Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging domain that promises ubiquitous connection to the Internet, turning common objects into connected devices. The IoT paradigm is changing the way people interact with things around them. It paves the way for creating pervasively connected infrastructures to support innovative services and promises better flexibility and efficiency. Such advantages are attractive not only for consumer applications, but also for the industrial domain. Over the last few years, we have been witnessing the IoT paradigm making its way into the industry marketplace with purposely designed solutions. In this paper, we clarify the concepts of IoT, Industrial IoT, and Industry 4.0. We highlight the opportunities brought in by this paradigm shift as well as the challenges for its realization. In particular, we focus on the challenges associated with the need of energy efficiency, real-time performance, coexistence, interoperability, and security and privacy. We also provide a systematic overview of the state-of-the-art research efforts and potential research directions to solve Industrial IoT challenges.

Industrial Internet of Things: Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions

Wireless sensor networks for healthcare: A survey

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In these networks various sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. The sensors of a WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in the hospital. This paper offers a survey of the concept of Wireless Body Area Networks. First, we focus on some applications with special interest in patient monitoring. Then the communication in a WBAN and its positioning between the different technologies is discussed. An overview of the current research on the physical layer, existing MAC and network protocols is given. Further, cross layer and quality of service is discussed. As WBANs are placed on the human body and often transport private data, security is also considered. An overview of current and past projects is given. Finally, the open research issues and challenges are pointed out.

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A survey on wireless body area networks

Exploiting smart e-Health gateways at the edge of healthcare Internet-of-Things

Life expectancy in most countries has been increasing continually over the several few decades thanks to significant improvements in medicine, public health, as well as personal and environmental hygiene. However, increased life expectancy combined with falling birth rates are expected to engender a large aging demographic in the near future that would impose significant burdens on the socio-economic structure of these countries. Therefore, it is essential to develop cost-effective, easy-to-use systems for the sake of elderly healthcare and well-being. Remote health monitoring, based on non-invasive and wearable sensors, actuators and modern communication and information technologies offers an efficient and cost-effective solution that allows the elderly to continue to live in their comfortable home environment instead of expensive healthcare facilities. These systems will also allow healthcare personnel to monitor important physiological signs of their patients in real time, assess health conditions and provide feedback from distant facilities. In this paper, we have presented and compared several low-cost and non-invasive health and activity monitoring systems that were reported in recent years. A survey on textile-based sensors that can potentially be used in wearable systems is also presented. Finally, compatibility of several communication technologies as well as future perspectives and research challenges in remote monitoring systems will be discussed.

Wearable Sensors for Remote Health Monitoring.

With the increasing number senior citizens, E-health is targeted for home use with the special requirements of being usable in everyday life and low cost. A wireless sensor network application is proposed here for 24 hour constant monitoring without disturbing daily activities of elderly people and their caretakers. In the system proposed, both fixed and body (mobile) sensors are used. Since not every elder likes to have a sensor board attached to him/her, and in many cases, he/she may not carry the sensor; the home sensor network independently would have the ability to monitor the health status and living environment based on the multisensor data analysis and fusion. A mixed positioning algorithm is proposed to determine where the elderly person is. The purpose of the positioning is to help the system to determine the person's activities and further to make decisions about his/her health status. The system could take care of two types of the basic needs of an elderly person: everyday needs as abnormal events and emergency alarms to doctors and caretakers through telephone, SMS and e-mail, and day to day requirements such as taking of medicine, having lunch, turn off the microwave oven, and so on. At same time, the system is sensitive to security and privacy issues.

Wireless sensor network based E-health system ¿ implementation and experimental results

As more and more wireless devices use the 2.4 GHz radio spectrum, the coexistence of 2.4 GHz wireless devices operating in one place has become a hot topic. With low transmit power, the widely deployed IEEE 802.15.4-based networks are easily interfered with by other 2.4 GHz wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.11. IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless networks have paid great attention to the coexistence between themselves and with other non-IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks. This problem has been further promoted by two new industry wireless standards, WirelessHART and ISA100, to meet special industry requirements. This paper surveys the studies on the coexistence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4-based networks following the general analysis method of “question-analysis-solution.” Based on the survey study, we discuss about some open research issues and developments in this field.

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Wireless Coexistence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4-based Networks: A Survey

The purpose of this project is to integrate the technologies of wireless sensor networks and public communication networks to construct a healthcare system for senior citizens at home without interfering their daily activities. This system provides 4 main functionalities, including indoor monitoring, outdoor monitoring, activity and health state decision, emergency decision and alarm. JTH has developed a prototype of wireless sensor networks, an interconnection platform and a service management platform to support large scale data interconnections and real-time activity and health state reports to related persons (e.g. doctors or nurses, elder-self, elders’ relatives) via all popular communication approaches, such as automatic voice telephone call, SMS or Email etc. In this paper, the system functions and implementation approaches are introduced. A series of experiments results shows that the system performs high validity and reliability.

An Elderly Health Care System Using Wireless Sensor Networks at Home

Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) have the potential to contribute significantly in areas such as cable replacement, mobility, flexibility, and cost reduction. Nevertheless, the industrial environment that the IWSNs operate in is very challenging because of dust, heat, water, electromagnetic interference, and interference from other wireless devices, which make it difficult for current IWSNs to guarantee reliable real-time communication. In this paper, we present a novel method based on the segmented slot assignment, fast slot competition, and free node concept that will improve the reliability and real-time communication significantly so that more advanced applications can be enabled. The main purpose of the algorithms is to improve the retransmission efficiency for time-division-multiple-access-based multihop IWSNs by using limited shared slot resources more efficiently. More importantly, the proposed algorithms support efficient slot rescheduling caused by link or node failure. We evaluate the proposed methods by using simulations and a real implementation targeting monitoring of welder machines. Our obtained results show that the proposed method outperforms the first published and most widely used IWSN standard called WirelessHART.

Assignment of Segmented Slots Enabling Reliable Real-Time Transmission in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in health care system has yielded a tremendous effort in recent years. However, in most of these researches, tasks like sensor data processing, health state decisions making and emergency messages sending are completed by a remote server. Transmitting and handing with a large scale of data from body sensors and home sensors consume a lot of communication resource, bring a burden to the remote server and delay the decision time and notification time. In this paper, we present a prototype of a smart gateway that we have implemented. This gateway is an interconnection and services management platform especially for WSN health care systems at home environment. By building a bridge between a WSN and public communication networks, and being compatible with an on-board data decision system and a lightweight database, our smart gateway system is enabled to make patients' health state decisions in low-power and low-cost embedded system and get faster response time o the emergencies. We have also designed the communication protocols between WSN, gateway and remote servers. Additionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi and GSM/GPRS communication module are integrated into the smart gateway in order to report and notify information to care-givers. We have conducted experiments on the proposed smart gateway by performing it together with a wireless home e-health care sensor network. The results show that the smart gateway design is feasible and has low latency.

Youzhi Xu

Papers

Wireless sensor network based E-health system ¿ implementation and experimental results

Wireless Coexistence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4-based Networks: A Survey

An Elderly Health Care System Using Wireless Sensor Networks at Home

Assignment of Segmented Slots Enabling Reliable Real-Time Transmission in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

A Smart Gateway for Health Care System Using Wireless Sensor Network