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The idea of Industry 4.0 includes the concept of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that is the possibility for industrial devices to have Internet connection and share data. Huge amount of data are stored and analyzed in the Cloud to extract meaningful information to be sold as "services". Today, many Industry 4.0 scenarios do not require a short latency between data collection and output...
Internet of Things (loT) aims at collecting data from billions of devices connected altogether. Despite there is no one technology able to cope with all possible scenarios, LPWAN solutions are emerging as viable technologies for implementing private, low-cost cellular like wireless networks. Distributed systems could leverage this approach as a driving technology for services as smart environment...
Causal relationship between physical activity and prevention of several diseases has been known for some time. Recently, attempts to quantify dose-response relationship between physical activity and health show that automatic tracking and quantification of the exercise efforts not only help in motivating people but improve health conditions as well. However, no commercial devices are available for...
Traditional healthcare solutions oblige patients to stay in hospital; bio-signal monitoring and treatment dosing require the presence of specialized personnel. In turn, this scenario implies high-cost, especially for chronic diseases or fragile people surveillance. Wearable sensor-based healthcare solutions may be an effective approach for lowering costs, since they offer good performance and can...
Metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors show a resistive value varying in a wide range, from hundreds of kilohms up to tens of gigohms. For this reason, oscillating circuits are often used to interface these sensors. Simple oscillators need a measuring time which is directly proportional to the resistive value; when large resistive value (gigohms) occur, the output updating time is on the order of seconds....
LF and VLF (very low frequency) wireless links have long been used to perform time and frequency dissemination. Indeed, several standard time services exploiting (V)LF signaling are continuously transmitting in many locations around the world, despite they face the competition from the Global Positioning System (GPS), which offers an higher clock synchronization accuracy. In fact, (V)LF signaling...
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly deployed in office blocks, residential areas and also industrial locations, thanks to advantages in terms of flexibility and scalability. Nowadays available wireless fieldbuses are widely adopted for process monitoring and offer performance comparable with the wired counterparts, despite they still are more sensitive to interference from external sources...
The wider and wider availability of powerful, low-cost mobile devices (e.g., smartphones or tablets) is deeply changing healthcare, so that the mHealth term has been coined. The announcement of healthcare projects by market big players as Apple and Samsung confirms this trend. In particular, the opportunity to collect reliable patient data automatically allows to enhance patient/user self-management...
Despite the increasing adoption of smart meters, especially for electrical power measurements, a very large number of utility inspectors manually execute readings of legacy analog meters (e.g., for gas or water utilities). Unfortunately, manual data collection generates a lot of paperworks and is clearly error prone. In this work, authors suggest the adoption of smartglasses to automatize this process...
The continuous monitoring of patients' vital parameters during recovery, essential in critical situations, is usually performed by dedicated supervision equipments and specialized personnel. For non-critical situations, to reduce the hospitalization and personnel expenses, patient rehabilitation can take place at home, supported by portable devices for vital parameter monitoring. Usually, such devices...
Machine Condition Monitoring (MCM) is become crucial in all industrial processes to achieve high reliability, reduced man power and scheduled maintenance. The cost reduction of diagnostic tool allows for on line testing, and user-friendly interfaces minimize requirements about technician expertise. For all these reasons, the use of smartdevices (including smartphone, tablets, PDA…) has been suggested...
Advantages of smart metering are well known: more control of resource usage, accurate bills and better budgeting. For this reason roll out plans have been created not only for electricity, but also for gas distribution. In such a scenario, some additional difficulties arise due to the need of a wireless and autonomous functioning of meters. In particular, measurement techniques and communication protocols...
Today, the broad proliferation of Smartphones and Tablets has determined a wide availability of software applications for numerous purposes. Thanks to this, Smartphones are now essential devices for many aspects of everyday life and not just advanced mobile phone terminals. The presence of powerful processing units, embedded sensors as well as the availability of many standard communication interfaces...
In the last years, the increasing focus on energy savings is the key factor in the transformation of the legacy distribution grid toward the so called smart grid. One of the most evident, it is the wide diffusion, in some countries, of smart metering technologies for monitoring of customer electrical consumption. The proven benefits of this technology suggested to the Italian regulative agency the...
The adoption of IEC 61850 in the deployment of Substation Automation System opens new scenarios to system design. The presence of a communication infrastructure connecting Intelligent Electronic Device (IED), sensors and protections may suggest the development of distribute measurement devices, where the sampling of the physical quantities and the elaboration of the sampled value could be performed...
This paper deals with time synchronization of devices attached to a smart grid, whose accuracy tightly depends on the accurate estimation of the Time of Arrival (ToA) of the synchronization related messages sent over the power line communication systems. Usually smart grids are quite complex “systems of heterogeneous systems”: the aim of this paper is to suggest a ToA detection mechanism that can...
Real-time networks for substations automation systems are based on ICT technologies and they may take great advantages from ultra recent network technological improvements. A careful evaluation of the performance enhancement is required. Due to cost and system complexity, such an analysis can be performed only using a dedicated simulation environment, but the currently available simulation libraries...
The paper deals with a new test bench for the assessment of time-related performance of wireless systems implementing the IEEE 802.15.4 with the Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) physical layer. The test bench has been designed in order to clearly evaluate the timestamping capabilities of an FPGA-based implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 CSS. The key features are the full bandwidth capability and the extreme...
PLC is the acronym for ??PowerLine Communication?? and means data communications via power wiring. PLC was initially used for tele-protection and tele-monitoring of electrical substations by means of high voltage power lines, in order to avoid costs of microwave or fiber optic links. More recently, PLC has been also adopted for automatic smart metering. However, only with the advent of low-cost digital...
Managing a large building construction site is a really complex task. Nowadays, many controllers have to daily check the site collecting information in order to inform managers about the construction progress. Recently, several software applications, compatible and integrated in most of commercial CAD tools, have been developed to help managers in collecting information. These tools furnish the managers...
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