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Maintenance and service are important tasks for any industrial enterprise. This article presents a methodology for technical maintenance that employs a smart glove equipped with tactile sensors, an electronic unit responsible for processing and transmitting information, and a unit designed to interpret the results. Tactile sensors are graphene-based. The main idea of the method is to use sensors to record the strength of contact between the operator's fingertips and the equipment. Afterwards, these values are recorded, transferred to processing, and the output signal from the sensors is compared with the steps of various repair works. The work contains methods for creating each component of the glove, their effectiveness is evaluated, and experiments are described to assess the feasibility of using the developed device for the maintenance and repair of equipment. The device discussed in this work is a wearable device. The obtained results demonstrate the applicability of the smart glove for equipment maintenance and repair.

This paper proposes a numerically and experimentally validated printed wideband antenna with a planar geometry for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This design tackles the challenges associated with deploying IoT sensors in remote areas or across extensive geographical regions. The proposed design exploits a coplanar-waveguide-fed modified microstrip line monopole for excitation of circularly polarized waves radiating in the broadside direction. The primary design is based on perturbations of the microstrip line protracted from a grounded coplanar waveguide. The capacitively coupled short rectangular stubs are periodically inserted alternately and excited asymmetrically on each side of the microstrip line parallel to the direction of the electric field vector. The sequential phase excitation of the periodic stubs generates a rectangular-cascaded electric field, which suppresses the stop band at the open end. As a result, the antenna radiates in the broadside direction. The impedance bandwidth of the antenna exceeds 8 GHz in the 28 GHz mm-wave band, i.e., it ranged from 25 to 33.5 GHz. Additionally, an axial ratio below 3 dB is achieved within the operating band from 26 to 33.5 GHz with the alterations of the surface current using straightforward topological adjustments of the physical parameters. The average in-band realized gain of the antenna is 10 dBic when measured in the broadside direction. These results indicate that the proposed design has the potential to improve the connectivity between IoT devices and the constantly varying orientation of satellites by mitigating the polarization mismatch., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Electrochemical biosensors include a recognition component and an electronic transducer, which detect the body fluids with a high degree of accuracy. More importantly, they generate timely readings of the related physiological parameters, and they are suitable for integration into portable, wearable and implantable devices that are significant relative to point-of-care diagnostics scenarios. As an example, the personal glucose meter fundamentally improves the management of diabetes in the comfort of the patients' homes. This review paper analyzes the principles of electrochemical biosensing and the structural features of electrochemical biosensors relative to the implementation of health monitoring and disease diagnostics strategies. The analysis particularly considers the integration of the biosensors into wearable, portable, and implantable systems. The fundamental aim of this paper is to present and critically evaluate the identified significant developments in the scope of electrochemical biosensing for preventive and customized point-of-care diagnostic devices. The paper also approaches the most important engineering challenges that should be addressed in order to improve the sensing accuracy, and enable multiplexing and one-step processes, which mediate the integration of electrochemical biosensing devices into digital healthcare scenarios.

The IoT devices placed in remote locations require a battery replacement very often, which is not a convenient option. Backscatter communication can resolve this problem, as backscatter communication is a data transmission in which an RF signal incident from the gateway is used for energy harvesting, and this energy will be employed for data transmission. In this paper, a hybrid contention-based TDMA scheme is proposed, which provides slots to devices by dividing them into groups, and then contention is employed in groups to acquire a slot; if a device is not able to transmit during harvest, then transmit (HTT) period, then it can transmit in variable sub frame and the devices which are not able to completely transmit during HTT period can reserve subframes. The proposed hybrid scheme is compared with the TDMA scheme for average transmission delay.The proposed scheme provides scalability. The difference between the average transmission delay of TDMA and the proposed hybrid scheme is from 6 to 20 s, depending on the number of devices added and when traffic is generated., Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Vipin balyan reports article publishing charges was provided by 10.13039/501100004512Cape Peninsula University of Technology - Bellville Campus. None., (© 2023 The Authors.)

Giant power conversion efficiency is achieved by using bifunction ZrO 2  : Er 3+ /Yb 3+ assisted co-sensitised dye-sensitized solar cells. The evolution of the crystalline structure and its microstructure are examined by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy studies. The bi-functional behaviour of ZrO 2  : Er 3+ /Yb 3+ as upconversion, light scattering is confirmed by emission and diffused reflectance studies. The bi-function ZrO 2  : Er 3+ /Yb 3+ (pH=3) assisted photoanode is co-sensitized by use of N719 dye, squaraine SPSQ2 dye and is sandwiched with Platinum based counter electrode. The fabricated DSSC exhibited a giant power conversion efficiency of 12.35 % with V OC of 0.71 V, J SC of 27.06 mA/cm 2 , FF of 0.63. The results, which motivated the development of a small DSSC module, gave 6.21 % and is used to drive a tiny electronic motor in indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. Small-area DSSCs connected in series have found that a V OC of 4.52 V is sufficient to power up Internet of Things (IoT) devices., (© 2023 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Basketball players need to frequently engage in various physical movements during the game, which puts a certain burden on their bodies and can easily lead to various sports injuries. Therefore, it is crucial to prevent sports injuries in basketball teaching. This paper also studies basketball motion track capture. Basketball motion capture preserves the motion posture information of the target person in three-dimensional space. Because the motion capture system based on machine vision often encounters problems such as occlusion or self occlusion in the application scene, human motion capture is still a challenging problem in the current research field. This article designs a multi perspective human motion trajectory capture algorithm framework, which uses a two-dimensional human motion pose estimation algorithm based on deep learning to estimate the position distribution of human joint points on the two-dimensional image from each perspective. By combining the knowledge of camera poses from multiple perspectives, the three-dimensional spatial distribution of joint points is transformed, and the final evaluation result of the target human 3D pose is obtained. This article applies the research results of neural networks and IoT devices to basketball motion capture methods, further developing basketball motion capture systems., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The emergence of the infectious diseases, such as the novel coronavirus, as a significant global health threat has emphasized the urgent need for effective treatments and vaccines. As infectious diseases become more common around the world, it is important to have strategies in place to prevent and monitor them. This study reviews hybrid models that incorporate emerging technologies for preventing and monitoring infectious diseases. It also presents a comprehensive review of the hybrid models employed for preventing and monitoring infectious diseases since the outbreak of COVID-19. The review encompasses models that integrate emerging and innovative technologies, such as blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI). By harnessing these technologies, the hybrid system enables secure contact tracing and source isolation. Based on the review, a hybrid conceptual framework model proposes a hybrid model that incorporates emerging technologies. The proposed hybrid model enables effective contact tracing, secure source isolation using blockchain technology, IoT sensors, and big data collection. A hybrid model that incorporates emerging technologies is proposed as a comprehensive approach to preventing and monitoring infectious diseases. With continued research on and the development of the proposed model, the global efforts to effectively combat infectious diseases and safeguard public health will continue.

Deep learning algorithms have a wide range of applications, including cancer diagnosis, face and speech recognition, object recognition, etc. It is critical to protect these models since any changes to them can result in serious losses in a variety of ways. This article proposes the consortium blockchain-enabled conventional neural network (CBCNN), a four-layered paradigm for detecting malicious vehicles. Layer-1 is a convolutional neural network-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) model for the vehicle; Layer-2 is a spatial pyramid polling layer for the vehicle; Layer-3 is a fully connected layer for the vehicle; and Layer-4 is a consortium blockchain for the vehicle. The first three layers accurately identify the vehicles, while the final layer prevents any malicious attempts. The primary goal of the four-layered paradigm is to successfully identify malicious vehicles and mitigate the potential risks they pose using multi-label classification. Furthermore, the proposed CBCNN approach is employed to ensure tamper-proof protection against a parameter manipulation attack. The consortium blockchain employs a proof-of-luck mechanism, allowing vehicles to save energy while delivering accurate information about the vehicle's nature to the "vehicle management system." C++ coding is employed to implement the approach, and the ns-3.34 platform is used for simulation. The ns3-ai module is specifically utilized to detect anomalies in the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs). Finally, a comparative analysis is conducted between the proposed CBCNN approach and state-of-the-art methods. The results confirm that the proposed CBCNN approach outperforms competing methods in terms of malicious label detection, average accuracy, loss ratio, and cost reduction.

Roll-to-roll (R2R) printing methods are well known as additive, cost-effective, and ecologically friendly mass-production methods for processing functional materials and fabricating devices. However, implementing R2R printing to fabricate sophisticated devices is challenging because of the efficiency of material processing, the alignment, and the vulnerability of the polymeric substrate during printing. Therefore, this study proposes the fabrication process of a hybrid device to solve the problems. The device was created so that four layers, composed of polymer insulating layers and conductive circuit layers, are entirely screen-printed layer by layer onto a roll of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film to produce the circuit. Registration control methods were presented to deal with the PET substrate during printing, and then solid-state components and sensors were assembled and soldered to the printed circuits of the completed devices. In this way, the quality of the devices could be ensured, and the devices could be massively used for specific purposes. Specifically, a hybrid device for personal environmental monitoring was fabricated in this study. The importance of environmental challenges to human welfare and sustainable development is growing. As a result, environmental monitoring is essential to protect public health and serve as a basis for policymaking. In addition to the fabrication of the monitoring devices, a whole monitoring system was also developed to collect and process the data. Here, the monitored data from the fabricated device were personally collected via a mobile phone and uploaded to a cloud server for additional processing. The information could then be utilized for local or global monitoring purposes, moving one step toward creating tools for big data analysis and forecasting. The successful deployment of this system could be a foundation for creating and developing systems for other prospective uses.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a part of modern life where it is used for data acquisition and long-range wireless communications. Regardless of the IoT application profile, every wireless communication transmission is enabled by highly efficient antennas. The role of the antenna is thus very important and must not be neglected. Considering the high demand of IoT applications, there is a constant need to improve antenna technologies, including new antenna designs, in order to increase the performance level of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) and enhance their efficiency by enabling a long range and a low error-rate communication link. This paper proposes a new antenna design that is able to increase the performance level of IoT applications by means of an original design. The antenna was designed, simulated, tested, and evaluated in a real operating scenario. From the obtained results, it ensured a high level of performance and can be used in IoT applications specific to the 868 MHz frequency band.By inserting two notches along x axis, we find an optimal structure of the microstrip patch antenna with a reflection coefficient of -34.3 dB and a bandwidth of 20 MHz. After testing the designed novel antenna in real IoT operating conditions, we concluded that the proposed antenna can increase the performance level of IoT wireless communications.

This paper studies the anti-jamming problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) communication networks in the presence of a jammer under the accurate probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) model. Our goal is to maximize the information collection throughput of the system under the assumption that only the jammer's approximate location is known. To this end, we formulate a throughput maximization problem by optimizing the UAV trajectory, the IoT devices' transmit power, and communication scheduling under the accurate real-time probabilistic LoS channel. However, the proposed optimization problem is non-convex and coupled, and hence intractable to be solved. In order to tackle the problem, a robust iterative algorithm is proposed by leveraging the block coordinate descent (BCD) method, the successive convex approximation (SCA) technology, the difference of convex (D.C) programming approach, and the S-procedure. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed algorithm significantly improves the system throughput while achieving a practical anti-jamming effect compared with the benchmark algorithms.

A compact four-port multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) antenna with good isolation is proposed for sub-6 GHz and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Four similar L-shaped antennae are placed orthogonally at 7.6 mm distance from the corner of the FR4 substrate. The wideband characteristics and the required frequency band are achieved through the L-shaped structure and with proper placement of the slots on the substrate. To obtain good isolation between the ports, rectangular slots are etched in the bottom layer and are interconnected. The proposed antenna has total dimensions of 40 mm × 40 mm × 1.6 mm. The interconnected ground plane provides good isolation of less than -17 dB between the ports, and the impedance bandwidth obtained by the proposed four-port antenna is about 54% between the frequency range of 3.2 GHz to 5.6 GHz, thus providing a wideband antenna characteristic covering sub-6 GHz 5G bands (from 3.4 to 3.6 GHz and 4.8 to 5 GHz) and the WLAN band (5.2 GHz). The proposed design antenna is fabricated and tested. Good experimental results are achieved when compared with the simulation results. As the proposed design is compact and low profile, this antenna could be a suitable candidate for 5G and IoT devices.

The activities of daily living (ADL) ability level of an elderly patient is an important indicator in determining the patient's degree of degenerative brain disease and is mainly evaluated through face-to-face interviews with doctors and patients in hospitals. It is impossible to determine the exact ADL ability of a patient through such a temporary interview, and the pursuit of accurate ADL ability evaluation technology is a very important research task worldwide. In this paper, in order to overcome the limitations of the existing ADL evaluation method mentioned above, first of all, a self-organized IoT architecture in which IoT devices autonomously and non-invasively measure a patient's ADL ability within the context of the patient's daily living place was designed and implemented. Second, a remote rehabilitation treatment concept for enhancing the patient's ADL ability we call an "e-coaching framework", in which a doctor remotely gives an instruction in a specific ADL scenario, and the patient's ability to understand and perform the instruction can be measured on-line and in real time, was additionally developed on top of the self-organized IoT architecture. In order to verify the possibility of remote rehabilitation treatment through the proposed architecture, various remotely directed ADL scenarios were performed and the accuracy of the measurements was verified.

Assessing the numbers and distribution of at-risk megafauna such as the black rhino ( Diceros bicornis ) is key to effective conservation, yet such data are difficult to obtain. Many current monitoring technologies are invasive to the target animals and expensive. Satellite monitoring is emerging as a potential tool for very large animals ( e.g ., elephant) but detecting smaller species requires higher resolution imaging. Drones can deliver the required resolution and speed of monitoring, but challenges remain in delivering automated monitoring systems where internet connectivity is unreliable or absent. This study describes a model built to run on a drone to identify in situ images of megafauna. Compared with previously reported studies, this automated detection framework has a lower hardware cost and can function with a reduced internet bandwidth requirement for local network communication. It proposes the use of a Jetson Xavier NX, onboard a Parrot Anafi drone, connected to the internet throughout the flight to deliver a lightweight web-based notification system upon detection of the target species. The GPS location with the detected target species images is sent using MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT), a lightweight messaging protocol using a publisher/subscriber architecture for IoT devices. It provides reliable message delivery when internet connection is sporadic. We used a YOLOv5l6 object detection architecture trained to identify a bounding box for one of five objects of interest in a frame of video. At an intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.5, our model achieved an average precision (AP) of 0.81 for black rhino (our primary target) and 0.83 for giraffe ( Giraffa giraffa) . The model was less successful at identifying the other smaller objects which were not our primary targets: 0.34, 0.25, and 0.42 for ostrich ( Struthio camelus australis ), springbok ( Antidorcas marsupialis ) and human respectively. We used several techniques to optimize performance and overcome the inherent challenge of small objects (animals) in the data. Although our primary focus for the development of the model was rhino, we included other species classes to emulate field conditions where many animal species are encountered, and thus reduce the false positive occurrence rate for rhino detections. To constrain model overfitting, we trained the model on a dataset with varied terrain, angle and lighting conditions and used data augmentation techniques ( i.e ., GANs). We used image tiling and a relatively larger ( i.e ., higher resolution) image input size to compensate for the difficulty faced in detecting small objects when using YOLO. In this study, we demonstrated the potential of a drone-based AI pipeline model to automate the detection of free-ranging megafauna detection in a remote setting and create alerts to a wildlife manager in a relatively poorly connected field environment., Competing Interests: Sky Alibhai and Zoe C. Jewell are employed by WildTrack Inc. Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai are Principal Research Associates JMP Division, SAS., (© 2022 Hua et al.)

Background: One of the main challenges of health monitoring systems is the support of older persons in living independently in their homes and with relatives. Smart homes equipped with internet of things devices can allow older persons to live longer in their homes. Previous surveys used to identify sensor-based data sets in human activity recognition systems have been limited by the use of public data set characteristics, data collected in a controlled environment, and a limited number of older participants., Objective: The objective of our study is to build a model that can learn the daily routines of older persons, detect deviations in daily living behavior, and notify these anomalies in near real-time to relatives., Methods: We extracted features from large-scale sensor data by calculating the time duration and frequency of visits. Anomalies were detected using a parametric statistical approach, unusually short or long durations being detected by estimating the mean (μ) and standard deviation (σ) over hourly time windows (80 to 355 days) for different apartments. The confidence level is at least 75% of the tested values within two (σ) from the mean. An anomaly was triggered where the actual duration was outside the limits of 2 standard deviations (μ-2σ, μ+2σ), activity nonoccurrence, or absence of activity., Results: The patterns detected from sensor data matched the routines self-reported by users. Our system observed approximately 1000 meals and bathroom activities and notifications sent to 9 apartments between July and August 2020. A service evaluation of received notifications showed a positive user experience, an average score of 4 being received on a 1 to 5 Likert-like scale. One was poor, two fair, three good, four very good, and five excellent. Our approach considered more than 75% of the observed meal activities were normal. This figure, in reality, was 93%, normal observed meal activities of all participants falling within 2 standard deviations of the mean., Conclusions: In this research, we developed, implemented, and evaluated a real-time monitoring system of older participants in an uncontrolled environment, with off-the-shelf sensors and internet of things devices being used in the homes of older persons. We also developed an SMS-based notification service and conducted user evaluations. This service acts as an extension of the health/social care services operated by the municipality of Skellefteå provided to older persons and relatives., (©Zahraa Khais Shahid, Saguna Saguna, Christer Åhlund. Originally published in JMIR Aging (https://aging.jmir.org), 11.04.2022.)

The rapid evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as e-health and the smart ecosystem, has resulted in the emergence of numerous security flaws. Therefore, security protocols must be implemented among IoT network nodes to resist the majority of the emerging threats. As a result, IoT devices must adopt cryptographic algorithms such as public-key encryption and decryption. The cryptographic algorithms are computationally more complicated to be efficiently implemented on IoT devices due to their limited computing resources. The core operation of most cryptographic algorithms is the finite field multiplication operation, and concise implementation of this operation will have a significant impact on the cryptographic algorithm's entire implementation. As a result, this paper mainly concentrates on developing a compact and efficient word-based serial-in/serial-out finite field multiplier suitable for usage in IoT devices with limited resources. The proposed multiplier structure is simple to implement in VLSI technology due to its modularity and regularity. The suggested structure is derived from a formal and systematic technique for mapping regular iterative algorithms onto processor arrays. The proposed methodology allows for control of the processor array workload and the workload of each processing element. Managing processor word size allows for control of system latency, area, and consumed energy. The ASIC experimental results indicate that the proposed processor structure reduces area and energy consumption by factors reaching up to 97.7% and 99.2%, respectively.

The COronaVIrus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is unfortunately highly transmissible across the people. In order to detect and track the suspected COVID-19 infected people and consequently limit the pandemic spread, this paper entails a framework integrating the machine learning (ML), cloud, fog, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to propose a novel smart COVID-19 disease monitoring and prognosis system. The proposal leverages the IoT devices that collect streaming data from both medical (e.g., X-ray machine, lung ultrasound machine, etc.) and non-medical (e.g., bracelet, smartwatch, etc.) devices. Moreover, the proposed hybrid fog-cloud framework provides two kinds of federated ML as a service (federated MLaaS); (i) the distributed batch MLaaS that is implemented on the cloud environment for a long-term decision-making, and (ii) the distributed stream MLaaS, which is installed into a hybrid fog-cloud environment for a short-term decision-making. The stream MLaaS uses a shared federated prediction model stored into the cloud, whereas the real-time symptom data processing and COVID-19 prediction are done into the fog. The federated ML models are determined after evaluating a set of both batch and stream ML algorithms from the Python's libraries. The evaluation considers both the quantitative (i.e., performance in terms of accuracy, precision, root mean squared error, and F 1 score) and qualitative (i.e., quality of service in terms of server latency, response time, and network latency) metrics to assess these algorithms. This evaluation shows that the stream ML algorithms have the potential to be integrated into the COVID-19 prognosis allowing the early predictions of the suspected COVID-19 cases., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021.)

Background: Recently, wearable technologies have gained attention in diverse applications of the medical platform to guarantee the health and safety of the sportsperson with the assistance of the Internet of things (IoT) device. The IoT device's topology varies due to the shift in users' orientation and accessibility, making it impossible to assign resources, and routing strategies have been considered the prominent factor in the current medical research. Further, for sportspersons with sudden cardiac arrests, hospital survival rates are low in which wearable IoT devices play a significant role., Objective: In this paper, the energy efficient optimized heuristic framework (EEOHF) has been proposed and implemented on a wearable device of the sportsperson's health monitoring system., Method: The monitoring system has been designed with cloud assistance to locate the nearest health centers during an emergency. The wearable sensor technologies have been used with an optimized energy-efficient algorithm that helps athletes monitor their health during physical workouts. The monitoring system has fitness tracking devices, in which health information is gathered, and workout logs are tracked using EEOHF. The proposed method is applied to evaluate and track the sportsperson's fitness based on case study analysis., Results: The simulation results have been analyzed, and the proposed EEOHF achieves a high accuracy ratio of 97.8%, a performance ratio of 95.3%, and less energy consumption of 9.4%, delay of 13.1%, and an average runtime of 98.2% when compared to other existing methods.

Actually, COVID-19 and its variants present a big challenge for the public health security. COVID-19 is a new form of the coronaviruses characterized by a set of symptoms like laboratory and radiological symptoms, when the first case has confirmed in December 2019 in Wuhan City, as well as a new variant of this form has appeared in December 2020 in the United Kingdom. Internet of things (IoT) is a technological revolution employed in different areas in the aim to serve the asked purposes. The implementation of IoT solutions in healthcare area has several benefits such as reducing the cost of services and improving treatment results. In this paper, we present a review on the impact of IoT on this new health challenge (COVID-19 and its variants), we will focus this study on the impact of the use of IoT devices to reduce transmissions of COVID-19 and its variants., (© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.)

In the Internet of Things (IoT) + Fog + Cloud architecture, with the unprecedented growth of IoT devices, one of the challenging issues that needs to be tackled is to allocate Fog service providers (FSPs) to IoT devices, especially in a game-theoretic environment. Here, the issue of allocation of FSPs to the IoT devices is sifted with game-theoretic idea so that utility maximizing agents may be benign. In this scenario, we have multiple IoT devices and multiple FSPs, and the IoT devices give preference ordering over the subset of FSPs. Given such a scenario, the goal is to allocate at most one FSP to each of the IoT devices. We propose mechanisms based on the theory of mechanism design without money to allocate FSPs to the IoT devices. The proposed mechanisms have been designed in a flexible manner to address the long and short duration access of the FSPs to the IoT devices. For analytical results, we have proved the economic robustness, and probabilistic analyses have been carried out for allocation of IoT devices to the FSPs. In simulation, mechanism efficiency is laid out under different scenarios with an implementation in Python.

The huge spreading of Internet of things (IoT)-oriented modern technologies is revolutionizing all fields of human activities, leading several benefits and allowing to strongly optimize classic productive processes. The agriculture field is also affected by these technological advances, resulting in better water and fertilizers' usage and so huge improvements of both quality and yield of the crops. In this manuscript, the development of an IoT-based smart traceability and farm management system is described, which calibrates the irrigations and fertigation operations as a function of crop typology, growth phase, soil and environment parameters and weather information; a suitable software architecture was developed to support the system decision-making process, also based on data collected on-field by a properly designed solar-powered wireless sensor network (WSN). The WSN nodes were realized by using the ESP8266 NodeMCU module exploiting its microcontroller functionalities and Wi-Fi connectivity. Thanks to a properly sized solar power supply system and an optimized scheduling scheme, a long node autonomy was guaranteed, as experimentally verified by its power consumption measures, thus reducing WSN maintenance. In addition, a literature analysis on the most used wireless technologies for agri-food products' traceability is reported, together with the design and testing of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) low-cost sensor tag to be applied into the containers of agri-food products, just collected from the fields or already processed, to monitor the main parameters indicative of any failure or spoiling over time along the supply chain. A mobile application was developed for monitoring the tracking information and storing conditions of the agri-food products. Test results in real-operative scenarios demonstrate the proper operation of the BLE smart tag prototype and tracking system., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

With the constant growth of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, allowing them to interact transparently has become a major issue for both the research and the software development communities. In this paper we propose a novel approach that builds semantically interoperable ecosystems of IoT devices. The approach provides a SPARQL query-based mechanism to transparently discover and access IoT devices that publish heterogeneous data. The approach was evaluated in order to prove that it provides complete and correct answers without affecting the response time and that it scales linearly in large ecosystems.

This paper presents a duty cycle-based, dual-mode simultaneous wireless information and power transceiver (SWIPT) for Internet of Things (IoT) devices in which a sensor node monitors the received power and adaptively controls the single-tone or multitone communication mode. An adaptive power-splitting (PS) ratio control scheme distributes the received radio frequency (RF) energy between the energy harvesting (EH) path and the information decoding (ID) path. The proposed SWIPT enables the self-powering of an ID transceiver above 20 dBm input power, leading to a battery-free network. The optimized PS ratio of 0.44 enables it to provide sufficient harvested energy for self-powering and energy-neutral operation of the ID transceiver. The ID transceiver can demodulate the amplitude-shift keying (ASK) and the binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals. Moreover, for low-input power level, a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) scheme based on multitone is also proposed for demodulation of the information-carrying RF signals. Due to the limited power, information is transmitted in uplink by backscatter modulation instead of RF signaling. To validate our proposed SWIPT architecture, a SWIPT printed circuit board (PCB) was designed with a multitone SWIPT board at 900 MHz. The demodulation of multitone by PAPR was verified separately on the PCB. Results showed the measured sensitivity of the SWIPT to be -7 dBm, and the measured peak power efficiency of the RF energy harvester was 69% at 20 dBm input power level. The power consumption of the injection-locked oscillator (ILO)-based phase detection path was 13.6 mW, and it could be supplied from the EH path when the input power level was high. The ID path could demodulate 4-ASK- and BPSK-modulated signals at the same time, thus receiving 3 bits from the demodulation process. Maximum data rate of 4 Mbps was achieved in the measurement.

In this paper, we present an implementation work of sensing and actuation capabilities for IoT devices using the oneM2M standard-based platforms. We mainly focus on the heterogeneity of the hardware interfaces employed in IoT devices. For IoT devices (i.e., Internet-connected embedded systems) to perform sensing and actuation capabilities in a standardized manner, a well-designed middleware solution will be a crucial part of IoT platform. Accordingly, we propose an oneM2M standard-based IoT platform (called nCube) incorporated with a set of tiny middleware programs (called TAS) responsible for translating sensing values and actuation commands into oneM2M-defined resources accessible in Web-based applications. All the source codes for the oneM2M middleware platform and smartphone application are available for free in the GitHub repositories. The full details on the implementation work and open-source contributions are described.

Cognitive capabilities are indispensable for the Internet of Things (IoT) not only to equip them with learning, thinking, and decision-making capabilities but also to cater to their unprecedented huge spectrum requirements due to their gigantic numbers and heterogeneity. Therefore, in this paper, a novel unified channel management framework (CMF) is introduced for cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs), which comprises an (1) opportunity detector (ODR), (2) opportunity scheduler (OSR), and (3) opportunity ranker (ORR) to specifically address the immense and diverse spectrum requirements of CRSN-aided IoT. The unified CMF is unique for its type as it covers all three angles of spectrum management. The ODR is a double threshold based multichannel spectrum sensor that allows an IoT device to concurrently sense multiple channels to maximize spectrum opportunities. OSR is an integer linear programming (ILP) based channel allocation mechanism that assigns channels to heterogeneous IoT devices based on their minimal quality of service (QoS) requirements. ORR collects feedback from IoT devices about their transmission experience and generates special channel-sensing order (CSO) for each IoT device based on the data rate and idle-time probabilities. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CMF outperforms the existing ones in terms of collision probability, detection probability, blocking probability, idle-time probability, and data rate.