things has focused on new systems, the so-called smart things, to integrate the physical world with the virtual world by exploiting the network architecture of the Internet. However, defining applications on top of smart things is mainly reserved to system experts, since it requires a thorough knowledge of hardware platforms and some specific programming languages. Furthermore, a common infrastructure to publish and share resource information is also needed. In this paper, we propose a software architecture that simplifies the visual development and execution of mash-up applications based on smart things, exploiting Internet Web protocols and their ubiquitous availability even on constrained devices. We have developed a distributed architecture that allows to create and control mash-up applications in an easy and scalable way, without specific knowledge on both hardware and programming languages. In addition, we have also defined a centralized public database deployed on the Internet, to manage and share physical resource information. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been tested through a real use case and experimental results have demonstrated the validity of the whole system