The world is witnessing the emerging role of Internet of Things (IoT) as a technology that is transforming different industries, global community and its economy. Currently, a plethora of interconnected smart devices have been deployed for diverse pervasive applications and services, and billions more are expected to be connected to the Internet in the near future. The potential benefits of IoT include improved quality of life, convenience, enhanced energy efficiency, and more productivity. Alongside these potential benefits, however, come increased security risks and potential for abuse. Arguably, this is partly because many IoT start-ups and electronics hobbyists lack security expertise, and some established companies do not make security a priority in their designs, and hence they produce IoT devices that are often ill-equipped in terms of security. In this paper, we discuss different IoT application areas, and identify security threats in IoT architecture. We consider security requirements and present typical security threats for each of the application domains. Finally, we present several possible security countermeasures, and introduce the IoT Hardware Platform Security Advisor (IoT-HarPSecA) framework, which is still under development. IoT-HarPSecA is aimed at facilitating the design and prototyping of secure IoT devices.

devices and applications in recent years can be attributed partly to the emergence of several new IoT startup companies and potential applications. While many of these startups offer significant innovations in the IoT, some of them lack security expertise, resulting in the development of ill-equipped IoT devices and applications in terms of security. For example, one of the fundamental problems faced by non-security experts in the IoT space is how to select the right Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithm (LWCA) for a given security requirement. To address this specific problem, an IoT Hardware Platform Security Advisor (IoT-HarPSecA) framework is proposed in this paper. The security framework is aimed at facilitating the choice of specific security algorithms given a set of security goals, hardware specifications, message payload size, application area, and energy requirement. Within the scope of this framework, we develop an easy-to-use tool in C++ that allows users to interact with the IoT-HarPSecA framework. The tool can potentially help non-security experts, such as electronics and computer engineers as well as application developers make informed decisions on selecting the appropriate security algorithms for their various applications. Finally, the paper presents some preliminary results and discussion.

With the growing demand for Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in paradigms such as Smart Homes, the automation of these environments is associated with the increasing need for transducer integration, which has resulted in a need for efficient communication between IoT devices. And for these systems to exchange information, they rely on communication protocols that often lead to incompatibility issues that hinder the implementation of new IoT devices in existing systems. To solve incompatibility problems, standardisation is needed to create a platform that allows compatibility between different devices. To this end, the ISO/IEC/IEEE 1451 standard defines a common interface that allows the integration of new devices in a plug-and-play manner, increasing the flexibility of IoT systems. The IEEE 1451 family of standards offers a solution to reduce the costs of IoT systems and addresses a fundamental barrier to the integration of new systems into existing IoT systems. This will have an impact on many fields covered by the IoT paradigm, such as home automation, which requires the use of sensors and actuators that enable the automation of the defined infrastructure. In this work, two Transducer Interface Module (TIM) systems were developed to monitor comfort parameters in a Smart Home. One of the systems uses an MSP430F5529 to collect data from temperature and light sensors and send this data according to the IEEE 1451 standard to an Arduino Mega 2560 board, with wireless communication via the CC2500 radio transceiver. This data is then sent to the Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP). The other system consists of a Xiao ESP32-C6 microprocessor for collecting data from temperature, pressure, humidity and radiance (light intensity) sensors, which is then sent to the NCAP via Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT).

Internet of Things (IoT) will create the opportunity to develop new types of businesses. Every tangible object, biologic or not, will be identified by a unique address, creating a common network composed by billions of devices. Those devices will have different requirements, creating the necessity of finding new mechanisms to satisfy the needs of all the entities within the network. This is one of the main problems that all the scientific community should address in order to make Internet of Things the Future Internet. Currently, IoT is used in a lot of projects involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensors are generally cheap and small devices able to generate useful information from physical indicators. They can be used on smart home scenarios, or even on healthcare environments, turning sensors into useful devices to accomplish the goals of many use case scenarios. Sensors and other devices with some reasoning capabilities, like smart objects, can be used to create smart environments. The interaction between the objects in those scenarios and humans can be eased by the inclusion of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, IPAs have good reasoning capabilities, improving the assistance they give to their owners. Artificial intelligence (AI), new learning mechanisms, and the evolution assisted in speech technology also contributed to this improvement. The integration of IPAs in IoT scenarios can become a case of great success. IPAs will comprehend the behavior of their owners not only through direct interactions, but also by the interactions they have with other objects in the environment. This may create ubiquitous communication scenarios where humans act as passive elements, being adequately informed of all the aspects of interest that surrounds them. The communication between IPAs and other objects in their surrounding environment may use gateways for traffic forwarding. On ubiquitous environments devices can be mobile or static. For example, in smart home scenarios, objects are generally static, being always on the same position. In mobile health scenarios, objects can move from one place to another. To turn IPAs useful on all types of environments, static and mobile gateways should be developed. On this dissertation, a novel mobile gateway solution for an IPA platform inserted on an IoT context is proposed. A mobile health scenario was chosen. Then, a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is always monitoring a person, giving the real time feedback of his/her health status to another person responsible by him (designated caretaker). On this scenario, a mobile gateway is needed to forward the traffic between the BSN and the IPA of the caretaker. Therefore, the IPA is able to give warnings about the health status of the person under monitoring, in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype, where the more important aspects for IPAs and IoT networks are considered.

The idea of monitoring several types of parameters in various environments has been motivating significant research works in Internet of Things (IoT). This paper presents the design and construction of iSensA, a system for integrating and collecting information from sensors. The solution implements a multi-sensor monitoring system and then expands the monitoring concept to an IoT solution, by employing multi-network access, Web services, database and web and mobile applications for user interaction. iSensA system is highly configurable, enabling several monitoring solutions with different types of sensors. Experiments have been performed on real application scenarios to validate and evaluate our proposition.

In the UK it is estimated the NHS spends almost £100 million every year in unused drugs. In addition, hospital admission costs attributed to patients not taking their prescribed medicine properly was estimated to be between £36m and £197m per year. In the U.S., medication non-adherence is estimated to lead to between $100 and $300 billion of avoidable healthcare costs annually, representing 3–10% of total U.S. healthcare costs. Studies show that improving medication adherence may have a greater influence on the health of the population than the discovery of any new therapy. Effective medicines are available for many conditions and yet patients are non-adherent 50% of the time. This can be critical point in certain disease states, such as asymptomatic conditions like hypertension, where the incidence may approach 80% non-compliance. It is proposed to create a therapeutic adherence monitoring device within a smart blister pack that is coupled to a device with the capacity to collect and send data to a common server. This would allow a clinician to know, with high certainty, if the patient is taking their medication as prescribed and on schedule. This paper gathers information to identify current technology to support integrated monitoring and control of therapeutic adherence.

This dissertation reviews Internet of Things concepts and implementations, state-of-the-art technology with practical examples, as well as data fusion methods applied in different problems. The purpose of this study is to review different data fusion methods and develop a system to provide recognition of human activity that can be applied in day care homes and in hospitals to monitor patients. The system’s objective is to study human activity recognition based on the data recovered by sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. In order to transform this data to useful information and practical results to monitoring patients with accuracy and high performance, two different neural networks were implemented. To conclude, the results from the two different neural networks are compared to each other and compared with systems from other authors. It is hoped this study will inform other authors and developers about the performance of neural networks when managing human activity recognition systems.

This paper studies the performance improvement of the IEEE 802.15.4 non-beacon-enabled mode originated by the inclusion of the Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send (RTS/CTS) handshake mechanism resulting in frame concatenation. Under IEEE 802.15.4 employing RTS/CTS, the backoff procedure is not repeated for each data frame sent but only for each RTS/CTS set. The maximum throughput and minimum delay performance are mathematically derived for both the Chirp Spread Spectrum and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Physical layers for the 2.4 GHz band. Results show that the utilization of RTS/CTS significantly enhances the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 applied to healthcare in terms of bandwidth efficiency.

The current vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to ensure that everything from everywhere is connected to the Internet at all times using Internet Protocol (IP). This idea has the potential of making homes, cities, electric grids, among others, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage. Nevertheless, a number of obstacles still remain to fully realize the IoT vision, with security and privacy among the most critical. Ensuring security and privacy in the IoT is particularly complicated, especially for the resource-constrained devices due to finite energy supply and low computing power. These factors are typically at odds with most of the existing security protocols and schemes proposed for the IoT because of the intensive computational nature of the cryptographic algorithms involved. This paper performs an extensive comparison of previous surveys on the subject, and shows its novelty with respect to the previous work. It describes 9 application domains and presents, in detail, security requirements, system models, threat models along with protocols and technologies for those 9 application areas. The survey also performs an exhaustive examination of some existing mechanisms and approaches proposed in the literature for ensuring security and privacy of IoT devices. Finally, it outlines some open research issues associated with IoT security.

This paper presents a study on how the Internet of Things (IoT) can be applied to the intelligent management of parking lots in the historic area of Covilhã. The aim is to study the parking areas and car parks, the challenges faced when trying to find a parking space and, finally, to apply technologies, such as IoT, to mitigate and solve some of the existing problems. This study can be extrapolated to other mountain towns across Europe, as they have very similar characteristics to Covilhã, such as sloping terrain, narrow streets and old architecture. Ultimately, one of the main objectives of this study is to formulate how, through the use of technologies such as IoT, innovative solutions can be created to solve the current problems of cities, bringing them ever closer to a modern 'Smart City', a city capable of providing intelligent responses to its various users. A Smart City brings together various technologies which, when combined, facilitate the management of various functions such as mobility, energy, parking, transportation and other resources. The case study presented, as mentioned above, is Covilhã, Portugal. This city has an old and historic part, with dilapidated houses, narrow streets, difficult traffic circulation and a shortage of parking, and a new part, with modern buildings and wide streets. Consequently, in the historic part of the city, there are several car parking problems. To reduce this problem, parking silos have been built. However, these lack information on their location, operation and real-time information on how many parking spaces are available at any given time. Thus, combining the concepts of IoT and Smart City, some theoretical and practical proposals for modernization are explored in this article. The study focuses on the Mercado, Sporting Shopping and Pelourinho silos. There is also a proposal to prepare the spaces to prioritize the accommodation of electric cars, as well as making it possible to charge their batteries while they are parked inside the silos. As for the proposed vehicle counting mechanism, it consists of an electronic device equipped with ultrasonic sensors, placed on the roof of the parking lot, to count the free parking spaces. These sensors are then connected to an electronic prototyping platform, in this case an Arduino. This equipment is then able to count the number of vacant spaces and send the corresponding information to be displayed on digital screens, visible from outside the car park. This real-time information can also be sent via the IoT to screens in central areas of the city. In this way, drivers have access to privileged information to make the best decision when parking.