In our increasingly tech-saturated world, from mobile apps and health sensors to autonomous cars and factory robots, we expect these devices to seamlessly integrate into our lives, enhancing safety and convenience. However, as these devices proliferate and their autonomy grows, ensuring they provide unobtrusive, yet effective support becomes crucial. The Horizon Europe KST multi-partner project “Distributed Multi-Sensor Systems for Human Safety and Health” (DistriMuSe) intends to support human health and safety by improved sensing of human presence, behaviour, and vital signs in a collaborative or common environment by means of multi-sensor systems, distributed processing and MachinelDeep Learning (ML/DL) techniques. In this paper, we focus on the DistriMuSe's approach on sports performance and health assessment, focusing on monitoring the physical activity of non-professional and hobby athletes, people who like sports and care about their health, elderly healthy people, and subjects affected by neurological disability (e.g., Parkinson's disease). The overall goal is to measure activity and exertion, estimating performance levels and determining maximum effort. We discuss the overall system-of-systems architecture, focusing on the adopted technologies.

The OPtimization of Electric Vehicle Autonomy (OPEVA) project enhances data aggregation for Electric Vehicles (EVs) by collecting critical real-time data (i.e., vehicle performance, battery health, charging behaviours) through heterogeneous data acquisition devices built on robust HW and integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) protocols. By combining internal sensor data and driver-specific behaviours with external information (e.g., road conditions, charging station availability), OPEVA maximizes vehicles performance, establishing secure and seamless data communication between EVs and the infrastructure, and using IoT and cloud computing tools alongside Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) devices and networks. This paper focuses on the extensible data model ensuring semantic data integrity considering in- and out-vehicle factors, presenting data acquisition solutions dealing with OPEVA's semantic data model and their use in various Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered use cases (e.g., range prediction, route optimization, battery management).

This paper describes the NextPerception project’s outcomes organized as examples motivated by user stories. The project developed next-generation perception sensors and enhanced the distributed intelligence paradigm to build versatile, secure, reliable and proactive human monitoring systems, in turn applied in use cases in health and automotive domains.

Localization services for precise and continuous monitoring of the locations of both humans and vehicles in industrial environments are among the most relevant applications in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) contexts, to maximize safety and optimize operational activities. Unfortunately, localization in industrial scenarios is particularly challenging because targets can generally move freely in both indoor and outdoor areas. In this paper, we propose a localization monitoring architecture based on a prototypical wearable IoT device equipped with Ultra-Wide Band (UWB), inertial, and GNSS/RTK technologies for seamless localization in heterogeneous environments. We focus on a Web of Things (WoT) approach, verifying suitability and limitations in a real use case scenario. Our approach shows that the proposed architecture can effectively enhance the safety of workers, detecting potentially dangerous events and triggering alarms (e.g., via smart buzzers or gas concentration warning devices) based on a cloud WoT architecture.

Nowadays, the need to efficiently process information in Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented heterogeneous scenarios has increased significantly, e.g., in all scenarios where unobtrusive environmental monitoring is beneficial for the involved people (e.g., inside public transport vehicles, indoor workplaces and offices, large public infrastructures, etc.). This objective typically requires the combination of heterogeneous IoT systems, which need to efficiently share information, e.g., through the Web of Things (WoT) paradigm. In this paper, we propose an edge computing-oriented flexible WoT architecture, with distributed intelligence, for air quality monitoring and prediction inside a public transport bus. Our results show that the proposed architecture allows seamless integration of heterogeneous IoT systems according to a WoT perspective, exploiting the device/edge/fog computing continuum and using containerized and secure processing modules.

Research efforts in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) are providing solutions in building new types of “network of networks,” going beyond the technological barriers due to intrinsic limitations of the constrained devices typically used in this context. Thanks to the improvement in communication/networking protocols and the hardware cost reduction, it is now possible to define new IoT architectures, combining the “micro” IoT paradigm, based on short-range radio technologies (e.g., IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11), with the rising “macro” IoT paradigm, based on sub-GHz radio technologies. This allows the implementation of scalable network architectures, able to collect data coming from constrained devices and process them in order to provide useful services and applications to final consumers. In this paper, we focus on practical integration between micro and macro IoT approaches, providing architectural and performance details for a set of experimental tests carried out in the campus of the University of Parma. We then discuss challenges and solutions of the proposed micro-macro integrated IoT systems.