IoTCrawler: Challenges and Solutions for Searching the Internet of Things.

Due to the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and consequently, the availability of more and more IoT data sources, mechanisms for searching and integrating IoT data sources become essential to leverage all relevant data for improving processes and services. This paper presents the IoT search framework IoTCrawler. The IoTCrawler framework is not only another IoT framework, it is a system of systems which connects existing solutions to offer interoperability and to overcome data fragmentation. In addition to its domain-independent design, IoTCrawler features a layered approach, offering solutions for crawling, indexing and searching IoT data sources, while ensuring privacy and security, adaptivity and reliability. The concept is proven by addressing a list of requirements defined for searching the IoT and an extensive evaluation. In addition, real world use cases showcase the applicability of the framework and provide examples of how it can be instantiated for new scenarios.

IoT-Stream: A Lightweight Ontology for Internet of Things Data Streams and Its Use with Data Analytics and Event Detection Services.

With the proliferation of sensors and IoT technologies, stream data are increasingly stored and analyzed, but rarely combined, due to the heterogeneity of sources and technologies. Semantics are increasingly used to share sensory data, but not so much for annotating stream data. Semantic models for stream annotation are scarce, as generally semantics are heavy to process and not ideal for Internet of things (IoT) environments, where the data are frequently updated. We present a light model to semantically annotate streams, IoT-Stream. It takes advantage of common knowledge sharing of the semantics, but keeping the inferences and queries simple. Furthermore, we present a system architecture to demonstrate the adoption the semantic model, and provide examples of instantiation of the system for different use cases. The system architecture is based on commonly used architectures in the field of IoT, such as web services, microservices and middleware. Our system approach includes the semantic annotations that take place in the pipeline of IoT services and sensory data analytics. It includes modules needed to annotate, consume, and query data annotated with IoT-Stream. In addition to this, we present tools that could be used in conjunction to the IoT-Stream model and facilitate the use of semantics in IoT.

Machine learning methods for detecting urinary tract infection and analysing daily living activities in people with dementia.

Dementia is a neurological and cognitive condition that affects millions of people around the world. At any given time in the United Kingdom, 1 in 4 hospital beds are occupied by a person with dementia, while about 22% of these hospital admissions are due to preventable causes. In this paper we discuss using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and in-home sensory devices in combination with machine learning techniques to monitor health and well-being of people with dementia. This will allow us to provide more effective and preventative care and reduce preventable hospital admissions. One of the unique aspects of this work is combining environmental data with physiological data collected via low cost in-home sensory devices to extract actionable information regarding the health and well-being of people with dementia in their own home environment. We have worked with clinicians to design our machine learning algorithms where we focused on developing solutions for real-world settings. In our solutions, we avoid generating too many alerts/alarms to prevent increasing the monitoring and support workload. We have designed an algorithm to detect Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) which is one of the top five reasons of hospital admissions for people with dementia (around 9% of hospital admissions for people with dementia in the UK). To develop the UTI detection algorithm, we have used a Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) technique to extract latent factors from raw observation and use them for clustering and identifying the possible UTI cases. In addition, we have designed an algorithm for detecting changes in activity patterns to identify early symptoms of cognitive decline or health decline in order to provide personalised and preventative care services. For this purpose, we have used an Isolation Forest (iForest) technique to create a holistic view of the daily activity patterns. This paper describes the algorithms and discusses the evaluation of the work using a large set of real-world data collected from a trial with people with dementia and their caregivers.

Federation of Internet of Things Testbeds for the Realization of a Semantically-Enabled Multi-Domain Data Marketplace.

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention from the research and innovation community for a number of years already. One of the key drivers for this hype towards the IoT is its applicability to a plethora of different application domains. However, infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of IoT solutions are scarce. Being able to test and assess the behavior and the performance of any piece of technology (i.e., protocol, algorithm, application, service, etc.) under real-world circumstances is of utmost importance to increase the acceptance and reduce the time to market of these innovative developments. This paper describes the federation of eleven IoT deployments from heterogeneous application domains (e.g., smart cities, maritime, smart building, crowd-sensing, smart grid, etc.) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day. The paper summarizes the resources that are made available through a cloud-based platform. The main contributions from this paper are twofold. In the one hand, the insightful summary of the federated data resources are relevant to the experimenters that might be seeking for an experimental infrastructure to assess their innovations. On the other hand, the identification of the challenges met during the testbed integration process, as well as the mitigation strategies that have been implemented to face them, are of interest for testbed providers that can be considering to join the federation.

Health management and pattern analysis of daily living activities of people with dementia using in-home sensors and machine learning techniques.

The number of people diagnosed with dementia is expected to rise in the coming years. Given that there is currently no definite cure for dementia and the cost of care for this condition soars dramatically, slowing the decline and maintaining independent living are important goals for supporting people with dementia. This paper discusses a study that is called Technology Integrated Health Management (TIHM). TIHM is a technology assisted monitoring system that uses Internet of Things (IoT) enabled solutions for continuous monitoring of people with dementia in their own homes. We have developed machine learning algorithms to analyse the correlation between environmental data collected by IoT technologies in TIHM in order to monitor and facilitate the physical well-being of people with dementia. The algorithms are developed with different temporal granularity to process the data for long-term and short-term analysis. We extract higher-level activity patterns which are then used to detect any change in patients' routines. We have also developed a hierarchical information fusion approach for detecting agitation, irritability and aggression. We have conducted evaluations using sensory data collected from homes of people with dementia. The proposed techniques are able to recognise agitation and unusual patterns with an accuracy of up to 80%.

A Proof-of-Concept for Semantically Interoperable Federation of IoT Experimentation Facilities.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. The potential of IoT technologies and deployments has been already demonstrated in a number of different application areas, including transport, energy, safety and healthcare. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming application silos. A lightweight data centric integration and combination of these silos presents several challenges that still need to be addressed. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potentiality of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. In this article, a proof-of-concept implementation that federates two different IoT experimentation facilities by means of semantic-based technologies will be described. The specification and design of the implemented system and information models will be described together with the practical details of the developments carried out and its integration with the existing IoT platforms supporting the aforementioned testbeds. Overall, the system described in this paper demonstrates that it is possible to open new horizons in the development of IoT applications and experiments at a global scale, that transcend the (silo) boundaries of individual deployments, based on the semantic interconnection and interoperability of diverse IoT platforms and testbeds.