The Web of Things paradigm has represented a shift in the conjunction of the Internet of Things (IoT) with people, as it allows treating a smart object as a Web resource. While in a first phase the challenge was the physically management of smart objects, the current demand is to help users in profitably introducing IoT in their own daily life. The paper presents a software architecture for IoT systems able to manage the behaviour of involved IoT entities basing on knowledge processing tools. The main goal is informing the user of the occurrence of events of interest semantically determined starting from actual state of the environment. The architecture exploits the potentialities of the Web of Topics (WoX) approach, a conceptual model that simplifies the designing of IoT applications. Leveraging the WoX approach, the architecture introduces an innovative way to mine knowledge from IoT devices aside from any technological background, so that facing the intrinsic heterogeneity affecting IoT entities. The discussed architecture is composed by different modules integrated into an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), strongly decoupled and provided with RESTful-compliant web interfaces to communicate each other and with the external environment, according to a SOA structure. The paper shows how the system is able to receive data coming from sensors and to semantically interpret them by means of a series of business rules that act as knowledge processor.

When hazardous events occurs in buildings or in large environments with different access points and with a large number of users, rescue workers (firefighters, first aid workers, civil protection teams, etc.) need to intervene in a timely manner, where there is a certainty that there are users to help. Typically such events requires to avoid waste of resources in environments where there are no people at the time of the disaster or where the damage is of low magnitude. To guide the rescuers at the points of the building where there are users to help, we modeled and built an Internet of Things-based framework that monitors data and environmental parameters of interest and, if certain thresholds are exceeded, alerts the rescuers through a telephone call to emergency numbers. The hardware infrastructure is driven by a complex flexible and adaptive software layer that behaves depending on a Complex Event Processing engine and a reflective middleware according to the rule based engine that manages data from the sensors and reasoning mechanisms of a knowledge base that models the given domain.

Energy efficiency represents one of the primary challenges in the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since communication is the most power consuming operation for a node, many current energy-efficient protocols are based on duty cycling mechanisms. However, most of these solutions are expensive from both the computational and the memory resources point of view and; therefore, they result in being hardly implementable on resources constrained devices, such as sensor nodes. This suggests to combine new communication protocols with hardware solutions able to further reduce the nodes’ power consumption. In this work, a cross-layer solution, based on the combined use of a duty-cycling protocol and a newkind of active wake-up circuit, is presented and validated by using a test bed approach.The resulting solution significantly reduces idle listening periods by awakening the node only when a communication is detected. Specifically, an MAC scheduler manages the awakenings of a commercial power detector connected to the sensor node, and, if an actual communication is detected, it enables the radio transceiver. The effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer protocol has been thoroughly evaluated by means of tests carried out in an outdoor environment.

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities use- ful to control people's daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to mon- itor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction be- tween digital world and real world. Most NFC-enabled mobile devices exploit the smart card features as a whole: e.g., they can be used as contactless payment and authentication systems. Nevertheless at present heterogeneity in mobile and IoT technologies does not permit to fully express potentialities of mobile devic- es as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card ap- proach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emula- tion (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authen- tication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its inde- pendence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univo- cally identifying user identity, tracing its actions in the meanwhile. As proof of concept, a real case has been implemented: an Android/iOS mobile application to control a car central locking system by NFC.

The Internet of Things, whose main goal is to automatically predict users’ desires, can find very interesting opportunities in the art and culture field, as the tourism is one of the main driving engines of the modern society. Currently, the innovation process in this field is growing at a slower pace, so the cultural heritage is a prerogative of a restricted category of users. To address this issue, a significant technological improvement is necessary in the culture-dedicated locations, which do not usually allow the installation of hardware infrastructures. In this paper, we design and validate a no-invasive indoor location-aware architecture able to enhance the user experience in a museum. The system relies on the user’s smartphone and a wearable device (with image recognition and localization capabilities) to automatically deliver personalized cultural contents related to the observed artworks. The proposal was validated in the MUST museum in Lecce (Italy).

Smart Objects and Smart Environments are expected to become two of the leaders of the future Internet of Things. In this context, the Smart Homes are getting more and more attention, since people are very attracted by the idea of a home environment able to automatically meet their needs. However, the heterogeneity of the smart devices, the difficulty in automating the user-home interaction, and the poor involvement of the users in the development process of new services and applications still represent very debated issues. So, in this paper, we propose an architecture able to overcome the heterogeneity of smart devices and that can be easily extended to new future technologies. To maximize the User Experience, the proposed architecture automatically manages the environment basing on users-defined rules and on people movements, by exploiting an indoor location service based on Bluetooth Low Energy. Finally, the system also provides a simplified development tool that allows even common users to develop new services for Smart Homes and mobile applications to directly interact with the home environment. As a proof-of-concept, the first development steps are described in this paper.

In the near future, the wireless technologies will play a very important role in healthcare applications, especially for tracing and tracking systems of objects and people. Among these, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solutions promise to substantially improve both many processes in healthcare environments and the patient safety connected to the reduction of errors in drug prescriptions and administration. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies in the healthcare sector. In order to face these challenges, multidisciplinary skills are required. A recent research project has attempted to coordinate heterogeneous activities focused on the tracing and tracking of drugs at item level on the pharmaceutical supply chain. One of these is related to the evaluation of potential effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields, generated by RFID devices in UHF band, on drugs. This paper aims to introduce some investigative techniques useful to carry out an experimental protocol able to evaluate the potential alterations of the molecular structure of some biological drugs exposed to electromagnetic fields. The work highlighted that the experimental analysis is complex because it depends strongly on particular molecules. Some experimental results on ActrapidTM, a human insulin preparation, are reported. They showed the absence of substantial alterations both in molecular structure and biological activity of ActrapidTM.

The continuously rising demand for electricity has prompted governments and industries to research more effective energy management systems. The Internet of Things paradigm is a valuable add-on for controlling and managing the energy appliances such as Plug-in Electrical Vehicles (PEV) charging stations. In this paper, we present a Demand Response implementation for PEV charging stations able to use Wireless Sensor Network technologies based on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). We developed a self-service kiosk system by which the user can autonomously swipe his/her credit card and choose the charging station to enable. When a user plugs his/her vehicle to the station, s/he subscribes his availability to share a portion of its energy. When the grid requests a contribution from the PEVs, the kiosk sends a CoAP message to the available stations and the energy flow is inverted (Vehicle-to- Grid). At the end of the charging process, the user’s credit card gets charged with a discounted bill.

The concept of Internet of Things is becoming one of the key aspects for the future Internet, where embedded devices will be responsible for collecting data from the surrounding environment and making them available to useful mash-up applications. In order to guarantee a high feasibility of this scenario, it would be appropriate to have a flexible and intuitive architecture for the implementation of such applications without knowing specific details about the constrained hardware and operating system. Therefore, in this work, a software system for the graphical development of mash-up applications, dedicated to Wireless Sensor Networks, was designed and implemented. It is based on a Constrained Application Protocol application server, called Actinium, and on a graphical editor, called ClickScript. Especially the latter one has been substantially modified in order to communicate with Actinium and to interact with the constrained resources made available by the WSN. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been tested through a real use case that has demonstrated the validity of the whole system.

Enabling a sustainable mobility is one of primary goals of the so-called Smart Cities vision, and in this perspective, the deployment of intelligent parking systems represents a key aspect. This paper presents a novel IoT-aware Smart Parking System based on the jointly use of different technologies, such as RFID, WSN, NFC, and mobile. It is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and information about the occupancy state of parking spaces. To reduce the overall system costs, the possibility to use a solar RFID tag as cars’ detection system has been analyzed. The system allows drivers to reach the nearest vacant parking spot and to pay for the parking fee, by using a customized mobile application. Furthermore, a software application based on RESTful Java and Google Cloud Messaging technologies has been installed on a CS in order to manage alert events. A proof-of-concept has been defined to demonstrate that the proposed solution is able to satisfy real requirements of an innovative Smart Parking System, while preliminary analysis of solar tag usage investigates the feasibility of the proposed detection solution.

The rising success of the Internet of Things has led the Wireless Sensor Networks to play an important role in many fields, ranging from military to civilian applications. However, since sensor nodes are battery powered, communication protocols and applications for these networks must be carefully designed in order to limit the power consumption. In this work, a new MAC protocol able to significantly reduce the power consumption and compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is designed and validated. The defined protocol is based on an efficient setting of the node's duty cycle as a function of the transmission times of the neighbor nodes. In a duty cycle period, each node wakes up once to transmit and N times to receive, where N is the number of neighbors, while it remains in sleep mode for the rest of the time. The defined protocol has been validated through both an analytical and a simulative approach. By using the first approach, the proposed solution is compared with another energy-efficient protocol, namely AS-MAC; then, the differences between the simulated scenario and the analytical one are analyzed. By using the second approach (through Omnet++ simulator), we carried out a performance comparison between our protocol and the current MAC protocol compliant with the ZigBee standard. All the results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed solution, which has proved to be flexible and efficient, since it is able to provide high energy savings at different date rate, without a negative impact on the packets delivery.

The ever growing number of smart devices connected to the Internet of Things is giving users the chance to sense data from surrounding environment and act upon it. However, interpreting raw data coming from heterogeneous sensors and applying control algorithms to actuators is not a simple task for the common end-user who wants to create applications for smart environments. For these reasons, this work deals with the definition of a novel rule-based semantic architecture for the implementation of building automation applications in an IoT context. Sensor data are abstracted at a high semantic level related to the properties they are associated to and interactions with actuators are driven by high-level desired actions. Applications have the form of an Event- Condition-Action (ECA) rule and the layered architecture separates high-level semantic reasoning aspects from low-level execution details. The proposed architecture is also compared with main state-of-the-art solutions and some suitable technologies for its implementation are suggested.

The smart cities promise to offer innovative services to citizens in order to improve the level of life quality but currently, the integration among different ecosystems of data are still lacking. It is noteworthy that data, produced and consumed by public and private institutions, and citizens, may be a precious resource if abstraction and effectiveness are guaranteed in the interface mechanism between data-producers and data-consumers. This work proposes a coupling model, based on standards, technologies, and methodologies, able to make easy and effective the distribution, access, and use of data between services providers and citizens. The system architecture has been designed and developed by using the OSGi technology exploiting a support supplied by Docker, a platform able to ensure greater freedom in the modularization of software platforms oriented to micro-services. Furthermore, for higher levels, an approach based on the OneM2M standard has been adopted in order to obtain a middle layer useful to large-scale coordination of aspects related to the gathering, discovery, security and distribution of data and services. An use case has been defined and summarized in order to clearly show potential benefits of the proposed system for all stakeholders.

In most dangerous events, involving many people in large buildings, rescue workers need to intervene in a timely and targeted manner in order to help most number of people and secure the environments without wasting resources. This work presents an Internet of Things(IoT)-based framework, aiming at monitoring environmental parameters in order to alert rescuers when they exceed some alarm thresholds. A hardware infrastructure driven by a software layer adds flexibility and adaptability to the Complex Event Processing engine and to a rule engine-based reflective middleware that manages and analyzes raw data in conjunction with a knowledge base modeling the application domain.

Enabling a sustainable mobility is one of primary goals of the so-called Smart City vision, and the development of intelligent parking systems represents a key aspect. To this purpose, this paper presents a novel Smart Parking System based on the jointly use of different technologies, such as RFID, WSN, NFC, Cloud, and mobile. It is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and information about the occupancy state of parking spaces, and to direct drivers to the nearest vacant parking spot by using a customized software application. This last one leverages a NFC-based e-wallet system to allow users to pay for parking fees. Furthermore, a customized software application, installed on a cloud platform, is able to manage alert events (e.g. improper use of a reserved space or expiration of the purchased time). In such a case, it promptly informs the traffic cops through an Android mobile app, which has been designed ad hoc for the considered scenario.

The Internet of Things will include billions of smart “things” connected to the Web and characterized by sensing, actuating, and data processing capabilities. In this context, also known as Web of Things, the user should ideally be able to collect information provided by smart things, and to mash-up them to obtain value-added services. However, in the current solutions, the access to physical objects is poorly scalable and efficient, the communications are often unidirectional (from the devices to the users), and only tech-savvy people are able to develop mash-up applications. Based on these assumptions, we propose a software architecture to easily mash-up CoAP resources. It is able to discover the available devices and to virtualize them outside the physical network. These virtualizations are then exposed to the upper layers by a RESTful interface, so that the physical devices interact only with their own virtualization. Furthermore, the system provides simplified tools allowing the development of mash-up applications to different-skilled users. Finally, the architecture allows not only to monitor but also to control the devices, so establishing a bidirectional communication channel. To evaluate the proposal, we deeply modify and integrate some existing software components to realize an instance of the architecture.

This paper aims to provide the reader with a review of the main technologies explored in the literature to solve the indoor localization issue. Furthermore, some systems that use these enabling technologies in real-world scenarios are presented and discussed. This could deliver a better understanding of the state-of-the-art and motivate new research efforts in this promising field. Finally, focusing on one of the major challenges in the indoor localization field, i.e., the indoor animal tracking, existing indoor tracking systems have been reviewed and compared by analyzing advantages and drawbacks.

The behavioral analysis of laboratory mice plays a key role in several medical and scientific research areas, such as biology, toxicology, pharmacology, and so on. Important information on mice behavior and their reaction to a particular stimulus is deduced from a careful analysis of their movements. Moreover, behavioral analysis of genetically modified mice allows obtaining important information about particular genes, phenotypes or drug effects. The techniques commonly adopted to support such analysis have many limitations, which make the related systems particularly ineffective. Currently, the engineering community is working to explore innovative identification and sensing technologies to develop new tracking systems able to guarantee benefits to animals’ behavior analysis. This work presents a tracking solution based on passive Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. Much emphasis is given to the software component of the system, based on a Web-oriented solution, able to process the raw tracking data coming from a hardware system, and offer 2D and 3D tracking information as well as reports and dashboards about mice behavior. The system has been widely tested using laboratory mice and compared with an automated video-tracking software (i.e., EthoVision). The obtained results have demonstrated the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed solution, which is able to correctly detect the events occurring in the animals’ cage, and to offer a complete and user-friendly tool to support researchers in behavioral analysis of laboratory mice.

Smart objects are present in our cities everywhere, thus it is becoming more and more necessary to have a connection platform, not only capable to make those objects talk with each other, but to present the results of their functions also to the citizens/users. Objective of this paper is the definition and development of a model that represents a connection and interaction layer between smart objects and people. In particular, we propose an immersive virtual platform, able to engage end- users and let people be aware of the where, what and how factors: where smart objects are deployed in the city, what functionalities/data they offer, and how those data represent context for the urban areas. To prove this particular model, we developed a prototypical Virtual Environment of Things (VEoT), within an immersive 3D environment in which the user can explore the virtualized urban area and interact with the available smart objects through gestures and affordable VR devices. The VEoT is fed by real-time data produced by a multi-protocol sensing middleware that simplifies the interaction with physical devices through high-level (RESTful) APIs. Paying attention to interconnection of people and things, this prototype will empower final users with engaging tools in order to enhance the fruition of the IoT paradigm.

The analysis of locomotion in laboratory animals plays a crucial role in many scientific research areas. In fact, important information on animals’ behavior and their reaction to a particular stimulus is deduced from a careful analysis of their movements. The techniques commonly adopted to support such analysis have many limitations, which make the related systems particularly ineffective. On the one hand, the human observation and annotation process is strongly observer-dependent and expensive in terms of time and efforts. On the other hand, the use of more sophisticated systems based on video recordings and recognition algorithms is very expensive and complex. In order to face this challenge, this paper presents a tracking solution based on passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, allowing the tracking of laboratory animals with a high accuracy. The overall solution consists of a hybrid system including hardware and software components. In particular, in this paper, the attention is focused on the software component as the hardware has already been described in previous works. The software component is a Web- oriented solution that offers a complete 2D and 3D information tool including reports, dashboards, and tracking graphs. The proposed solution was widely tested using twelve laboratory mice and compared with an automated video-tracking software (i.e., EthoVision) in order to demonstrate its effectiveness and reliability. The obtained results have demonstrated that the proposed solution is able to correctly detect and reconstruct the events occurring in the animals’ cage, and to offer a complete and user-friendly tool to support researchers in behavioral analysis of small laboratory animals.

Abstract: Background: While smart objects are present in our cities everywhere, the real aim of the In- ternet of Things is not turned into reality yet. Each smart object is still designated to a specific task and requires proprietary procedures for interaction. Thus, it becomes more necessary to have a connection platform for abstracting the complexity of smart objects and to present their data to the end-users through a simpler interaction procedure. Objective: This paper aims at defining a model that represents a connection/interaction layer between smart objects and people, building a more intuitive human interface towards the Internet of Things. Method: We propose an immersive virtual platform, able to engage end-users and let them be aware of the following strategic factors: where smart objects are deployed in the city, what features/data they of- fer, and how this data represents context for the urban areas. Results: We have developed and tested a prototypical Virtual Environment of Things, within an immer- sive 3D environment in which the user can explore the virtualized urban area and interact with the available smart objects through gestures and affordable Virtual Reality devices. The virtual environment is fed by real-time data produced by a multiprotocol sensing middleware that simplifies the interaction with physical devices through high-level RESTful APIs. Conclusion: Paying attention to interconnection of people and things, this prototype empowers final us- ers with engaging tools in order to enhance the fruition of the IoT paradigm. The developed system was compared with existing solutions and fully tested in a real scenario.

The average age growing of the urban population, with an increasing number of 65+ citizens, is calling for the cities to provide global services specifically geared to elderly people. In this context, collecting data from the elderly’s environment and his/her habits and making them available in a structured way to third parties for analysis, is the first step towards the realization of innovative user-centric services. This paper presents a citywide general IoT-based sensing infrastructure and a data management layer providing some REST and Linked Open Data Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that collect and present data related to elderly people. In particular, this architecture is used by the H2020 City4Age project to help geriatricians in identifying the onset of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) disease.

This paper proposes an algorithm to be used in IEEE 802.16e networks for adapting MAC PDU size to wireless channel behavior when ARQ is adopted at MAC layer. The algorithm is based on an analytical approach for dynamically evaluating the optimal packet size. The latter is derived from an expression of the ARQ protocol efficiency, obtained by exploiting a finite-state Markov error model which also takes into account Adaptive Modulation/Coding. The effectiveness of the designed algorithm in improving TCP performance has been evaluated.

In last few years, the number of elderly people is more and more increasing. Consequently, various efforts were made in order to improve the quality of lifestyle for the elderly. Related to this issue, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) works to create better living conditions for older or disable people. AAL systems are able to continuously monitor the health status of the elderly through data coming from heterogeneous sensors. In this paper, we propose an AAL architecture for the monitoring of elderly people, able to guarantee the collection of heterogeneous sensor data as well as the detection of critical events such as the older adult fall. A remote reasoning system processes this data with the aim of generating appropriate events. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a proof of concept was used and validation functional tests were carried out.

According to the emerging concept of the Internet of Things, the next generation of the Internet will be a seamless integration of physical smart objects, interacting among them and with the surrounding environment. In this perspective, smart homes are receiving an increasing interest, since they can provide several useful services to end-users. Furthermore, with the widespread diffusion of mobile devices (i.e., smartphones, tablets), the capability to control and manage smart homes through them is becoming a primary requirement. Starting from these considerations, in this paper, we propose a flexible approach that allows, exploiting an Android device, to efficiently manage a building automation system composed of heterogeneous smart devices. Our solution is based on the semantic description of both the home automation system and the device functionalities. Leveraging such a description, the GUI and the business logic of an Android application is dynamically configured without any user effort. Moreover, in order to enable devices interoperation, a software smart gateway is integrated in the application so as providing a transparent access to the heterogeneous underlying technologies. The effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated through a real use case in which KNX and CoAP devices are involved.

Evaluating the behavior of mice and rats has substantially contributed to the progress of research in many scientific fields. Researchers commonly observe recorded video of animal behavior and manually record their observations for later analysis, but this approach has several limitations. The authors developed an automated system for tracking and analyzing the behavior of rodents that is based on radio frequency identification (RFID) in an ultra-high-frequency bandwidth. They provide an overview of the system’s hardware and software components as well as describe their technique for surgically implanting passive RFID tags in mice. Finally, the authors present the findings of two validation studies to compare the accuracy of the RFID system versus commonly used approaches for evaluating the locomotor activity and object exploration of mice.

Energy efficiency is one of the main issues in the design and optimization of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) since each node is typically subject to a hard battery limitation. Taking into account that the most energy-consuming component of a WSN node is the radio, the design of energyefficient routing and MAC protocols is certainly a valid approach to face the problem. Minimizing the energy consumption allows to increase the lifetime of nodes and so of the overall network. This paper deals with a novel low power Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol compliant with the ZigBee standard. In particular, a new algorithm to tune the duty cycle of a node, i.e., the cycling between an awake and a sleep state of the radio transceiver, is proposed. The basic idea of this solution is that neighboring nodes exchange information about their transmission time, so that each one knows in advance when it is supposed to be awake to receive a message and when it can switch off its radio. Low requirements in terms of processing and storage capacity characterize this solution. Furthermore, it is able to react effectively both to network topology changes and to clock desynchronization. The effectiveness of the defined schema has been evaluated, in terms of delay and power consumption, by means of simulations. The simulation results have highlighted substantial improvements of the proposed solution.

The Internet of Things (IoT), with its plethora of smart objects and technologies, allows to realize smart environments in several scenarios. However, the existing solutions are strictly intended for specific applications and their customization is often limited to what developers have considered at the design and implementation time. So, the integration of new functionalities requires significant changes by developers, while common users cannot make personalizations by themselves. For these reasons, this work deals with the definition of a novel rule-based semantic architecture for the easy implementation of building automation applications in an IoT context. Applications are structured as an Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rule and the layered architecture separates high-level semantic reasoning aspects from low-level execution details. The proposed architecture is also compared with main state-of-the-art solutions and a standard-based implementation framework is suggested. The last aspect is treated by referring to standardized guidelines and widely- accepted platforms, in order to make the proposal more attractive and robust.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are receiving an ever increasing attention because they are one of the most important technologies enabling the Internet of Things vision. Since nodes of these networks are battery-powered, energy efficiency represents one of the main design objectives. This goal can be primarily achieved through an optimization of the communication phase, which is the most power consuming operation for a WSN node. However, the limited computational and storage resources of physical devices make the design of complex communication protocols particularly hard, suggesting, on the contrary, to integrate more simple communication protocols with hardware solutions aimed at energy saving. In this work, a new MAC protocol, compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and a reconfigurable beam-steering antenna are presented and validated. They significantly reduce the nodes’ power consumption by exploiting scheduling techniques and directional communications. Specifically, both during transmission and receiving phases, the node activates exclusively the antenna sector needed to communicate with the intended neighbour. The designed antenna and the proposed protocol have been thoroughly evaluated by means of simulations and test-beds, which have highlighted their good performance. In particular, the MAC protocol has been implemented on the Contiki Operating System and it was compared with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard solution.

The world of education is changing substantially to satisfy new needs requested both from teachers and students. A very important role in this changing process is played by emerging hi-technologies, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), and auto-identification (Auto-ID) solutions (e.g. QR code, RFID, NFC). Several attempts to renovate traditional classrooms to enable Mixed Reality (MR) educational experiences are already reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they often lack a middleware able to ease the smart classroom management. This failure is due to poor flexibility in the means of easiness of new technologies configuration and educational methods configurations. In this paper, we present an educational MR middleware based on the EPCglobal standard. The proposed middleware is easy in Auto-ID and CVE technologies configuration; furthermore, it is able to support a competition among different classes of students or schools, by leveraging the EPC Information Services for extracting times and scores. We report also on an experience we made configuring the proposed middleware for a MR educational format called “TIWE Linguistico,” highlighting main benefits obtained considering an Italian high school for strengthening the English language mastery.

The new technologies characterizing the Internet of Things allow realizing real smart environments able to provide advanced services to the users. Recently, these smart environments are also being exploited to renovate the users’ interest on the cultural heritage, by guaranteeing real interactive cultural experiences. In this paper, we design and validate an indoor location-aware architecture able to enhance the user experience in a museum. In particular, the proposed system relies on a wearable device that combines image recognition and localization capabilities to automatically provide the users with cultural contents related to the observed artworks. The localization information is obtained by a Bluetooth Low Energy infrastructure installed in the museum. Moreover, the system interacts with the Cloud to store multimedia contents produced by the user and to share environment-generated events on his/her social networks. Finally, several location-aware services, running in the system, control the environment status also according to users’ movements. These services interact with physical devices through a multi-protocol middleware. The system has been designed to be easily extensible to other IoT technologies and its effectiveness has been evaluated in the MUST museum in Lecce, Italy.

Detecting how elderly people interact with their surrounding environment, especially with domestic electrical appliances, is an important parameter to assess Mild Cognitive Impairments and frailty issues. This paper proposes an innovative approach for monitoring elderly behavior by detecting home appliance’s usage. It is based on an unobtrusive smart meter that periodically measures the global power consumption in the house, associated with some smart plugs for punctually monitoring specific electrical devices. This infrastructure has been implemented and validated within the Personal Data Capturing System of the City4Age Platform, where, joined with other provided monitoring systems, can feed risk detection algorithms with more accurate data. Summarizing, implemented system, although simple and at low cost, is able to combine data provided by designed power meter with those of smart meter plugs and, by means of implemented algorithms, to detect unusual elder behavior, moreover resulting reliable and accurate.

As the average age of the citizens increases, cities must provide new services for the emerging problem. The City4Age project aims to provide meaningful interventions to address the problems related to Mild Cognitive Impairment and Frailty in elderly citizens. As part of the City4Age project we have developed a flexible and scalable data capturing and management infrastructure which combines both the Internet of Things and Linked Open Data paradigms. A proof-of-concept validation illustrates how data are collected, managed and computed by the proposed system to make them available for MCI and frailty risk detection algorithms and for third parties.

Traceability requirements in supply chain management are getting more and more strict in order to ensure product quality and public safety. Such requirements are particularly difficult to reach in the agro-food sector, especially for fresh ready-to-eat (RTE) vegetables, where specific needs exist; for example, mixed RTE salads are made of different produces, and there is the need to track and trace the treatments all the ingredients separately receive, avoiding gaps in the electronic histories. Traceability global standards, along with the adoption of Radio Frequency (RF) technologies have been widely experimented in this field; nevertheless, there are still many difficulties. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) cause a big impact on the existing information system, and meet the opposition of professionals in the field such as agronomists who feel out of the process. Additionally, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)-based item-level traceability is still too expensive. In this paper, we propose an integrated and innovative solution for the ‘‘gapless’’ traceability of fresh RTE vegetables produced by an Italian agro-food company. Most approaches to sensor-based implementations completely replace agronomists. By contrast, our solution keeps the agronomists in the greenhouses but empowers them with smart technology. The Agronomist Android mobile App uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to allow the linking of plants and traceability information, following the EPCglobal standard. We achieve low costs by using DataMatrix technology for item-level tagging, while restricting the use of UHF RFID to coarse-grained grouping levels (case and pallet). We adopt the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architectural style for granting flexibility and scalability while preserving compatibility with legacy applications. We obtained the experimental results we report by using a Living Laboratory approach; the experiments we carried on have demonstrated the good performances of RFID tags and readers when used in conjunction with fresh vegetables products, as well as the actual effectiveness of the proposed gapless traceability system.

The adoption of solutions based on Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology in a large number of contexts is a matter of fact. In many situations, such as the tracking of small living animals, the straightforward use of commercial systems does not guarantee adequate performance. Consequently, both the RFID hardware and the control software platform should be tailored for the particular application. In this work, the specific requirements of Near Field (NF) Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID reader antennas suitable for small animal localization and tracking are individuated and a control system based on NI LabVIEW has been designed. Afterwards, both hardware and software solutions have been implemented and validated by using a living laboratory approach. Finally, the set-up of a first working prototype involving six built-in-lab NF antennas has been completed and tested. The achieved results are impressive and demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed approach.

Sports and recreational activities provide an interesting domain of research that includes several of the critical challenges for next generation of services. The adoption of emerging Internet of Things technologies into the field of sport could significantly improve the sport experience and also the safety level of team sports. To this purpose, this paper presents a novel Sport System based on the jointly use of different technologies, such as RFID, WSN, Cloud, and mobile. It is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and players’ physiological data via an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN) composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities. Sensed data are delivered to a Cloud platform where a monitoring application makes them easily accessible via REST Web Services. A simple proof of concept has demonstrated the appropriateness of the proposed system. This work represents a first real attempt to demonstrate the benefits introduced by the use of IoT technologies in sport environments.

The rapid aging of the population occurred in recent years has encouraged the development of several solutions aimed to guarantee a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. In this paper, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system has been designed in order to create better living conditions for older people. In this way, people can live independently longer in their own house with an improved quality of life. The proposed system includes several features. On the one hand, it is able to continuously monitor the health status of the elderly through data coming from heterogeneous sources (i.e., environmental sensors and medical devices). On the other hand, it is able to guarantee outdoor and indoor localization aimed to know the real-time position of the elderly both inside and outside their home. A remote reasoning system processes all collected data with the aim of generating appropriate events and alerts. The architecture was validated from a functional point of view through a proof-of-concept.

The ever-growing life expectancy of people requires the adoption of proper solutions for addressing the particular needs of elderly people in a sustainable way, both from service provision and economic point of view. Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and frailty are typical examples of elderly conditions which, if not timely addressed, can turn out into more complex diseases that are harder and costlier to treat. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and in particular Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, can foster the creation of monitoring and intervention systems, both on an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Smart City scope, for early detecting behavioral changes in elderly people. This allows to timely detect any potential risky situation and properly intervene, with benefits in terms of treatment’s costs. In this context, as part of the H2020-funded City4Age project, this paper presents the data capturing and data management layers of the whole City4Age platform. In particular, this work deals with an unobtrusive data gathering system implementation to collect data about daily activities of elderly people, and with the implementation of the related Linked Open Data (LOD)-based data management system. The collected data are then used by other layers of the platform to perform risk detection algorithms and generate the proper customized interventions. Through the validation of some use-cases, it is demonstrated how this scalable approach, also characterized by unobtrusive and low-cost sensing technologies, can produce data with a high level of abstraction useful to define a risk profile of each elderly person.

The ageing of population is a phenomenon that is affecting the majority of developed countries around the world and will soon affect developing economies too. In recent years, both industry and academia are focused on the development of several solutions aimed to guarantee a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. In this context, the behavioral analysis of elderly people can help to prevent the occurrence of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty problems. The innovative technologies enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) can be used in order to capture personal data for automatically recognizing changes in elderly people behavior in an unobtrusive, low-cost and low-power modality. This work aims to describe the ongoing activities within the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission, mainly focused on the use of IoT technologies to develop an innovative AAL system able to capture personal data of elderly people in their home and city environments. The proposed architecture has been validated through a proof-of-concept focused mainly on localization issues, collection of ambient parameters, and user-environment interaction aspects.

The world population will be made up of a growing number of elderly people in the near future. Aged people are characterized by some physical and cognitive diseases, like mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and frailty, that, if not timely diagnosed, could turn into more severe diseases, like Alzheimer disease, thus implying high costs for treatments and cares. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) can be adopted to create frameworks for monitoring elderly behavior which, alongside normal clinical procedures, can help geriatricians to early detect behavioral changes related to such pathologies and to provide customized interventions. As part of the City4Age project, this work describes a novel approach for collecting and managing data about elderly behavior during their normal activities.Thedata capturing layer is an unobtrusive and low-cost sensing infrastructure abstracting the heterogeneity of physical devices, while the datamanagement layer easily manages the huge quantity of sensed data, giving them semantic meaning and fostering data shareability. This work provides a functional validation of the proposed architecture and introduces how the data it manages can be used by the whole City4Age platform to early identify risks related to MCI/frailty and promptly intervene.

Current manually-operated SOS systems used in Rallying are ineffective when driver and co-driver cannot push the SOS button due to loss of consciousness after the impact. The SafeRally service proposes a low-cost pilot monitoring system, to associate with existing tracking systems, able to automatically notify a serious accident, when both the driver and the co-driver cannot request help by themselves. First tests of the system have been performed during the “Rally of Salento” race, demonstrating the efficacy and the ease of use of the implemented functionalities.

The introduction of Internet of Things enabling technologies into the sport and recreational activities domain provide an interesting research challenge. Their adoption could significantly improve the sport experience and also the safety level of team sports. Despite this, only few attempts have been done to demonstrate the benefits provided by use of IoT technologies in sport environments. To fill this gap, this paper propose an IoT- aware Sport System based on the jointly use of different innovative technologies and standards. By exploiting the potentialities offered by an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN), composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities, the system is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and players’ physiological data. Sensed data are then delivered to a Cloud platform where a monitoring application makes them easily accessible via REST Web Services. A simple proof of concept has demonstrated the appropriateness of the proposed solution.

The aging population is a global phenomenon, characterized by many interesting challenges. In this context, the Internet of Things technologies could allow to analyze the elderly’s behavioral in an unobtrusive way, thus helping to prevent Mild Cognitive Impairment and frailty problems. To this end, this work aims to define a reliable system for controlling the position and the body motility of the elderly in low-cost and low- power way. Movements and body motility are, indeed, good indicators of behavioral changes. The system represents the basis of a complete architecture for behavioral analysis and risk detection developed within the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission.

Over the last few years, the convincing forward steps in the development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabling solutions are spurring the advent of novel and fascinating applications. Among others, mainly Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), and smart mobile technologies are leading this evolutionary trend. In the wake of this tendency, this paper proposes a novel, IoTaware, smart architecture for automatic monitoring and tracking of patients, personnel, and biomedical devices within hospitals and nursing institutes. Staying true to the IoT vision, we propose a Smart Hospital System (SHS) which relies on different, yet complementary, technologies, specifically RFID, WSN, and smart mobile, interoperating with each other through a CoAP/6LoWPAN/REST network infrastructure. The SHS is able to collect, in real time, both environmental conditions and patients’ physiological parameters via an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN) composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities. Sensed data are delivered to a control center where an advanced monitoring application makes them easily accessible by both local and remote users via a REST web service. The simple proof of concept implemented to validate the proposed SHS has highlighted a number of key capabilities and aspects of novelty which represent a significant step forward compared to the actual state of art.

Recent innovations in the ICT field are strongly focused towards the Internet of Things, which will definitely lead to an enhancement also in the domestic environments. Low- power and low-cost devices are expected to create network of interconnected smart objects able to transform our homes into real Smart Homes. However, the heterogeneity of the underlying technologies prevents these smart objects to natively interoperate for adapting the environment to users’ needs. In addition, common users are often excluded from the development of new applicative services that exploit physical devices, as they do not have sufficient programming and technological skills. To overcome these limitations, we propose a software ecosystem that allows different-skilled users to develop location-aware services able to autonomously manage the Smart Home. These services control the environment in accordance with user-defined rules and the users’ location, calculated by exploiting an indoor localization mechanism. In addition, to directly interact with smart devices, users can also define customized interfaces for mobile devices. Finally, a multi-protocol middleware allows both the services and the mobile applications to access the physical network hiding the underlying heterogeneities. As a proof-of- concept, the first implementation steps are presented.

An innovative tracking system based on passive RFID technology in Ultra High Frequency band, able to perform behavior analysis of small laboratory animals, is presented in this work. The proposed smart system consists of both hardware and software components and it is able to extract main behavioral parameters exploiting raw animals tracking data captured by an RFID reader system. The proposed solution allows overcoming some limits of typical analysis methods commonly used in research laboratories for the same purposes, such as systems based on video technology and human observations, while providing the same information content. It is cheaper and guarantees better performance even in case of strong similarity among animals and in poor lighting conditions. Different tests were carried out in order to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system using laboratory mice. The software component is able to provide, via Web, a user-friendly tool containing main animal behavioral information such as statistical analysis and graphs regarding animal displacements, indication about the locomotor activity and detection of specific conditions including isolation and aggregation phenomena.

Animal tracking and animal behavior analysis have a crucial impact in biomedical disciplines to study newpathologies and effects of newdrugs. There are several solutions, based on different technologies such as GPS, radar, and vision, designed to obtain animals tracking systems, but they are effective mainly in presence of large size animals and outdoor environment. Unfortunately, they show poor performance when groups of small laboratory animals have to be monitored in indoor environments. In such a context, the adoption of passive Near Field (NF) Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology seems to be a winning approach, even though the straightforward use of commercial solutions does not guarantee satisfactory performance. Specifically, customized hardware and software solutions are then required. The main goal of this work is to present the development and then to validate a reliable and effective system for the automatic tracking of laboratory mice, based on suited NF UHF RFID hardware capturing system combined with an ad hoc software system able to guarantee hardware control, data processing, and reporting. In particular, the validation phase has been carried out by selecting the most appropriate RFID tags and by surgically implanting them into laboratory mice. Experimental results have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed solution, which is able to gather data on the animal movements, allowing their nsubsequent processing for a satisfactory behavioral analysis.

The paper presents an innovative gapless traceability system able to improve the main business processes of the fresh vegetables supply chain. The performed analysis highlighted some critical aspects in the management of the whole supply chain, from the land to the table of the end consumer, and allowed us to reengineer the most important processes. In particular, the first steps of the supply chain, which include cultivation in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables, were analyzed. The re-engineered model was designed by exploiting the potentialities derived from the combined use of innovative Radio Frequency technologies, such as RFID and NFC, and important international standards, such as EPCglobal. The proposed tracing and tracking system allows the end consumer to know the complete history of the purchased product. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential benefits of the reengineered processes in a real supply chain, a pilot project was implemented in an Italian food company, which produces ready-to-eat vegetables, known as IV gamma products. Finally, some important metrics have been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefits derived from the use of the re-engineered model.

Wireless Sensor Networks have been receiving an ever increasing attention from the scientific and industrial communities because they are one of the enabling technologies for to the so called Internet of Things. Nodes in a WSN have limited battery duration, thus energy must be used carefully. Since the radio transceiver is one of the most energy consuming components, an optimization of the communication phase is necessary. In this work, a new duty cycle-based MAC protocol, compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is presented and validated: AS2-MAC. By knowing in advance the wake up periods of its neighbours, each node switches the radio on only when it wants to transmit or knows that a neighbour has something to send. The effectiveness of this mechanism is validated through a proper simulation campaign carried out with the Omnet++ simulation tool.

The behavioral analysis of individuals is an important science, especially if it is conducted on the elderly population, aiming to prevent Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty problems. A fundamental aspect in this context is to explore the use of innovative technologies enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), above all sensors, to unobtrusively capture personal data for automatically recognizing behavioral changes in elderly people. This is done with the aim to timely identify risks of MCI and frailty before they escalate into more serious conditions such as Alzheimer Disease. This paper aims to briefly describe the overall goal of the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission, in particular focusing on the IoT-based personal data capturing system.

People’s interaction with IoT devices such as proximity beacons, body-worn sensors, and controllable light bulbs is often mediated through personal mobile devices. Current approaches usually make applications operate in separate silos, as the functionality of IoT devices is fixed by vendors and typically accessed only through low-level proprietary APIs. This limits the flexibility in designing applications and requires intense wireless interactions, which may impact energy consumption. COIN is a system architecture that breaks this separation by allowing developers to flexibly run a slice of a mobile app’s logic onto IoT devices. Mobile apps can dynamically deploy arbitrary tasks implemented as loosely coupled components. The underlying runtime support takes care of the coordination across tasks and of their real-time scheduling. Our prototype indicates that COIN both enables increased flexibility and improves energy efficiency at the IoT device, compared to traditional architectures.

We present COIN, a system architecture to enable running a slice of a mobile app’s logic onto connected devices such as proximity beacons, body-worn sensors, and controllable light bulbs. These are normally shipped as black-boxes: their func- tionality is fixed by vendors and typically accessed only through low-level APIs. This often limits the flexibility in designing applications and requires intense wireless interactions between mobile and connected devices, which impacts energy consumption particularly on the latter. We overcome the limitations of this design by providing a generic programmable substrate right onto the connected device. Mobile apps can dynamically de- ploy arbitrary tasks implemented as loosely-coupled actor-like components. The underlying run-time support takes care of the coordination across tasks and of their real-time scheduling.

ICT technologies are going to play more and more a fundamental role in the healthcare scenario. They aim to implement innovative e-health services able to improve patient safety and quality of care. Particular attention is focused on patients affected by multiple intolerances. This people struggle every day to perform elementary actions such as the choice of food and/or drugs because of the adverse reactions that particular components could cause if taken. New item-level tracing systems based on RFID and EPCglobal are very important and able to face these problems but they do not represent yet a complete solution. In fact, a very interesting challenge in the e-healthcare field is currently focused on the combining of tracing systems with hospital information systems, compliant to HL7 (Health Level Seven). In this paper, a prototypal ICT system able to support medical and nutritional applications, based on the combining of the two different standards EPCglobal and HL7, is shown exploiting a concrete case study in the immunology field. Potential benefits, derived from new e-health services for the main actors (e.g. doctors, pharmacists, patients, etc.), are discussed in order to define attractive future research works.

The Internet of Things has focused on new systems, the so-called smart things, to integrate the physical world with the virtual world by exploiting the network architecture of the Internet. However, defining applications on top of smart things is mainly reserved to system experts, since it requires a thorough knowledge of hardware platforms and some specific programming languages. Furthermore, a common infrastructure to publish and share resource information is also needed. In this paper, we propose a software architecture that simplifies the visual development and execution of mash-up applications based on smart things, exploiting Internet Web protocols and their ubiquitous availability even on constrained devices. We have developed a distributed architecture that allows to create and control mash-up applications in an easy and scalable way, without specific knowledge on both hardware and programming languages. In addition, we have also defined a centralized public database deployed on the Internet, to manage and share physical resource information. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been tested through a real use case and experimental results have demonstrated the validity of the whole system.

Radio Frequency Identification is a wireless technology that is going to play a very important role as autoidentification solution for many application scenarios, where item-level traceability and high performance are crucial. Currently, some guidelines suggest the use of passive Ultra High Frequency tags for this kind of tracing system. In particular, Near Field UHF tags have also been suggested to face critical conditions such as the presence of liquids. Unfortunately, not all the requirements that a tag should satisfy in the different steps of the supply chain, can be met by general-purpose commercial tags in UHF band, both Near Field and Far Field. This is due to the effect on the performance of the presence of metals and liquids, as well as to the very stressful conditions such as high scanning speed, possible misalignment between tag and reader antennas, and multiple reading of tags. In this paper, we are presenting the main features that a far field UHF tag should own in order to work properly in the whole supply chain. A tag satisfying all the individuated requirements has been also realized and tested to trace some critical pharmaceutical products, containing metals and liquids, and has been compared with some commercial UHF tags, both Near Field and Far Field. The very impressive results clearly demonstrate that well-designed ad hoc Far Field UHF tags effectively improve the performance of any item-level tracing system.

The growing counterfeiting problem and the significant fragmentation of the pharmaceutical market are resulting on an increase of difficulty to trace medicines. In these scenarios, where an item-level traceability is crucial, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology holds the promise to eliminate many of the previous problems. Unfortunately, there are still some technical and economic barriers that are retarding the deployment of these innovative technologies in large-scale application scenarios. For the pharmaceutical supply chain, there have been concerns raised regarding the potential effects on the quality of drugs due to exposure to electromagnetic fields. In this paper, some results, obtained by a recent experimental study focused on the evaluation of potential effects on biological drugs, have been reported. This work aimed to evaluate potential effects of tracing RFID systems on the molecular structure of biological drugs. In particular, some samples of a commercial human insulin preparation have been exposed for different periods to electromagnetic fields generated by RFID devices. In order to evaluate possible alterations on the molecular structure, the following diagnostic techniques have been used: High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). The experimental results have shown that the electromagnetic field generated by UHF RFID readers does not cause any damage on the structure of the insulin molecule.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is playing a crucial role for item-level tracing systems in healthcare scenarios. The pharmaceutical supply chain is a fascinating application context, where RFID can guarantee transparency in the drug flow, supporting both suppliers and consumers against the growing counterfeiting problem. In such a context, the choice of the most adequate RFID tag, in terms of shape, frequency, size and reading range, is crucial. The potential presence of items containing materials hostile to the electromagnetic propagation exasperates the problem. In addition, the peculiarities of the different RFID-based checkpoints make even more stringent the requirements for the tag. In this work, the performance of several commercial UHF RFID tags in each step of the pharmaceutical supply chain has been evaluated, confirming the expected criticality. On such basis, a guideline for the electromagnetic design of new high-performance tags capable to overcome such criticalities has been defined. Finally, driven by such guidelines, a new enhanced tag has been designed, realized and tested. Due to patent pending issues, the antenna shape is not shown. Nevertheless, the optimal obtained results do not lose their validity. Indeed, on the one hand they demonstrate that high performance item level tracing systems can actually be implemented also in critical operating conditions. On the other hand, they encourage the tag designer to follow the identified guidelines so to realize enhanced UHF tags.

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, EPCglobal and ebXML on some business processes that are critical to the success of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Particular attention is focused on the wholesaler because it represents a particular stress point in terms of constraints and product flow. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of some current (AS IS) supply chain processes was performed on a big pharmaceutical wholesaler. It allowed us to identify some critical factors in the main business processes. In order to guarantee an efficient item-level tracing system in the whole supply chain, a re-engineering procedure has been defined exploiting an approach based on the combined use of RFID, EPCglobal, and ebXML. The Key Performance Indicator (KPI) method has been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefits by using an empirical method based on the Living Laboratory approach. This rigorous experimental approach, performed in a controlled test environment, allowed us to derive a realistic estimate of the selected performance indicators for the reengineered (TO BE) model.

The application of RFID technologies along the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a guarantee of transparency in the drug flow, against the growing counterfeiting problem. Unfortunately, the large-scale deployment of these solutions is still limited because of concerns over potential deteriorating effects of RF emissions on traced pharmaceuticals. This work aims at delineating an experimental framework to evaluate potential exposure risks and get new insight into poorly explored safety issues. Heterogeneous skills (engineering, chemistry and physiology) have been recruited to draw up a suitable experimental protocol, consisting of three main steps: (i) simulation of drug exposure to electromagnetic fields generated by RFID devices in a test environment reproducing the pharmaceutical supply chain; (ii) investigation of potential drug structural changes by High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) techniques; (iii) analysis of performance by in vitro functional assays. An example of application of this protocol on a commercial FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) preparation has been reported, showing no alterations of the hormone integrity following RF exposure. Conclusively, a wide adoption of "trace and track" RFID technologies passes through the assessment of related safety issues. The varying nature of drugs as well as their different biological targets make it a hard challenge, that can be successfully overcome by multidisciplinary approaches.

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology promises to improve several processes in the healthcare scenario, especially those related to traceability of people and things. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies in the healthcare field. Among these, the evaluation of potential thermal and non-thermal effects due to the exposure of biopharmaceutical products to electromagnetic fields is very challenging, but still slightly investigated. This paper aims to setup a controlled RF exposure environment, in order to reproduce a worst-case exposure of pharmaceutical products to the electromagnetic fields generated by the UHF RFID devices placed along the supply chain. Radiated powers several times higher than recommended by current normative limits were applied (10 W and 20 W). The electric field strength at the exposed sample location, used in tests, was as high as 100 V/m. Non-thermal effects were evaluated by chromatography techniques and in vitro assays. The results obtained for a particular case study, the ActrapidTM human insulin preparation, showed temperature increases lower than 0.5°C and no significant changes in the structure and performance of the considered drug.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are playing more and more a key role in several application scenarios such as healthcare, agriculture, environment monitoring, and smart metering. Furthermore, WSNs are characterized by high heterogeneity because there are many different proprietary and non-proprietary solutions. This wide range of technologies has delayed new deployments and integration with existing sensor networks. The current trend, however, is to move away from proprietary and closed standards, to embrace IP-based sensor networks using the emerging standard 6LoWPAN/IPv6. This allows native connectivity between WSN and Internet, enabling smart objects to participate to the Internet of Things (IoT). Building an all-IP infrastructure from scratch, however, would be difficult because many different sensors and actuators technologies (both wired and wireless) have already been deployed over the years. After a review of the state of the art, this paper sketches a framework able to harmonize legacy and new installations, allowing migrating to an all-IP environment at a later stage. The Building Automation use case has been chosen to discuss potential benefits of the proposed framework.

Radio Frequency Identification is going to play a very important role as auto-identification solution for many application scenarios, where item-level tagging and high performance are crucial. In such a context, the use of passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags is strongly suggested but, unfortunately, general-purpose commercial tags could not meet all the requirements in presence of critical operating conditions, including the presence of metals and liquids, the misalignment between tag and reader antennas, and the need of multiple reading of tags. In this paper, the main features that a UHF tag should own to work properly in the whole supply chain are presented. A tag, named below Enhanced tag, satisfying all the individuated requirements has been also realized and validated in a controlled test environment simulating the pharmaceutical supply chain. Tests have been focused on the above-mentioned critical conditions. The performance of the Enhanced tag, in terms of successful read rate, has been compared with that of some commercial Far Field and Near Field UHF tags. The experimental results are impressive and clearly demonstrate that ad hoc Far Field UHF tags are able to effectively solve many of the performance degradation problems affecting general-purpose tags. Finally, the proposed tag has been also tested in extreme conditions, applying it directly on Tetra Pak packages containing liquid, with interesting results in terms of platform-tolerant features.

The item-level tracing and tracking requirements are growing more and more in the pharmaceutical sector, where the counterfeiting problem and the significant fragmentation of the market contribute significantly to complicate the scenario. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology holds the promise to eliminate many of the previous problems. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the largescale deployment of these innovative technologies. Currently, it is not easy finding an exhaustive analysis about potential effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields of the RFID systems on drugs. This work aimed to evaluate the effects of RFID systems on the molecular structure and potency of a biological drug. In particular, some samples of a commercial human insulin preparation (ActrapidTM) were exposed for different periods to electromagnetic fields generated by RFID devices in UHF band. In order to evaluate both possible alterations of the molecular structure and possible adverse effects on drug performance, the following techniques have been used: Reverse Phase-High Pressure Liquid Chromatography and in vitro cell proliferation assays. The experimental results have shown that the electromagnetic field generated by UHF RFID devices does not cause significant biological effects on ActrapidTM insulin.

RFID has become an enabling technology for IoT implementation. In dynamic RFID scenarios, such as smart shops or industrial surroundings, it is crucial to identify every good, with an applied RFID tag, before it leaves the interrogation area. Currently, commercial reader solutions adopt DFSA protocol as a simple MAC that manages the communication between a reader and multiple tags. To increase DFSA throughput (the number of read tags in the unit of time) and thus speed up tag identification, simple calculations show that the number of tags should equal the frame size. However, the literature exhibiting RFID performance shows that tag responsiveness is stochastic, while this has been often neglected when considering the throughput. To investigate the influence and to define related research challenges in the RFID domain, this work provides the idea of the required measurements by using SDR technology, while arguing that PHY and MAC layers should be looked at integrally. If not, tag identification will be delayed, while at the same time unnecessary energy waste will occur. In the measurement campaigns, the metric of TRP is employed, given as tag response probability distribution, which can be used for modeling the MAC layer.

Wireless Sensor Networks are a key element of the Internet of Things since they are one of the most interesting pervasive systems. However, they are battery-powered, so energy efficiency represents one of the primary design challenges to address. This goal can be primarily achieved through an optimization of the communication procedure, which is the most power-consuming component of a WSN node. Nevertheless, the poor resources of the embedded devices usually limit the complexity of protocol solutions, which thus are not sufficient to reach satisfactory results. For this reason, the current trend aims at integrating both hardware and software solutions. In this work, a cross-layer solution, based on the combined use of a duty-cycling MAC protocol and a reconfigurable beam-steering antenna, is presented and validated. It significantly reduces the nodes’ power consumption by exploiting scheduling techniques and directional communications. Specifically, a MAC scheduler manages the activation of the antenna sectors based on information coming from both MAC and network layers. This way, node awakenings occur only when an actual communication has to take place and only the interested antenna sector is activated. The effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer approach has been evaluated through OMNeT++ simulation tool.

Radio Frequency Identification is a wireless technology that is going to play a very important role as auto-identification solution for many application scenarios, where item-level traceability and high performance are crucial. Currently, some works suggest the use of passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags but, unfortunately, not all the requirements can be met by general-purpose commercial tags in presence of critical operating conditions (e.g. metals and liquids, misalignment between tag and reader antennas, and multiple reading of tags). In this paper, the main features that a Far Field UHF tag should own in order to work properly in the whole supply chain are presented. A tag satisfying all the individuated requirements has been also realized and validated in a controlled test environment able to simulate the pharmaceutical supply chain. Tests have been focused on the above mentioned critical conditions. The performance of the Enhanced tag, in terms of successful read rate, has been compared with those of some commercial Far Field UHF tags. The experimental results are impressive and clearly demonstrate that ad hoc Far Field UHF tags are able to effectively solve many of the performance degradation problems affecting general purpose tags.

We present IDA-Cage, a smart system based on passive UHF RFID technology for animal behavior analysis. The proposed system represents an effectiveness, user-friendly and low-cost solution supporting researchers in their daily activity, able to overcome the limits of the common tools used in research laboratories. In the proposed demo, the benefits offered by the designed and developed system are shown through a presentation of its main features.

The evolution of modern mobile devices towards novel Radio Frequency (RF) capabilities, such as Near Field Communication, leads to a potential for delivering innovative mobile services, which is still partially unexplored. Mobile proximity payment systems are going to enhance the daily shopping experience, but the access to payment security resources of a mobile device (e.g. the “Secure Element”) by third party applications is still blocked by smartphone and Operating System manufacturers. In this paper, the IDA-Pay system is presented, an innovative and secure NFC micro-payment system based on Peer-to-Peer NFC operating mode for Android mobile phones. It allows to deliver mobile-to-POS micro-payment services, bypassing the need for special hardware. A validation scenario and a system evaluation are also reported to demonstrate the system effectiveness and performance.

The evolution of modern mobile devices towards novel Radio Frequency (RF) capabilities, such as Near Field Communication (NFC), leads to a potential for delivering innovative mobile services which is still partially unexplored. Mobile NFC micro-payments systems can enhance the daily shopping experience, but the access to payment security resources of a mobile device (e.g. the “Secure Element”) by third party applications is still blocked by smartphone and OS manufacturers. In this paper, the IDA-Pay system is presented, an innovative and secure NFC micro-payment system based on peer-to-peer NFC operating mode for Android mobile phones. It allows to guarantee mobile-to-POS micro-payment services, bypassing the need for special hardware. A validation scenario is also depicted in order to demonstrate the system effectiveness.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is becoming more and more important for tracing and tracking systems. Furthermore, the application of standards, such as EPCglobal, is contributing substantially to diffusing the important concept of Internet of Things. Although, these elements promise enormous benefits, there remain barriers that are limiting a large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies in supply chain management systems. An analysis of the main effects of the use of these technologies on the main processes of a supply chain is useful. This paper attempts to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to trace the impacts of the combined use of different standards, such as RFID, EPCglobal, and ebXML, on a pharmaceutical supply chain. The current and possible future visions of the pharmaceutical supply chain are described through the AS-IS and TO-BE models. These models are used to perform a first KPI analysis; even if the reported results are still only partial they sketch out the main guidelines identifying the advantages obtainable by adopting an integrated system with B2B messaging and tracing and tracking capabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

It is well known in the research community that the throughput of dynamic frame slotted ALOHA (DFSA) in a radio frequency identification (RFID) system can be maximized when DFSA frame size is set to the number of tags. However, related works often neglect the fact that tag responsiveness is of a stochastic nature, depending on the tag hardware performance in the wireless channel. Therefore, as number of tag responses may not be equal to the number of tags located in the interrogation area, corrections to the standard simulation models should be applied. In this letter, we provide the corrections that are based on tag read probability (TRP) metrics. At first, numerically, TRP was retrieved by the usage of fully configurable open-source software defined radio RFID reader in an indoor nonfading radio channel at the single frequency and constant output power, while considering reliable communication parameters in the environment of single and a pair of commercial Gen2 RFID tags. Then, TRP is statistically modeled, and the implications to the throughput are shown.

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability.

The worldwide spreading of Internet, in combination with the development of new low power and low cost embedded devices, has enabled the so-called Internet of Things vision. Wireless Sensor Networks represent an invaluable resource for realizing such scenario, inside which new and innovative applications could be developed. However, the low availability of resources and the reduced processing capacity of the target embedded platforms make the development of the next generation applications very challenging. This paper proposes an innovative system architecture, called STarch, able to simplify the development of new applications and protocols for resource constrained objects. It is meant to follow the software engineering principles and to support a wide range of applications, making both the programming easier and the code portable over multiple hardware platforms. STarch simplifies the network configuration process, through the use of an automatic mechanism based on the XML language and it runs properly on different operating systems, including FreeRTOS and Contiki. The feasibility of the proposed architecture has been proved by using a test bed approach, while an extensive performance analysis have been carried out in order to demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of memory requirements and processing delays.

The paper presents an energy efficient MAC scheduler for wireless sensor networks, and its implementation in the Contiki Operating System. Simulations performed using the Contiki’s simulations tools (i.e., Cooja and MPSim) show that the proposed scheme reduces the power consumption with respect to the ZigBee standard solution and the X-MAC protocol, already implemented in Contiki. Furthermore, the functionality and the portability of the implementation are validated using two test beds based on two different platforms.

The current trend in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is to use the Internet Protocol (IP) and open standards to achieve native connectivity between smart objects and the Internet, contributing to consolidate the Internet of Things (IoT). Emerging standards such as 6LoWPAN/IPv6 and CoRE/CoAP will play a very important role in a RESTful Web of Things, where each node has its own IPv6 address and is able to provide information and control about itself. Data exchanging in Machine To Machine (M2M) applications and communication with Web services require the use of structured data. XML is a possible solution, but its verbosity is not suitable for a WSN (e.g. based on IEEE 802.15.4) characterized by limited packet size. This paper investigates the benefits of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) in a real scenario, considering sensor nodes running on the Contiki RTOS. For this purpose, the authors have implemented an extremely lightweight version of EXI for Contiki running on application boards with just 8 Kbyte RAM memory.

In many practical applications, the item-level tracing systems based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is becoming more and more essential. Nevertheless, the requirements that an RFID tag should satisfy in the different steps of the supply chain, cannot be met by general purpose commercial tags, whose adoption would lead to low-performance systems. In this paper, we are presenting the properties of an ad hoc Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tag, designed and realized in order to work properly in the entire supply chain. The proposed tag has been tested to trace some critical pharmaceutical products, containing metals and liquids, and has been compared with a pre-selected commercial tag. Both tags mount the same chip. The very impressive results, reported in this paper, clearly demonstrate that well-designed ad hoc tags effectively improve the performance of any item-level tracing system.

Smart cities are a trading topic in both the academic literature and industrial world. The capability to provide the users with added- value services through low-power and low-cost smart objects is very attractive in many fields. Among these, art and culture represent very interesting examples, as the tourism is one of the main driving engines of modern society. In this paper, we propose an IoT-aware architecture to improve the cultural experience of the user, by involving the most important recent innovations in the ICT field. The main components of the proposed architecture are: (i) an indoor localization service based on the Bluetooth Low Energy technology, (ii) a wearable device able to capture and process images related to the user’s point of view, (iii) the user’s mobile device useful to display customized cultural contents and to share multimedia data in the Cloud, and (iv) a processing center that manage the core of the whole business logic. In particular, it interacts with both wearable and mobile devices, and communicates with the outside world to retrieve contents from the Cloud and to provide services also to external users. The proposal is currently under development and it will be validated in the MUST museum in Lecce.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have received an ever-increasing attention in recent years, mainly because they represent two of the most important technologies enabling the Internet of Things vision. Although designed originally with different objectives, WSN and RFID represent two complementary technologies whose integration might increase their functionalities and extend their range of applications. However, important technological issues must still be solved in order to fully exploit the potentialities offered by such integration. In this work, an innovative RFID-WSN integration approach is presented and validated. It relies on the interconnection of a new-generation, long-range, EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) RFID tag with a commercial WSN node via the I2C interface. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to existing solution in the literature. Interesting application scenarios enabled by the proposed RFID-WSN integration approach are briefly summarized at the end of the paper.

In this paper, a Smart Parking System (SPS) based on the integration of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies is presented. The system is able to collect information about the occupancy state of parking spaces, and to direct drivers to the nearest vacant parking spot by using a customized software application. Such application also leverages an NFC-based e-wallet system to allow users to pay for the parking fee. Furthermore, a software application based on RESTful Java and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) technologies has been installed on a Central Server in order to manage alert events (e.g. improper use of a reserved space or expiration of the purchased time). In such a case, it promptly informs the traffic cops through an Android mobile app, which has been designed ad hoc for the considered scenario. A proof-of-concept has demonstrated that the proposed solution can meet the real requirements of a SPS.

This work describes a Smart Hospital System (SHS) based on the integration of Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies. SHS is able to provide patient localization, tracking, and monitoring services within hospitals or nursing institutes through the deployment of a heterogeneous network of RFID-WSN nodes relaying data to a central server. A set of software applications based on RESTful Java and database Push Notification (PN) technologies has been designed, implemented, and installed on the central in order to manage alert events (e.g. patient falls) and promptly inform the nursing staff through an iOS mobile app which has been designed ad hoc for the smart hospital scenario.

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a wireless technology that is becoming more and more important as auto-identification solution for many application scenarios. The adoption of this innovative technology in the pharmaceutical sector promises to solve several problems related to tracing and tracking systems at item level. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the large-scale deployment of RFID technologies. One of these is related to very interesting research topics on the evaluation of potential effects of electromagnetic fields on drugs. In detail, this work aimed to analyze the impact of UHF RFID devices, used in tracing systems, on the molecular structure and potency of a commercial human insulin preparation, ActrapidTM. In order to investigate possible induced alterations of molecular structure, the Reverse Phase-High Pressure Liquid Chromatography and the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy have been mainly used in the experimental protocol. To obtain some indications about drug performance, in vitro cell proliferation assays have been also conducted. The experimental results, achieved by a protocol combining an accurate structural analysis on 5 min to 24 h irradiated drug samples with functional in vitro assays, have shown that the electromagnetic field generated by UHF RFID devices does not cause significant effects on ActrapidTM insulin. These findings are strongly encouraging the use of RFID-based technologies for item-level tracing systems in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

The adoption of smart environments is becoming more and more important in many applicative scenarios such as healthcare, asset management, environmental monitoring, and building automation. This last issue represents a very attractive use-case because of several scientific challenges that must be addressed in order to satisfy user requirements, which are mainly focused on the management of home’s comfort parameters. The main goal of this work is to develop and validate an architecture, both hardware and software, able to monitor and manage a Konnex-based home automation system through an Android mobile device in an efficient and safe way. In this perspective, an Android application is realized based on a specific Java library, called Calimero, that provides several methods for interaction with the Konnex implant. Furthermore, a software system able to configure the Android application consistently with the home automation implant is designed and implemented. The proposed architecture was tested from both functional and performance point of view and the obtained results prove that it provides high performance in comparison with other solutions already affirmed on the market.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is more and more adopted in a wide range of applicative scenarios. In many cases, such as the tracking of small-size living animals for behaviour analysis purposes, the straightforward use of commercial solutions does not ensure adequate performance. Consequently, both RFID hardware and the control software should be tailored for the particular application. In this work, a novel RFID-based approach enabling an effective localization and tracking of small-sized laboratory animals is proposed. It is mainly based on a UHF Near Field RFID multiantenna system, to be placed under the animals’ cage, and able to rigorously identify the NF RFID tags implanted in laboratory animals (e.g., mice). Once the requirements of the reader antenna have been individuated, the antenna system has been designed and realized. Moreover, an algorithm based on the measured Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) aiming at removing potential ambiguities in data captured by the multiantenna system has been developed and integrated. The animal tracking system has been largely tested on phantom mice in order to verify its ability to precisely localize each subject and to reconstruct its path. The achieved and discussed results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking system.

Item-level RFID-based tracing systems are of growing interest both from industrial and scientific standpoints. In such a context, the choice of the most adequate RFID tag, in terms of shape, frequency, size and reading range, is crucial. The potential presence of items containing materials hostile to the electromagnetic propagation exacerbates the problem. In addition, the peculiarities of the different RFID-based checkpoints make the requirements for the tag even more stringent. In this work, the performance of several commercial UHF RFID tags in each step of the pharmaceutical supply chain has been evaluated, confirming the foreseen criticality. On such basis, a guideline for the electromagnetic design of new high-performance tags capable of overcoming such criticalities has been defined. Finally, driven by such guidelines, a new enhanced tag has been designed, realised and tested, demonstrating that high performance item-level tracing systems can actually be implemented also in critical operating conditions. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The adoption of solutions based on Radio Frequency IDentification technology in a wide range of contexts is a matter of fact. In many situations, such as the tracking of small-size living animals, the straightforward use of commercial systems does not ensure adequate performance. Consequently, both the RFID hardware and the software control platform should be tailored for the particular application. In this work, the specific requirements of Near Field Ultra High Frequency RFID reader antennas suitable for small-size animal localization and tracking are identified and a control system in a LabVIEW environment is designed. Afterwards, both hardware and software solutions have been implemented and validated. In particular, an algorithm based on the measured Received Signal Strength Indication, in order to obtain precise localization data, was developed and validated. Finally, the set-up of a first working prototype involving built-in-lab reader antennas has been completed and tested. The achieved results prove the effectiveness of the proposed tracking system.

A Wireless Sensor Network consists of a large number of sensor nodes that are usually battery powered and deployed in large areas in which changing or recharging batteries may be impractical or completely unfeasible. Therefore, energy efficiency represents one of the main design objectives for these networks. Since most of the energy is consumed by the radio communication, the development of Medium Access Control protocols able to minimize the radio energy consumption is a very attractive research area. This paper presents an energy efficient communication protocol and its implementation in the Contiki Operating System. The performances and the portability of the proposed solution are thoroughly evaluated by means of both simulations, carried out using the Contiki simulation tools (i.e., Cooja and MPSim), and test beds based on two different platforms. Obtained results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the sensor nodes power consumption compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard solution already implemented in Contiki.

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges in the pharmaceutical distribution in order to improve track and trace systems. The RFID technology will play a very important role in development of auto-identification solutions. In this paper, we focus on the use of passive UHF tags, in order to analyze a performance comparison between near field and far field UHF RFID systems. Some different passive UHF tags, suitably chosen, have been tested at item-level, i.e. on each single medicine package, simulating each stage of the pharmaceutical supply chain in a controlled laboratory environment. The obtained experimental results, in terms of successful read rates, have shown that the use of passive far field UHF tags represents an advantage solution to guarantee high performance in an item-level tracing system in the whole supply chain.

Wireless Sensor Networks are destined to play a fundamental role in the next-generation Internet, which will be characterized by the Machine-to-Machine paradigm, according to which, embedded devices will actively exchange information, thus enabling the development of innovative applications. It will contribute to assert the concept of Internet of Things, where end-to-end security represents a key issue. In such context, it is very important to understand which protocols are able to provide the right level of security without burdening the limited resources of constrained networks. This paper presents a performance comparison between two of the most widely used security protocols: IPSec and DTLS. We provide the analysis of their impact on the resources of embedded devices. For this purpose, we have modified existing implementations of both protocols to make them properly run on our hardware platforms, and we have performed an extensive experimental evaluation study. The achieved results are not a consequence of a classical simulation campaign, but they have been obtained in a real scenario that uses software and hardware typical of the current technological developments. Therefore, they can help network designers to identify the most appropriate secure mechanism for end-to-end IP communications involving constrained devices.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is going to play a crucial role as auto-identification technology in a wide range of applications such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, ticketing, et cetera. The use of electromagnetic waves to identify, trace, and track people or goods allows solving many problems related to auto-identification devices based on optical reading (i.e. bar code). Currently, high interest is concentrated on the use of Radio Frequency (RF) solutions in healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chain, in order to improve drugs flow transparency and patients’ safety. Unfortunately, there is a possibility that drug interaction with electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by RF devices, such as RFID readers, deteriorate the potency of bioactive compounds. This chapter proposes an experimental multidisciplinary approach to investigate potential alterations induced by EMFs on drug molecular structure and performance. To show the versatility of this approach, some experimental results obtained on two biological pharmaceuticals (peptide hormone-based) are discussed.

The item-level traceability is a very important requirement for many practical application scenarios, where it needs to guarantee perfect transparency for products flow along the whole supply chain. Among these, the pharmaceutical distribution is a very interesting scenario, characterized by many challenges, where, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology will play a very important role. Unfortunately, there are still some technical barriers that are retarding the deployment of these innovative technologies in large-scale. For the pharmaceutical supply chain, there have been concerns raised regarding the potential effects on the quality of drugs due to electromagnetic fields exposure. This work aimed to evaluate potential effects of tracing RFID systems on the molecular structure of biological drugs. In particular, some samples of a commercial human insulin preparation have been exposed for different periods to electromagnetic fields generated by RFID devices. In order to evaluate possible alterations on the molecular structure, the following diagnostic techniques were used: High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). HPLC analysis demonstrated that there is are no differences between the RFID exposed samples and the control. On the contrary, a first and partial NMR analysis detected some changes on the insulin molecule spectra after one hour of exposition to the electromagnetic field. Unfortunately, this approach did not allow us to verify possible damages on the protein because of presence of expicients and low drug concentration. Further investigations, e.g. in vitro functional analysis, are required.

Enabling a sustainable urban mobility is one of primary goals of the so-called Smart Cities vision, and the deployment of smart parking systems represents a key aspect. The proper operation of these systems heavily depends on their ability to automatically detect the presence of vehicles in the parking spaces. To date, this problem is solved by expensive wireless/wired systems. As the car presence is only one bit of information, with importance of knowing the ID of a slot, in this paper we consider the possibility of using Battery Assisted Passive (BAP) tags for those purposes. Specifically, the considered system uses a BAP tag, with the battery replaced by a solar cell. Once the light level is below some thresholds (ensured by car on top of it), the tag stops transmitting the data, and the system recognizes the slot as occupied. The feasibility of the proposed solution is experimentally verified, and first results are reported.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a very promising wireless technology able to trace and track individual objects. The pharmaceutical supply chain is a challenging scenario, where an item-level traceability is crucial to guarantee transparency and safety in the drug flow. Unfortunately, there are still some barriers limiting the large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies. In order to face these challenges, multidisciplinary skills are required. A recent research project has attempted to coordinate heterogeneous activities focused on drug traceability. One of these is related to the evaluation of potential effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields on drugs. This paper aims to briefly describe both the main features of the defined framework for the item-level tracing of drugs on the whole supply chain and the most interesting results obtained by the evaluation of the potential effects of RFID systems on drugs. In particular, the potential alterations of the molecular structure of a commercial human insulin preparation have been analyzed by using investigative techniques such as Reverse Phase-High Pressure Liquid Chromatography and in vitro cell proliferation assays. The experimental results are strongly encouraging the use of RFID-based technologies for item-level tracing systems in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges of many application scenarios. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a very interesting case where the new auto-identification technologies, based on RFID and EPCglobal, will play a very import role. The authors present practical experiences gained from a recent research project on the item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, a discussion on several areas of improvement opportunities for future large-scale deployments of these technologies is reported.

Buildings energy efficiency plays a key role in terms of reducing energy consumption and improving the internal comfort. For this purpose, European standards regulate the use of different insulation systems, applied to the internal or external building envelope. However, different studies demonstrate that considerable thicknesses of insulation layers are inappropriate in our Mediterranean climates. This paper presents an innovative dynamic ventilated insulation system able to overcome condensation and overheating phenomena, also exploiting Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. This system, called S-MUnSTa, is a ventilated external layer equipped with valves of insulating material, for opening (in summer) and closing (in winter) the air channel, with the aim to optimize the thermal performance. Moreover, in order to control and manage the valves, a wireless controller system based on IoT technologies has been adopted. The proposed solution, exploiting a photovoltaic system as power source, has been also compared with a wired one alternative. The combination of building and IoT technologies develops an innovative system with several advantages, such as: the improvement of internal comfort and energy saving during the whole year controlled with a wireless system, the ease of installation and the versatile use in walls and roofs in every building typology.

The Internet of Things (IoT) vision enables the development of a wide range of application scenarios, including the smart lighting systems. Since the electrical energy consumption for street lighting is a significant part of total energy consumption of a city, the development of smart lighting systems represents a very interesting research topic. Moreover, adding communication capabilities and Internet access to these systems allows the development of additional services able to substantially improve citizens' satisfaction and safety. However, the use of the untrusted Internet makes security a primary issue in the design of such applications. Among all the emerging technologies, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) represents as the ideal choice for the development of smart systems, thanks to the ability of sensor nodes to self-configure and self-organize. Several studies on the use of WSNs to develop Smart Lighting System have been recently presented in literature. However, most of them do not take into account security issues and, therefore, propose solutions not usable in a real environment. In this paper the security problem in a Smart Lighting System is analyzed and the main protocols used to minimize the risk of security attacks in a WSN are described.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is more and more adopted in a wide range of applicative scenarios. Nevertheless, in many applications, commercial and general-purpose solutions can be unsuitable as in the case of the tracking of small-size living animals for the behavior analysis. In such a case, the whole RFID hardware, as well as the control software, should be opportunely tailored for the particular application. In this paper, a novel RFID-based approach enabling an effective localization and tracking of small-sized laboratory animals is proposed. It is mainly based on a near-field (NF) RFID multiantenna system working in the UHF bandwidth, to be placed below the animal’s cage, and able to rigorously identify the NF RFID tags implanted in laboratory animals. Once the requirements of the reader antenna have been individuated, an antenna system composed of a matrix of specifically designed segmented loops has been prototyped. Moreover, to improve the effectiveness of the whole tracking system, a properly algorithm based on the measured received signal strength indication has been developed and integrated. It aims at removing potential minor ambiguities of the data captured by the multiantenna system. The whole animal tracking system has been then largely tested on phantom mice to verify its ability to precisely localize each subject and to reconstruct its path. Additionally, a first test performed on living mice has been presented. The achieved and discussed results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in the main auto-identification technologies in many heterogeneous scenarios. The ability to identify and trace individual objects is essential in many business processes, such as manufacturing, logistics, ticketing, and anti-counterfeiting. These contribute substantially to validate the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), although there are many ways to describe an IoT. It can be defined as a world-wide network of uniquely addressable interconnected objects, based on standard communication protocols (1). The core idea of the concept of the IoT is to collect any useful information about the objects of the physical world and to use this information in various applications during the objects’ life cycle. This feature can help organizations to improve existing internal and external business processes and also to create new ones. In many application scenarios, the two key elements that are making this revolution possible are: radio frequency identification (RFID) technology (Wikipedia Foundation) and the EPCglobal international standard (epcglobal). RFID is a rapidly developing technology that uses RF signals for automatic identification of objects. Among the different types (i.e. passive, semi-passive, and active) of RFID transponders, often called ‘tags’, the passive ones are used in most track and trace systems due to their higher range and very low cost, since they require no battery to operate. A typical passive RFID tag consists of an antenna and an integrated circuit chip in ASIC technology. In a passive RFID system, the reader transmits a modulated RF signal, which is received by the tag antenna. The RF voltage generated on the antenna is converted into DC (Direct Current). This voltage powers up the chip, which sends back the information that it contains.

Directional and switched-beam antennas in wireless sensor networks are becoming increasingly appealing due to the possibility to reduce transmission power and consequently extend sensor node lifetime. In this work, a reconfigurable beam-steering antenna is proposed for Wireless Sensor Network applications in the ISM band (f = 2.4-2.4835 GHz). The proposed radiating structure consists of a vertical half-wavelength dipole antenna and eight microstrip antennas composed of a rectangular two-element patch antenna array. These microstrip antennas have a directional radiation pattern in the azimuth plane with a HPBW of nearly 60 degrees. A control circuit consisting of a transmission line, RF-switches and a 4: 16 multiplexer has been designed in order to dynamically switch among nine radiation patterns, eight directional and one omnidirectional. Simulations and experimental results, referred to a low-cost realization on a FR4 substrate with a thickness of 1.6 mm, demonstrate appreciable performance.

This paper evaluates the impact of the EPCglobal international standard and some emerging Radio Frequency (RF) technologies, such as Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC), on the main processes of the fresh vegetables supply chain. Particular attention was focused on the first steps of the supply chain, which include cultivation in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables, known as IV gamma products (i.e., goods ready to be consumed), because they represent crucial points of the considered supply chain. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the current business processes was performed exploiting the experience of a big Italian company, with several locations and different brands. This analysis highlighted some critical aspects in the management of the whole supply chain, from the land to the table of the end-consumer, and allowed us to perform an efficient re-engineering of the main business processes. The re-engineered model was designed by exploiting the potentialities derived from the combined use of innovative technologies, including EPCglobal, RFID, NFC, and DataMatrix. Moreover, this work has led to the definition of important guidelines able to substantially improve both the culture techniques and the vegetables transformation procedures, based on strategic concepts such as precision agriculture, item-level traceability, and integration of heterogeneous Information Systems (IS). The proposed tracing and tracking system, based on EPCglobal standard, is able to guarantee to end-consumer the ability to know the entire history of the purchased product. Moreover, in order to evaluate the potential benefits of the re-engineered processes in a real supply chain, some metrics able to compare the current (AS IS) and reengineered (TO BE) models were considered. In particular, the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) method has been chosen to carry out this analysis on the pilot project implemented in the chosen company. Experimental results allowed us to derive a realistic estimate of the selected performance indicators for the re-engineered model.

In recent years, due the improvement of humans’ living standard, smart homes are receiving an increasing interest. They can provide several useful services such as support for the elderly and disabled people, access control, environmental monitoring, and home automation. Furthermore, with the widespread diffusion of mobile devices (i.e., smartphones, tablets) and their integration with new auto-identification technologies (such as the NFC technology), the need to control and manage the smart home through these devices is increasing. In this context, the main goal of this work is to develop and validate an architecture, both hardware and software, able to monitor and manage a KNX-based home automation system through an Android mobile device in an efficient and safe way. More in detail, a software system able to configure an Android application consistently with the home automation implant was designed and implemented as well as an Android application able to manage the entire home automation system based on the KNX standard. A further Android module, which exploits NFC technology, was developed in order to address the access control issue. A real use case is presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed software system.

The use of item-level tracing systems are becoming more and more important for many application scenarios in order to guarantee major transparency in products flow along the supply chain. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a very interesting case where the new auto-identification technologies, based on RFID and EPCglobal, will play a very import role. The paper reports some experiences obtained by a recent research project focused on tracing and tracking systems in the pharmaceutical supply chain. The proposed framework is described. The validation phase is based on a test bed approach carried out in a controlled test environment able to simulate the whole supply chain. Furthermore, a discussion on several areas of improvement opportunities for future large-scale deployments of these technologies is reported.

This paper attempts to define a methodology for evaluating the potential benefits related to the adoption of innovative technologies such as Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and EPCglobal in some critical processes of a supply chain. The starting point of this work has been a quantitative and qualitative analysis carried out on a particular stakeholder of the pharmaceutical supply chain: the wholesaler. Some experimental measurements, derived by applying the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) method, are discussed. The case study presented allowed us to derive guidelines and indications for the development of a practical unified approach able to evaluate the RFID adoption from different perspectives and easily understandable also by company's top management.

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges of many application scenarios. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a very interesting case where the new auto-identification technologies, based on RFID and EPCglobal, will play a very import role. The authors present practical experiences gained from a recent research project on the item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, a discussion on an extension of the tracing platform able to provide addition services to support clinic and nutritional applications for people with multiple intolerances is reported.

In the Internet of Things, the extreme heterogeneity of sensors, actuators and user devices calls for new tools and design models able to translate the user’s needs in machine- understandable scenarios. The scientific community has proposed different solution for such issue, e.g., the MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) protocol introduced the topic concept as “the key that identifies the information channel to which payload data is published”. This study extends the topic approach by proposing the Web of Topics (WoX), a conceptual model for the IoT. A WoX Topic is identified by two coordinates: (i) a discrete semantic feature of interest (e.g. temperature, humidity), and (ii) a URI-based location. An IoT entity defines its role within a Topic by specifying its technological and collaborative dimensions. By this approach, it is easier to define an IoT entity as a set of couples Topic-Role. In order to prove the effectiveness of the WoX approach, we developed the WoX APIs on top of an EPCglobal implementation. Then, 10 developers were asked to build a WoX-based application supporting a physics lab scenario at school. They also filled out an ex-ante and an ex-post questionnaire. A set of qualitative and quantitative metrics allowed measuring the model’s outcome.

Il tag RFID passivo oggetto di brevetto possiede proprietà elettromagnetiche che lo distinguono dai comuni tag commerciali. Per prima cosa mantiene buone performance anche se l’oggetto da tracciare contiene liquidi e metalli. Inoltre, il tag brevettato ha un diagramma di radiazione tale da permetterne la comunicazione con le antenne-reader anche in condizioni di disallineamento. Infine, il layout dell’antenna del nuovo tag permette di minimizzare problemi di overlapping tra tag dello stesso tipo e quindi di agevolarne l’eventuale lettura multipla. Il tag brevettato è stato testato esaustivamente sullintera supply-chain del farmaco, scelta come riferimento per via delle sue criticità. Anche nelle peggiori condizioni operative quali quelle relative alla tracciabilità di sciroppi (presenza di liquidi) e bombolette spray (presenza di metalli), con presenza di disallineamento tra antenne tag e reader e con molteplici oggetti tracciati contemporaneamente, si sono ottenute percentuali di lettura con successo superiori al 99.7%. Nelle stesse condizioni operative, tutti i tag commerciali testati (circa 10 diverse tipologie tra le più performanti in commercio) hanno fatto registrare percentuali di lettura con successo inferiori all’1%. Infine, la tecnologia utilizzata per la realizzazione del tag brevettato permette di salvaguardare l aspetto dei costi. Si stima infatti che il costo per la realizzazione del tag brevettato è confrontabile con quello di un comune Tag label-type presente in commercio. Le sue dimensioni particolarmente ridotte, inoltre, ne permettono l’agevole integrazione con gli oggetti da tracciare.