IoT Systems for Healthy and Safe Life Environments

The past two years have been sadly marked by the worldwide spread of the SARS-Cov-19 pandemic. The first line of defense against this and other pandemic threats is to respect interpersonal distances, use masks, and sanitize hands, air, and objects. Some of these countermeasures are becoming part of our daily lives, as they are now considered good practices to reduce the risk of infection and contagion. In this context, we present Safe Place, a modular system enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) that is designed to improve the safety and healthiness of living environments. This system combines several sensors and actuators produced by different vendors with self-regulating procedures and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to limit the spread of viruses and other pathogens, and increase the quality and comfort offered to people while minimizing the energy consumption.We discuss the main objectives of the system and its implementation, showing preliminary results that assess its potentials in enhancing the conditions of living and working spaces. © 2022 IEEE.

Trade show visitors and key technological trends: from a literature review to a conceptual framework

Purpose: This study proposes a literature review and, based on the findings, the authors develop a conceptual framework, attempting to explain how technology may influence visitor behavior and eventually trade show performance. Design/methodology/approach: The present research explores the role of visitors in the trade show context. The analysis specifically focuses on the variables that influence visitors’ participation at business-to-business trade shows and how their satisfaction and perception can be related to exhibition performance. The authors also take into consideration technological trends that prior to COVID-19 pandemics were slowly emerging in the trade show industry. Findings: The findings highlight a continuity between pre-, at and postexhibition phases. Visitors’ behavior represents a signal of how a trade show is perceived as postexhibition purchases and next visit emerge as signals of an exhibition evaluation in relation to visitors’ perception. Besides being urgent tools for the continuity of the sector due to the pandemics, emerging technological trends can be key elements in understanding visitors’ behavior and in boosting their interest and loyalty toward trade shows. Originality/value: The paper proposes a conceptual model including top notch and innovative technological trends to improve the understandment of visitors’ behavior. Both practitioners in companies and academics might find the study useful, given the digital uplift generated by the pandemics. © 2022, Veronica Vitali, Claudia Bazzani, Annamaria Gimigliano, Marco Cristani, Diego Begalli and Gloria Menegaz.

The Visual Social Distancing Problem

One of the main and most effective measures to contain the recent viral outbreak is the maintenance of the so-called Social Distancing (SD). To comply with this constraint, governments are adopting restrictions over the minimum inter-personal distance between people. Given this actual scenario, it is crucial to massively measure the compliance to such physical constraint in our life, in order to figure out the reasons of the possible breaks of such distance limitations, and understand if this implies a potential threat. To this end, we introduce the Visual Social Distancing (VSD) problem, defined as the automatic estimation of the inter-personal distance from an image, and the characterization of related people aggregations. VSD is pivotal for a non-invasive analysis to whether people comply with the SD restriction, and to provide statistics about the level of safety of specific areas whenever this constraint is violated. We first point out that measuring VSD is not only a geometrical problem, but it also implies a deeper understanding of the social behaviour in the scene. The aim is to truly detect potentially dangerous situations while avoiding false alarms (e.g., a family with children or relatives, an elder with their caregivers), all of this by complying with current privacy policies. We then discuss how VSD relates with previous literature in Social Signal Processing and indicate a path to research new Computer Vision methods that can possibly provide a solution to such problem. We conclude with future challenges related to the effectiveness of VSD systems, ethical implications and future application scenarios.