Movements assessment and analysis for IMU based wearable networks

Movements assessment and analysis based on Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) is becoming a common feature for many kinds of applications, such as industrial, videogames, sports and medical. The approach predominantly used is the processing of sensors output as a waveform in which a pattern can be recognized or the initial and the final positions of the movement detected. Not only does this approach lack in precision of the measurement but also yields results that are not readily understandable, especially visually. On the other hand, visual interaction alone can be restricted by the difficulties in capturing some body positions and evaluating them. Using six degrees of freedom IMUs and similarly to techniques that rely on optical devices, but obviously without employing them, we tried to view the sensors output as a representation of the movement in space, in order to obtain the actual trajectory of the whole movement. We also gave a suitable representation of the movements and efficient analysis and comparison techniques for evaluating them. In this thesis we will describe how our approach was realized, the experiments performed and the solutions proposed, even comparing them with other solutions proposed in literature. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- La valutazione e l’analisi di movimenti basata su dispositivi di misurazione inerziale (IMUs) sta diventando caratteristica comune in molti tipi di impieghi, come quelli industriali, video-ludici, sportivi e medici. L’approccio maggiormente utilizzato è il processamento dell’output dei sensori visto come una forma d’onda nella quale riconoscere un pattern o individuare le pose iniziali e finali del movimento. Questo approccio non solo è carente nella precisione della misurazione ma fornisce risultati di difficile lettura e comprensione, specialmente dal punto di vista visivo. D’altro canto la sola interazione visuale può essere limitata dalla difficoltà nel rilevare alcune posizioni del corpo e quindi valutarle. Utilizzando IMUs a sei gradi di libertà e in maniera simile alle tecniche basate su dispositivi ottici, ma ovviamente senza impiegarli, abbiamo cercato di interpretate l’output dei sensori come rappresentazione del movimento nello spazio, al fine di ottenere la reale traiettoria dell’intero movimento. Inoltre, abbiamo fornito un’adeguata rappresentazione dei movimenti e efficienti tecniche per la loro analisi e il loro confronto. In questa tesi descriveremo come il nostro approccio è stato realizzato, gli esperimenti condotti e le soluzioni proposte, effettuando anche dei confronti con altre soluzioni proposte in letteratura

Blockchain in Energy Communities, A proof of concept

This report aims at exploring the use of the distributed ledger paradigm to incentive the participation of the citizen to a truly free, open and interoperable energy market, producing a feasibility study and a first demo testbed, taking also into consideration privacy, cybersecurity and big-data issues of the smart-home in the Energy market context. This study is intended to support point 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of the DSM (COM(2015)192) and point 2.2 of the Energy Union package (COM(2015)80.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Cybersecurity, our digital anchor: A European perspective

The Report ‘Cybersecurity – Our Digital Anchor’ brings together research from different disciplinary fields of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It provides multidimensional insights into the growth of cybersecurity over the last 40 years, identifying weaknesses in the current digital evolution and their impacts on European citizens and industry. The report also sets out the elements that potentially could be used to shape a brighter and more secure future for Europe’s digital society, taking into account the new cybersecurity challenges triggered by the COVID-19 crisis. According to some projections, cybercrime will cost the world EUR 5.5 trillion by the end of 2020, up from EUR 2.7 trillion in 2015, due in part to the exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic by cyber criminals. This figure represents the largest transfer of economic wealth in history, more profitable than the global trade in all major illegal drugs combined, putting at risk incentives for innovation and investment. Furthermore, cyber threats have moved beyond cybercrime and have become a matter of national security. The report addresses relevant issues, including: - Critical infrastructures: today, digital technologies are at the heart of all our critical infrastructures. Hence, their cybersecurity is already – and will become increasingly – a matter of critical infrastructure protection (see the cases of Estonia and Ukraine). - Magnitude of impact: the number of citizens, organisations and businesses impacted simultaneously by a single attack can be huge. - Complexity and duration of attacks: attacks are becoming more and more complex, demonstrating attackers’ enhanced planning capabilities. Moreover, attacks are often only detected post-mortem . - Computational power: the spread of malware also able to infect mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (as in the case of Mirai botnet), hugely increases the distributed computational power of the attacks (especially in the case of denial of services (DoS)). The same phenomenon makes the eradication of an attack much more difficult. - Societal aspects: cyber threats can have a potentially massive impact on society, up to the point of undermining the trust citizens have in digital services. As such services are intertwined with our daily life, any successful cybersecurity strategy must take into consideration the human and, more generally, societal aspects. This report shows how the evolution of cybersecurity has always been determined by a type of cause-and-effect trend: the rise in new digital technologies followed by the discovery of new vulnerabilities, for which new cybersecurity measures must be identified. However, the magnitude and impacts of today's cyber attacks are now so critical that the digital society must prepare itself before attacks happen. Cybersecurity resilience along with measures to deter attacks and new ways to avoid software vulnerabilities should be enhanced, developed and supported. The ‘leitmotiv’ of this report is the need for a paradigm shift in the way cybersecurity is designed and deployed, to make it more proactive and better linked to societal needs. Given that data flows and information are the lifeblood of today’s digital society, cybersecurity is essential for ensuring that digital services work safely and securely while simultaneously guaranteeing citizens’ privacy and data protection. Thus, cybersecurity is evolving from a technological ‘option’ to a societal must. From big data to hyperconnectivity, from edge computing to the IoT, to artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and blockchain technologies, the ‘nitty-gritty’ details of cybersecurity implementation will always remain field-specific due to specific sectoral constraints. This brings with it inherent risks of a digital society with heterogeneous and inconsistent levels of security. To counteract this, we argue for a coherent, cross-sectoral and cross-societal cybersecurity strategy which can be implemented across all layers of European society. This strategy should cover not only the technological aspects but also the societal dimensions of ‘behaving in a cyber-secure way’. Consequently, the report concludes by presenting a series of possible actions instrumental to building a European digital society secure by design.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

The evolution of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) applications and technologies for law enforcement and public safety

The term Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) refers to the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for road transportation to support and enhance various applications. In this book chapter, we focus on the ITS applications and technologies which can support law enforcer’s capabilities. More specifically, we investigate how wireless communication technologies for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication can be used to support law enforcers operational activities.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

A survey of techniques for the identification of mobile phones using the physical fingerprints of the built-in components

The identification of electronic devices through their physical components and properties has many applications in various domains. In recent years, substantial research activity has investigated the feasibility of identification techniques from a theoretical point of view and through extensive experimental studies. In many cases, the research results have shown that a very high identification accuracy can be obtained by exploiting imperfections and small differences in the electronic components, which are called fingerprints in this context. In this paper we survey the techniques for the identification of a specific category of electronic devices, which is extensively used in the everyday life: the mobile phone or smartphone. A mobile phone is usually equipped with various electronic components: the radio frequency front-ends to support wireless communication standards, the high resolution cameras, the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers, the Micro-Electro-MEchanical Systems (MEMS) components, the microphone and so on. Each of these components can be identified by different techniques applied to specific features of the components and their digital output. The identification of these components can be used to fingerprint the mobile phone itself. This paper provides a survey of the different techniques, which can be applied to the different components, the types of features which are usually implemented in literature and the classification algorithms. Outstanding challenges and research issues are identified and described. An overview of the potential applications for mobile phone fingerprinting is also presented in this paper. In addition, this paper analyzes the potential privacy risks associated to the tracking of the mobile phone on the basis of its fingerprints and the related mitigation techniques. Finally, this paper identifies research opportunities and potential future trends for mobile phone fingerprinting.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Enforcement of Security Policy Rules for the Internet of Things

According to the European Union data protection legislation, privacy is a fundamental right that should be protected in the interaction of the citizen with the digital world. In the evolution of Internet towards new paradigms like Internet of Things (IoT), protection of privacy can be a challenging task because IoT connected objects can generate an enormous amount of data, some of which actually constitute personal data. In addition, it is difficult to control the flow of data when there is no user interface or adequate tools for the user. In this paper we describe an efficient solution to enforcement security policy rules that addresses this challenge, and takes a more general enterprise architecture approach for security and privacy engineering in IoT. This enforcement solution is based on a Model-based Security Toolkit named SecKit, and its integration with the MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol layer, which is a widely adopted technology to enable the communication between IoT devices. In this paper, we describe the motivation and design of our enforcement solution, demonstrating its feasibility and the performance results in a case study.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

Physical Layer Authentication and Identification of Wireless Devices Using the Synchrosqueezing Transform

This paper addresses the problem of authentication and identification of wireless devices using their physical properties derived from their Radio Frequency (RF) emissions. This technique is based on the concept that small differences in the physical implementation of wireless devices are significant enough and they are carried over to the RF emissions to distinguish wireless devices with high accuracy. The technique can be used both to authenticate the claimed identity of a wireless device or to identify one wireless device among others. In the literature, this technique has been implemented by feature extraction in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or also in the 2D time frequency domain. This paper describes the novel application of the synchrosqueezing transform to the problem of physical layer authentication. The idea is to exploit the capability of the synchrosqueezing transform to enhance the identification and authentication accuracy of RF devices from their actual wireless emissions. An experimental dataset of 12 cellular communication devices is used to validate the approach and to perform a comparison of the different techniques. The results described in this paper show that the accuracy obtained using 2D Synchrosqueezing Transform (SST) is superior to conventional techniques from the literature based in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or 2D time frequency domain

LTE D2D communication for collaborative wearable sensor networks: A connectivity analysis

While the demand for wearable sensor devices is going to rise significantly in the near future, Long Term Evolution (LTE) chips are becoming progressively less expensive and rich in functionalities, suggesting for a strong integration between these two technologies. Moreover, the introduction of the Device-to-Device (D2D) feature in LTE envisages direct communication for basically any kind of device, and wearable sensors can be one of those. In this way, collaborative applications based on wearable sensors would benefit from the extended range and higher throughput offered by LTE. However, when sensor devices achieve cellular coverage, security of direct links and of wearable applications become crucial. In particular, especially in critical and emergency scenarios, direct connectivity has to be guaranteed to all the nodes. Starting from this requirement and using a secure LTE D2D protocol, in this paper we provide the analytical and simulation results in terms of achievable connectivity for a possible deployment of a LTE-enabled collaborative wearable network for emergency or extreme sport applications.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Physical Layer authentication and identification of wireless devices using the Synchrosqueezing transform

This paper addresses the problem of authentication and identification of wireless devices using their physical properties derived from their Radio Frequency (RF) emissions. This technique is based on the concept that small differences in the physical implementation of wireless devices are significant enough and they are carried over to the RF emissions to distinguish wireless devices with high accuracy. The technique can be used both to authenticate the claimed identity of a wireless device or to identify one wireless device among others. In the literature, this technique has been implemented by feature extraction in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or also in the 2D time frequency domain. This paper describes the novel application of the synchrosqueezing transform to the problem of physical layer authentication. The idea is to exploit the capability of the synchrosqueezing transform to enhance the identification and authentication accuracy of RF devices from their actual wireless emissions. An experimental dataset of 12 cellular communication devices is used to validate the approach and to perform a comparison of the different techniques. The results described in this paper show that the accuracy obtained using 2D Synchrosqueezing Transform (SST) is superior to conventional techniques from the literature based in the 1D time domain, 1D frequency domain or 2D time frequency domain.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit