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The remote monitoring of vital signs and healthcare provision has become an urgent necessity due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. Blood oxygen level, heart rate, and body temperature data are crucial for managing the disease and ensuring timely medical care. This study proposes a low-cost wearable device employing non-contact sensors to monitor, process, and visualize critical variables, focusing on body temperature measurement as a key health indicator. The wearable device developed offers a non-invasive and continuous method to gather wrist and forehead temperature data. However, since there is a discrepancy between wrist and actual forehead temperature, this study incorporates statistical methods and machine learning to estimate the core forehead temperature from the wrist. This research collects 2130 samples from 30 volunteers, and both the statistical least squares method and machine learning via linear regression are applied to analyze these data. It is observed that all models achieve a significant fit, but the third-degree polynomial model stands out in both approaches. It achieves an R 2 value of 0.9769 in the statistical analysis and 0.9791 in machine learning.

Within Industry 4.0, drones appear as intelligent devices that have brought a new range of innovative applications to the industrial sector. The required knowledge and skills to manage and appropriate these technological devices are not being developed in most universities. This paper presents an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based smart educational mechatronics system that makes use of a motion capture (MoCap) laboratory and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to teach UAV knowledge and skills, within the Educational Mechatronics Conceptual Framework (EMCF). The macro-process learning construction of the EMCF includes concrete, graphic, and abstract levels. The system comprises a DJI Phantom 4, a MoCap laboratory giving the drone location, a Simulink drone model, and an embedded system for performing the HIL simulation. The smart educational mechatronics system strengthens the assimilation of the UAV waypoint navigation concept and the capacity for drone flight since it permits the validation of the physical drone model and testing of the trajectory tracking control. Moreover, it opens up a new range of possibilities in terms of knowledge construction through best practices, activities, and tasks, enriching the university courses.

Industry 4.0 involves various areas of engineering such as advanced robotics, Internet of Things, simulation, and augmented reality, which are focused on the development of smart factories. The present work presents the design and application of the methodology for the development of augmented reality applications (MeDARA) using a concrete, pictorial, and abstract approach with the intention of promoting the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the students within the conceptual framework of educational mechatronics (EMCF). The flight of a drone is presented as a case study, where the concrete level involves the manipulation of the drone in a simulation; the graphic level requires the elaboration of an experiential storyboard that shows the scenes of the student's interaction with the drone in the concrete level; and finally, the abstract level involves the planning of user stories and acceptance criteria, the computer design of the drone, the mock-ups of the application, the coding in Unity and Android Studio, and its integration to perform unit and acceptance tests. Finally, evidence of the tests is shown to demonstrate the results of the application of the MeDARA.

The educational sector has made extraordinary efforts to neutralize the impact of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, forcing teachers, scholars, and academic personnel to change the way education is delivered by developing creative and technological solutions to improve the landscape for education. The Internet of Things (IoT) is crucial for the educational transition to digital and virtual environments. This paper presents the integration of IoT technology in the Two-Dimensional Cartesian Coordinate System Educational Toolkit (2D-CACSET), to transform it into MEIoT 2D-CACSET; which includes educational mechatronics and the IoT. The Educational Mechatronics Conceptual Framework (EMCF) is extended to consider the virtual environment, enabling knowledge construction in virtual concrete, virtual graphic, and virtual abstract levels. Hence, the students acquire this knowledge from a remote location to apply it further down their career path. Three instructional designs are designed for this work using the MEIoT 2D-CACSET to learn about coordinate axes, quadrants, and a point in the 2D Coordinate Cartesian System. This work is intended to provide an IoT educational technology to offer an adequate response to the educational system's current context.

Engineering education benefits from the application of modern technology, allowing students to learn essential Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) related concepts through hands-on experiences. Robotic kits have been used as an innovative tool in some educational fields, being readily accepted and adopted. However, most of the time, such kits' knowledge level requires understanding basic concepts that are not always appropriate for the student. A critical concept in engineering is the Cartesian Coordinate System (CCS), an essential tool for every engineering, from graphing functions to data analysis in robotics and control applications and beyond. This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel Two-Dimensional Cartesian Coordinate System Educational Toolkit (2D-CACSET) to teach the two-dimensional representations as the first step to construct spatial thinking. This innovative educational toolkit is based on real-time location systems using Ultra-Wide Band technology. It comprises a workbench, four Anchors pinpointing X+, X-, Y+, Y- axes, seven Tags representing points in the plane, one listener connected to a PC collecting the position of the Tags, and a Graphical User Interface displaying these positions. The Educational Mechatronics Conceptual Framework (EMCF) enables constructing knowledge in concrete, graphic, and abstract levels. Hence, the students acquire this knowledge to apply it further down their career path. For this paper, three instructional designs were designed using the 2D-CACSET and the EMCF to learn about coordinate axes, quadrants, and a point in the CCS.

As the development of systems in smart homes is increasing, it is of ever-increasing importance to have data, which artificial intelligence methods and techniques can apply to recognize activities and patterns or to detect anomalies, with the aim of reducing energy consumption in the main home domestic services, and to offer users an alternative in the management of these resources. This paper describes the design and implementation of a platform based on the internet of things and a cloud environment that allows the user to remotely control and monitor Wi-Fi wireless e-switch in a home through a mobile application. This platform is intended to represent the first step in transforming a home into a smart home, and it allows the collection and storage of the e-switch information, which can be used for further processing and analysis.

Due to the emergence of the coronavirus disease (COVID 19), education systems in most countries have adapted and quickly changed their teaching strategy to online teaching. This paper presents the design and implementation of a novel Internet of Things (IoT) device, called MEIoT weather station, which incorporates an exogenous disturbance input, within the National Digital Observatory of Smart Environments (OBNiSE) architecture. The exogenous disturbance input involves a wind blower based on a DC brushless motor. It can be controlled, via Node-RED platform, manually through a sliding bar, or automatically via different predefined profile functions, modifying the wind speed and the wind vane sensor variables. An application to Engineering Education is presented with a case study that includes the instructional design for the least-squares regression topic for linear, quadratic, and cubic approximations within the Educational Mechatronics Conceptual Framework (EMCF) to show the relevance of this proposal. This work's main contribution to the state-of-the-art is to turn a weather monitoring system into a hybrid hands-on learning approach thanks to the integrated exogenous disturbance input.

This paper presents the design and development of an IoT device, called MEIoT weather station, which combines the Educational Mechatronics and IoT to develop the required knowledge and skills for Industry 4.0. MEIoT weather station connects to the internet, measures eight weather variables, and upload the sensed data to the cloud. The MEIoT weather station is the first device working with the IoT architecture of the National Digital Observatory of Intelligent Environments. In addition, an IoT open platform, GUI-MEIoT, serves as a graphic user interface. GUI-MEIoT is used to visualize the real-time data of the weather variables, it also shows the historical data collected, and allows to export them to a csv file. Finally, an OBNiSE architecture application to Engineering Education is presented with a dynamic system case of study that includes the instructional design carried out within the Educational Mechatronics Conceptual Framework (EMCF) to show the relevance of this proposal. This work main contribution to the state of art is the design and integration of the OBNiSE architecture within the EMCF offering the possibility to add more IoT devices for several smart domains such as smart campus, smart cities, smart people and smart industries., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

A real-time implementation of a control scheme for a multirotor, based on angular velocity sensors for the actuators, is presented. The control scheme is composed of two loops: an inner loop for the actuators and an outer loop for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV control algorithm is designed by means of the backstepping technique and a robust sliding mode differentiator, and the actuator control strategy is based on a standard proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. A robust exact differentiator, based on high order sliding modes, is used to estimate the complex derivatives present in the proposed control law. As the measurements of the propeller's angular velocities are required for the control law, velocity sensors are mounted in the axles of the rotors to retrieve them and a signal conditioning stage is implemented. In addition, dynamical models for the actuators of the aircraft were calculated by means of transfer functions obtained via experimental measurements in a test bench developed for this purpose. This test bench permits to characterize the parameters of the transfer functions by comparing the forces computed using the nominal parameter to the measured forces. To this end, it is assumed that the loads in the actuators of the vehicle are insignificant during flight. The effectiveness of the proposed sensor, its signal conditioning, and the overall control scheme are validated by means of simulation results and real-time experiments.

Humanity is currently experiencing one of the short periods of transition thanks to novel sensing solutions for smart cities that bring the future to today. Overpopulation of cities demands the development of solid strategic plannings that uses infrastructure, innovation, and technology to adapt to rapid changes. To improve mobility in cities with a larger and larger vehicle fleet, a novel sensing solution that is the cornerstone of a smart parking system, the smart vehicular presence sensor (SPIN-V, in its Spanish abbreviation), is presented. The SPIN-V is composed of a small single-board computer, distance sensor, camera, LED indicator, buzzer, and battery and devoted to obtain the status of a parking space. This smart mobility project involves three main elements, namely the SPIN-V, a mobile application, and a monitoring center, working together to monitor, control, process, and display the parking space information in real-time to the drivers. In addition, the design and implementation of the three elements of the complete architecture are presented.