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The Internet of Things (IoT) framework is moving the research community to provide smart systems and solutions aimed at revolutionizing medical sciences and healthcare. Given the extreme diffusion of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), the demand for a solution to early detect neurological symptoms of such diseases strongly arose. According to the medical literature, such early detection can be obtained through the correlation between PD and AD and some external symptoms: the Essential Tremor (ET) and the number of Eye Blinks (EBs). In this paper, which can be considered as an extended version of [1], we present a prototype of wearable smart glasses able to detect the presence of ET of the head and to count the number of EBs at the same time, in a transparent way with respect to the final user. Numerical results demonstrate the reliability of the proposed approach: the proposed algorithms are able to i) correctly recognize the ET with an overall accuracy above 97% and ii) count the number of EBs with an overall error around 9%.

Most factory automation and motion control systems rely on a cyclic approach, where a controller device periodically inquires and sends commands to decentralized I/O peripherals. From a general viewpoint, the shorter the period of the cycle the better the accuracy of the control system. However, reducing the cycle duration implies that more complex (and expensive) solutions have to be adopted. In this paper, an inexpensive computing platform for control applications is described, which consists of a conventional PC equipped with a CUDA-based GPU and an Ethernet interface, and its performance is evaluated. We show that noticeable improvements can be actually obtained, as long as control algorithms can be parallelized effectively.

The importance of safe communications in industrial environments has been steadily increasing over the past years and several special-purpose solutions have been developed to this purpose. However, the prevalent trend nowadays is the adoption of standard transmission technologies to support both safe and non-safe data exchanges over the same medium. This exposes safety-aware protocols to the same security threats experienced in conventional communication networks. This paper deals with some security aspects of a popular safety-oriented communication solution, namely Safe-tyNETp. Its main contribution is showing that safety protocols too suffer from security threats and can even make things simpler in carrying out certain types of attacks such as denial of service (DoS).

The adoption of open-source operating systems for the execution of real-time applications is gaining popularity, even in the networked control systems domain, due to cost and flexibility reasons. However, as opposed to their commercial counterparts, the actual performance level to be expected from them is still little known and may often depend on the kind of real-time extension being used, its configuration, and the overall software load of the system, including best-effort components. In this paper, an open-source EtherCAT master supported by a popular real-time extension for Linux, the RT Patch, is thoroughly evaluated with long-term measurements, which build confidence on the suitability of the proposed approach for real-world applications. Special attention is devoted to the unexpected, adverse effect that some best-effort components, for instance, graphics applications, may have on the overall real-time characteristics of the system. For reference, the proposed approach is also compared with RTAI, a more traditional and well-known real-time extension for Linux already in use for demanding applications.

This paper has the twofold goal of investigating the real-time performance of an EtherCAT master entirely built from open-source components (using Linux and the RT Patch at the operating system level) and assess its ability to support concurrent best-effort tasks without compromising the real-time ones, depending on kernel configuration. This is especially important for the successful adoption of the proposed approach in real-world applications. A hardware-based data acquisition system enables measurements to be taken for long periods of time, and with high resolution and precision. At the same time, this method guarantees that the measurement process does not influence the behavior of the system under test in any way.

The MODBUS protocol on TIA/EIA-485 is a proven fieldbus that provides client-server data exchange between industrial devices with minimal hardware requirements. However, a few aspects of the protocol are not adequate to fulfill the needs of a contemporary distributed embedded system, especially for what concerns address space size, guaranteed bandwidth allocation, and controlled handover between multiple masters. This paper shows how MODBUS can be extended, in a backward-compatible way, to address these shortcomings. The extension is very simple and does not require any additional hardware, hence it is suitable for inexpensive, distributed embedded systems. The proposed extension was implemented with little development effort, starting from a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) protocol stack, for which the source code is readily available.

At present, an increasing number of distributed control systems are based on platforms made up of conventional PCs running open-source real-time operating systems. Often, the need arises in these systems to have networked devices supporting synchronized operations. In this paper, an inexpensive solution is introduced, described, implemented and evaluated that relies on standard software and protocols such as RTAI, RTnet and IEEE 1588. The main goals of this architecture are reducing design and development costs, ensuring adequate synchronization accuracy, and easing the porting of control applications to different H/W and S/W configurations.

The possibility of using Linux as underlying operating system for real-time applications has received considerable attention by industry due to several definite advantages, such as the lack of royalties and the availability of rich and programmer-friendly software development frameworks. In addition, the real-time capabilities of the Linux kernel have recently been enhanced considerably through the development of the Linux RT Patch. This paper evaluates the real-time characteristics of the Linux kernel with the RT Patch installed, in order to help the designer understand what sort of real-time performance is to be expected, and decide whether it is adequate or not for a given class of applications.

The steady increase in performance of the processors commonly adopted for real-time systems leads to the opportunity of hosting diverse classes of tasks on the same hardware, for example real-time control tasks and a man-machine interface, each one under the control of its own operating system. This paper describes how an asymmetric virtualisation layer has been realised on top of the ARM TrustZone security extension, in order to support the concurrent execution of both a real-time and a general purpose operating system on the same processor. The resulting implementation has a small execution time overhead and does not require any modification to the general purpose operating system.