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Low latency and high availability of resources are essential characteristics to guarantee the quality of services in health systems. Hospital systems must be efficient to prevent loss of human life. Smart hospitals promise a health revolution by capturing and transmitting patient data to doctors in real-time via a wireless sensor network. However, there is a significant difficulty in assessing the performance and availability of such systems in real contexts due to failures not being tolerated and high implementation costs. This paper adopts analytical models to assess the performance and availability of intelligent hospital systems without having to invest in real equipment beforehand. Two Stochastic Petri Net models were proposed to represent intelligent hospital architectures. One model is used to assess performance, and another to assess availability. The models are pretty parametric, making it possible to calibrate the resources, service times, times between failures, and times between repairs. The availability model, for example, allows you to define 48 parameters, allowing you to evaluate a large number of scenarios. The analysis showed that the arrival rate in the performance model is an impacting parameter. It was possible to observe the close relationship between MRT, resource utilization, and discard rate in different scenarios, especially for high arrival rates. Three scenarios were explored considering the second model. The highest availability results were observed in scenario A, composed of server redundancy (local and remote). Such scenario—with redundancy—presented an availability of 99.9199%, that is, 7.01 h/year of inactivity. In addition, this work presents a sensitivity analysis that identifies the most critical components of the architecture. Therefore, this work can help hospital system administrators plan more optimized architectures according to their needs.

The advent of internet of things has opened the opportunities for people with disabilities, increased their inclusion and productivity in their living society. Most of the invented smart sensing devices including the wearable ones for users with speech impairments are expensive and not affordable for patients in the low income countries such as Egypt. Morse Glasses is a cost efficient wearable device based on IoT technology and a modified Morse code that tracks the patient’s eyes blinks and translates it into a generated speech. A sequence of Morse encoded alphabets/sentences along with the frequently used ones is displayed and heard on any android supported device that is installed Morse Glasses mobile application. With cost less than 30$, patients with motor neuron diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) can communicate easily with the others, express their needs and simply live their life normally.

The fast development in IoT and Cloud technologies has propelled the emergence of a variety of computing paradigms, among which Fog and Edge computing are salient computing technologies. Such new paradigms are opening up new opportunities to implement novel application scenarios, not possible before, by supporting features of mobility, edge intelligence and end-user support. This, however, comes with new computing challenges. One such challenge is the allocation of applications to Fog and Edge nodes. Indeed, for some application scenarios larger computing capacity might be needed. Therefore, due to co-existence of computing devices of different computing granularity, techniques for grouping up and clustering resources into virtual nodes of larger computing capacity are required. In this paper we present some clustering techniques for creating virtual computing nodes from Fog/Edge nodes by combining semantic description of resources with semantic clustering techniques. Then, we use such clusters for optimal allocation (via heuristics and Liner Programming) of applications to virtual computing nodes. Simulation results are reported to support the feasibility of the model and efficacy of the proposed approach. First Fit Heuristic Algorithm (FFHA) outperformed ILP method for medium and large size instances. Likewise, FFHA performed more consistently than ILP on various experimental setting. Finally, the results showed that the proposed clustering techniques deliver relatively fast response times, while enabling the service of a larger number of applications, with more demanding requirements

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a disruptive technology for the current and future of computing and communication. IoT is characterized by a variety of heterogeneous technologies and devices able to be connected to the Internet. Current and future research and development efforts aim at adding artificial intelligence to IoT systems, enabling devices to become smart and thus make autonomous decisions individually or collectively. Additionally, such smart devices have the ability to interact not only with other smart devices but also with humans. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the usability of the artificial intelligence in the IoT paradigm. To achieve the approach, a system called smart-IoT is built based on artificial neural networks, namely, neural networks have been learned by back-propagation algorithm. The system is tested using mobile devices under Android as smart objects. Experiments with neural networks were carried on certain services (such as auto set alarms for a specific event, or estimating the time to return home). These experiments showed the feasibility of embedding neural networks techniques into the IoT system. The approach allows also for easy adding of new services, which in turn means that smart IoT is a modular and full-fledged system.

This paper presents an extensive overview of the challenges that arise when testing large IoT applications at the system level. In order do that we start from analyzing behavior of local entities such as IoT devices or people interacting with the IoT system. The interactions of these local entities eventually leads to an emergent behavior. Both the emergent behavior and the local behavior need to be taken into account when testing IoT systems. Therefore, we present a novel hybrid simulation based testing approach that is able to effectively facilitate interactions of these local entities. Furthermore, we introduce various solutions to the challenges that arise when implementing this hybrid methodology. These challenges are mainly related to the IoT development pipeline, synchronization between real-life and simulation environment and the scalability constraints of modern simulation techniques.

The involvement of numerous devices and data sources in the current form of Web leads to the collection of vast volumes of data. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) enhances the devices to act autonomously and transforms them into information and knowledge producers. The vast infrastructure of the Web/IoT becomes the basis for producing data either in a structured or in an unstructured way. In this paper, we focus on a distributed scheme for securing the quality of data as collected and stored in multiple partitions. A high quality is achieved through the adoption of a model that identifies any change in the accuracy of the collected data. The proposed scheme determines if the incoming data negatively affect the accuracy of the already present datasets and when this is the case, it excludes them from further processing. We are based on a scheme that also identifies the appropriate partition where the incoming data should be allocated. We describe the proposed scheme and present simulation and comparison results that give insights on the pros and cons of our solution.