Book Published: A Sneak Peek into Arduino-Based Robot Car Projects Aimed at Disaster Management/Prevention

🥳📚📖 I am pleased to introduce my newly published Book with Igla Hoxha, titled,
A Sneak Peek into Arduino-Based Robot Car Projects
Aimed at Disaster Management/Prevention.
Well done, to all the valuable contributors to the chapters of this work: 🧐👩‍🎓👨‍🎓🤓Jonathan Kilday, Joel Roberts, Paul Munginga, Oluwadamilola Oke, Olakunle Labinjoh, Tchoungoua Nyamsi J, Dominik Cpak, Songtao Yang, Lewis Dillon, XueZhi Cao, Emmanuel Ndali Ngboko, Daniel Bucknor, Abdulla Aljaber and Maryam Ali Al-Khayyat🧐👩‍🎓👨‍🎓🤓 🥳📚💝.
ISBN: 978-613-9-84756-3

In the world of manufacturing, apart from computer systems, a new concept i.e. computer automation has arisen. This concept was originally conceived when computers started to automate things, based on the interaction with the outside world. The significant increase in the trend of automation has introduced Arduino. Having said that, Arduino is a platform that uses different inputs e.g. electronic sensors, lights, motors and other assorted gadgets, to get information from the real world and to make decisions based on that information. What Arduino builds is essentially a robot. Everyone that is interested in creating interactive environments, has the potential of doing so by using this revolutionary device. This book consists of some Arduino projects that are proposed by students. The aim of this book is to provide students with an insight of the projects that can be developed by using the Arduino platform and motivate them for further developments in the field.

2 Papers Published (Presented at IoTNAT 2019, Rome)

Papers:
1- Michael Opoku Agyeman, Zainab Al-Waisi, Igla Hoxha:
Design and Implementation of an IoT-Based Energy Monitoring System for Managing Smart Homes. FMEC 2019: 253-258
2- Michael Opoku Agyeman, Ali Al-Mahmood:
Design and Implementation of a Wearable Device for Motivating Patients With Upper and/or Lower Limb Disability Via Gaming and Home Rehabilitation. FMEC 2019: 247-252

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Had an amazing time with these wonderful minds at IoTNAT 2019 in Rome to share our recent contributions towards the future of Internet of Things (IoT) and to chair a session.

IoTNAT 2019: The Internet of Things (IoT) technology offers unprecedented opportunities to interconnect human beings as well as Machine-to-Machine (M2M), whereby sensors and networks allow all ‘things’ to communicate directly with each other to share vital information allowing us to have an instrumented universe where accurate data is readily available to inform optimal decision making. The IoT is about to enable a range of new capabilities and services far beyond today’s offerings. It will fundamentally change how people go about their lives. According to Gartner, the number of objects connected to the Internet is set to reach 20 billion by 2020. Cisco estimates the number will be close to 26 billion objects by 2020. Others believe the actual number will be even higher with the assumption that any object with a simple micro controller and on-off switch will be connected to the Internet in the near feature. The scale of the IoT is set to have a major economic, social and environmental impacts; the intersection of which forms the future sustainable growth.

Security trustworthiness of Human-as-a-Sensor gathered information

As reported in my earlier posted blogs, HaaS is a concept that promises to help in the improvement of real world problems, yet one of the biggest challenges associated with it is the ability to determine the credibility of the data that is received, as the information is more often generated by unknown sources which are untrusted. HaaS has gained an substantial attention in Internet-connected smartphones, which have developed an information sharing culture in society. In the law enforcement and civil protection space, HaaS is typically used to harvest information regarding physical hazards, crimes and evolving emergencies. The trustworthiness of this information is typically studied in relation to the trustworthiness of the human sensors.

The amount of data generated from mobile devices is greater than ever before. Every time people notice something unusual or noteworthy, they share it with others in social media or using specialised apps. This sharing culture has created an opportunity for harvesting or generating knowledge from the members of the public to facilitate crisis and emergency response. Reliable and trustworthy information received in this manner can help improve emergency responders’ and Law Enforcement Agencies’ (LEA) situational awareness and ability to detect and respond to evolving incidents. This is referred to as the Human-as-a-Sensor (HaaS) paradigm for situational awareness. A key initiative is the TRILLION project, which includes the use of smartphones, mobile apps, wearables and social media to improve community policing, for citizen reporting crimes.

TRILLION’s collaboration with citizens to fight crime makes it an attractive target for cyber criminals. Beyond confidentiality and privacy, attacks against TRILLION may aim to affect availability preventing citizens from accessing it when needed, and integrity, manipulating information, such as the location reported by citizens’ mobile devices. An incident report delivered from a malware-infected mobile device should ideally be handled as an untrusted report regardless of the trustworthiness of the user, but there is no practical way for TRILLION to determine this in real-time and remotely. Beyond strong authentication and encryption, a novel aim in TRILLION and any HaaS wearable devices is to include the capability of gathering information based on the cyber trustworthiness of the platform where they originated from.

The fashion industry- one of the biggest sources of pollution in the world

“You know the colour in fashion next season, by the colours of the rivers in China”-  said Linda Greer, Senior Scientist of Natural Resources Defence Council. According to a recent report, the textile industry emits more greenhouse gas emissions than international shipping and aviation combined. 

Taking into consideration the huge impact of the fashion industry on the pollution (being one of the biggest sources of it), it is the industry’s duty to let people know about the pollution level of the area they are walking in. Except for recycling clothes, by designing a wearable pollution device that changes its colour based on the pollution level, the fashion industry somehow makes up for its damages towards the environment in terms of pollution. 

Implementation of wearable sensors in different sectors

Recently there has been an  upsurge of usage of wearable sensors in many applications such as medical, entertainment, security, and commercial fields. They can be extremely useful in providing accurate and reliable information on people’s activities and behaviours, thereby ensuring a safe living environment. It may be that the smart wearable sensors technology will revolutionize our life, social interaction and activities very much in the same way that personal computers have done a few decades back. They are widely used in fields such as:

  • Security:    Wearable sensors in the form of panic buttons for emergency help have been in use for a long time and are a huge commercial success. Of course for proper utilization the person needing help should be alert and fit enough to press the button. Most importantly, the panic button should be light in weight so that it is comfortable to wear 24/7.
  • Medical sciences:   Wearable sensors have become very popular, especially in the medical sciences, where there are a lot of different applications in monitoring physiological activities. In the medical field, it is possible to monitor patients’ body temperature, heart rate, brain activity, muscle motion and other critical data. It is important to have very light sensors that could be worn on the body to perform standard medical monitoring. It is possible to measure the blood pressure using wearable sensors through a modified volume-oscillometric technique which eliminates the need for an inflatable pressure cuff and using earphone and mobile device. The use of wearable sensors has made it possible to have the necessary treatment at home for patients after an attack of diseases such as heart-attacks, sleep apnea, Parkinson disease and so on. Patients after an operation usually go through the recovery/rehabilitation process where they follow a strict routine. All the physiological signals as well as physical activities of the patient are possible to be monitored with the help of wearable sensors. During the rehabilitation stage the wearable sensors may provide audio feedback, virtual reality images and other rehabilitative services. The system can be tuned to the requirement of individual patient. The whole activity can be monitored remotely by doctors, nurses or caregivers.
  • Sport/Training:    In the area of sport and training there is an increasing trend of using various wearable sensors. Something, for example, measurement of sweat rate which was possible only in the laboratory based system a few years back is now possible using wearable sensors.
  • Elderly support:    A significant amount of research is currently undergoing in the development of a smart sensing system to detect falls of elderly within the home. Falls are the single largest cause of injury in New Zealand  and it may be true for any other country. In New Zealand one in every three people over the age of sixty five years has a fall every year and it increases to one in two for the age of over eighty years. Falls may lead to several major health problems for the elderly and immediate help needs to be provided to reduce the risk of complications. In the absence of quick help, the elderly may suffer pain, go through emotional distress and even develop other medical complications such as dehydration, hypothermia and so on. The wearable smart panic button can also provide a mental peace to the elderly.
  • Air Pollution:   Air pollution exposure is an invisible hazard responsible for seven million premature deaths every year, according to World Health Organization estimates. But the new generation of wearable high-tech devices, paired with the mobile phones we carry, reveals this hazard so that users can see it in real-time. Personal environmental monitors measure air quality and other environmental data and stream that information to users who may otherwise have no idea what they are breathing. Armed with information, wearers might seek cleaner air by moving off a certain street or opening the window to a smoky room.
     

It is now an everyday news that the wearable electronics devices and technologies, such as heart rate monitors, smart watches, tracking devices (including PillCam) and smart glasses (google glass), etc. are experiencing a period of rapid growth. Future wearable technology reports that the wearable technologies will impact future medical technology, affecting our health and fitness decisions, deciding which park to go so the air is not polluted, redefining the doctor-patient relationship and reducing healthcare cost. Looking at the bigger picture, research points out that the wearable electronics technologies will undoubtedly continue to expand in consumer sectors.

Sourcehttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6974987

Wearable pollution devices- useful only to make choices for our daily activities?

Engineers have been designing and marketing small, wearable/portable pollution sensors for several years now.  The sensors are intended to inform the users about how pollution levels change as they change their location.

In fact, air pollution can differ drastically even from one neighbourhood to the next, said Michael Jerrett, chair of the department of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Depending on the type of pollution, you can see a lot of variability or change in the levels of pollution over very short distances,” he said. For example, a cyclist pedalling down a busy road might be exposed to five or even 10 times higher levels of ultrafine particles or carbon monoxide, thanks to traffic, than would a person in a neighbourhood just a few streets over.

Hence, there are practical choices that such sensors can help us make, such as where to go jogging or which parks to take children to play in. Wearable sensors could in theory be useful on a larger scientific scale as well, although the technology may require some improvements before it reaches that point. “I think that most people who work in environmental or spatial epidemiology would agree that the very best assessment you could get of someone’s exposure would be to have them carry a sensor on their person,” Jerrett said. “And to then know where they were and what they were doing, their activity level.”

Most studies of air pollution and premature mortality have tended to rely on models that take little information into account when it comes to the different neighbourhoods people go into on a day-to-day basis or their activity levels at the time. Researchers may be able to recruit large numbers of people to wear these types of sensors and take part in population-level studies, said Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, a research professor at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Spain. He has been involved with projects exploring the utility of personal sensors as part of the CITI-SENSE consortium, a collaboration involving several dozen European institutions aiming to develop community-based environmental monitoring projects. Nieuwenhuijsen said some personal sensors measure pollution concentrations “reasonably well,” and may be useful for the individual, but whether they would  be suitable for larger-scale research projects is still unclear.

“Most of them have not reached a level of precision that we would consider valid for research purposes,” Jerrett noted. For instance, certain factors, such as changes in humidity, are suspected to affect the way some sensors report pollution levels, he said.

“I would say that the current state of the science is there are some sensors that are good enough to detect changes in microenvironments,” he said. “But they do not line up as well as we’d like with a reference instrument that would cost $10,000 and require a lot of labour.” As the technology plays catch-up, Nieuwenhuijsen pointed out that there are other issues to be aware of.

“What you have to be careful of is to put too much responsibility on the individual,” he said. Wearable pollution sensors might allow people to make more informed choices about their daily activities, but policymakers still need to look at pollution through a bigger lens and put measures in place to protect whole cities or regions. In other words, action should be “more on a community basis than an individual basis,” he said.

By designing a wearable pollution device that changes its colour based on the pollution level of the area you are walking in, the invisible is made visible to both individuals and environment-related policymakers. Hence, the burden of actions being taken belongs to both individuals (they decide which place to go based on the colour of their costumes) and institutions (as soon as a lot of red costumes are seen in an area, this is a clear indication  that  environmental measures should be taken within that area). Thus, such wearable devices not only affect people’s daily decisions, but can raise awareness among environmental policymakers as well.

Interesting article in BBC News this morning (2/04/19) involving the use of air-monitoring backpack to measure nitrogen dioxide and the smallest particles, called PM2.5.

Source: BBC News

Full Story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47777103

Highlights:

  • “The countdown has begun to the launch of one of the world’s boldest attempts to tackle air pollution.”
  • “The initiative comes as scientists say the impacts of air pollution are more serious than previously thought.”
  • “One of the things that has troubled me is that because we can’t see the particulate matter, the nitrogen dioxide, the poison, you don’t take it seriously.”
  • “But over the last few decades, research has revealed how gases like nitrogen dioxide and tiny particles, known as particulate matter or PM, can reach deep into the body with the danger of causing lasting damage.”