The rapid aging of the global population has highlighted the need for technologies to support elderly, particularly in healthcare and emotional well-being. Facial expression recognition (FER) systems offer a non-invasive means of monitoring emotional states, with applications in assisted living, mental health support, and personalized care. This study presents a systematic review of deep learning-based FER systems, focusing on their applications for the elderly population. Following a systematic methodology, we analyzed 39 studies published over the last decade, addressing challenges such as the scarcity of elderly-specific datasets, class imbalances, and the impact of age-related facial expression differences. Our findings show that convolutional neural networks remain dominant in FER, and especially lightweight versions for resource-constrained environments. However, existing datasets often lack diversity in age representation, and real-world deployment remains limited. Additionally, privacy concerns and the need for explainable artificial intelligence emerged as key barriers to adoption. This review underscores the importance of developing age-inclusive datasets, integrating multimodal solutions, and adopting explainable artificial intelligence techniques to enhance system usability, reliability, and trustworthiness. We conclude by offering recommendations for future research to bridge the gap between academic progress and real-world implementation in elderly care.

Voice assistants have shown great potential to support older adults at home and improve their quality of life. Nevertheless, its use in nursing home contexts has not been sufficiently explored. The article presents a study carried out with 21 residents, both assisted and autonomous, in a Spanish nursing home. The aim of the study has been to assess the acceptance, and the user experience, both in individual and group interaction with a voice assistant. Aspects analysed include the voice interaction difficulties encountered, the attitudes and emotions felt during interaction, the appropriateness of using games, the usefulness of the display and the feasibility of supporting group interaction. In spite of the challenges encountered, results have been promising, especially regarding group interaction. They have confirmed the feasibility of using voice assistants in nursing home contexts if interaction is adapted to residents’ characteristics and its use is always guided by a mediator.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) provides new opportunities for the coordination of vehicles for enhancing safety and transportation performance. Vehicles can be coordinated for avoiding collisions by communicating their positions when near to each other, in which the information flow is indexed by their geographical positions or the ones in road maps. Vehicles can also be coordinated to ameliorate traffic jams by sharing their locations and destinations. Vehicles can apply optimization algorithms to reduce the overuse of certain streets without excessively enlarging the paths. In this way, traveling time can be reduced. However, IoV also brings security challenges, such as keeping safe from virtual hijacking. In particular, vehicles should detect and isolate the hijacked vehicles ignoring their communications. The current work presents a technique for enhancing security by applying certain prioritization rules, using digital certificates, and applying trust and reputation policies for detecting hijacked vehicles. We tested the proposed approach with a novel agent-based simulator about security in Internet of Things (IoT) for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The experiments focused on the scenario of avoidance of collisions with hijacked vehicles misinforming other vehicles. The results showed that the current approach increased the average speed of vehicles with a 64.2% when these are giving way to other vehicles in a crossing by means of IoT.

Sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT) are useful for many purposes such as military defense, sensing in smart homes, precision agriculture, underwater monitoring in aquaculture, and ambient‐assisted living for healthcare. Efficient and secure data forwarding is essential to maintain seamless communications and to provide fast services. However, IoT devices and sensors usually have low processing capabilities and vulnerabilities. For example, attacks such as the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) can easily hinder sensor networks and IoT devices. In this context, the current approach presents an agent‐based simulation solution for exploring strategies for defending from different DDoS attacks. The current work focuses on obtaining low‐consuming defense strategies in terms of processing capabilities, so that these can be applied in sensor networks and IoT devices. The experimental results show that the simulator was useful for (a) defining defense and attack strategies, (b) assessing the effectiveness of defense strategies against attack ones, and (c) defining efficient defense strategies with low response times.

The Internet of Things is a concept that is increasingly present in our lives. The emergence of intelligent devices has led to a paradigm shift in the way technology interacts with the environment, leading society to a smarter planet. Consequently, new advanced telemetry approaches appear to connect all kinds of devices with each other, with companies, or with other networks, such as the Internet. On the road to an increasingly interconnected world, where critical devices rely on communication networks to provide an essential service, there arises the need to ensure the security and reliability of these protocols and applications. In this paper, we discuss a security‐based approach for MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), which stands out as a very lightweight and widely used messaging and information exchange protocol for IoT (Internet of Things) devices throughout the world. To that end, we propose the creation of a framework that allows for performing a novel, template‐based fuzzing technique on the MQTT protocol. The first experimental results showed that performance of the fuzzing technique presented here makes it a good candidate for use in network architectures with low processing power sensors, such as Smart Cities. In addition, the use of this fuzzer in widely used applications that implement MQTT has led to the discovery of several new security flaws not hitherto reported, demonstrating its usefulness as a tool for finding security vulnerabilities.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) have become a mechanism to separate the control plane and the data plane in the communication in networks. SDNs involve several challenges around their security and their confidentiality. Ideally, SDNs should incorporate autonomous and adaptive systems for controlling the routing to be able to isolate network resources that may be malfunctioning or whose security has been compromised with malware. The current work introduces a novel agent-based framework that simulates SDN isolation protocols by means of trust and reputation models. This way, SDN programmers may estimate the repercussions of certain isolation protocols based on trust models before actually deploying the protocol into the network.

Smart cities still need the appropriate tools for allowing researchers to contribute in this growing field that will change the comfort and qualities of live of citizens. Smart cities can provide services such as informing of the less overcrowded tourist routes, path-finding for avoiding traffic jams, search services for parking, collecting tree branches from streets, and the finding of the nearest available public electric bicycles or cars. The levels of urgencies differ from some situations to others. Examples of urgent matters are the fast transportation critical patients and the removal of obstacles in main roads. Since smart cities are meant to manage huge amounts of requests, priorities should be automated and managed in a flexible way for new scenarios. Smart cities may need citizens to report the service priorities. However, citizens may have different criteria and could abuse the highest priority levels hindering the service performance for really urgent matters. A novel agent-based simulation open-source framework is proposed for testing different policies for normalizing and controlling self-reported priorities, with its simulator called ABS-SmartPriority. This approach is illustrated by simulating two different policies, in which the smart policy outperformed the one used as the control mechanism.

Some works on the researchers cooperation's literature provide the key lines for building research networks and propose new protocols and standards for business to business (B2B) data exchange, but none of them explains how researchers should contact and the procedure to select the most appropriate partner of a research enterprise, institute or university. In this paper, we propose a B2B architecture and protocol between research entities, that uses ebXML protocol. The contacts for cooperation are established based on some defined parameters and an information retrieval system. We explain the information retrieval system, the researcher selection procedure, the XML-based protocol and the workflow of our proposal. We also show the information that has to be exchanged to contact other researchers. Several simulations demonstrate that our proposal is a feasible architecture and may be used to promote the research cooperation. The main purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient procedure for searching project partners.

This paper presents a secure protocol for spontaneous wireless ad hoc networks which uses an hybrid symmetric/asymmetric scheme and the trust between users in order to exchange the initial data and to exchange the secret keys that will be used to encrypt the data. Trust is based on the first visual contact between users. Our proposal is a complete self-configured secure protocol that is able to create the network and share secure services without any infrastructure. The network allows sharing resources and offering new services among users in a secure environment. The protocol includes all functions needed to operate without any external support. We have designed and developed it in devices with limited resources. Network creation stages are detailed and the communication, protocol messages, and network management are explained. Our proposal has been implemented in order to test the protocol procedure and performance. Finally, we compare the protocol with other spontaneous ad hoc network protocols in order to highlight its features and we provide a security analysis of the system.

In contrast with the simple and elegant concept of global computing, also called ubiquitous computing - where daily life objects get now computing capacity and interact among them to provide a wide range of services to users - a major difficulty is arising with the software engineering process to develop applications for these devices. This article discusses the additional parameters that should be taken into account when designing and developing software for ubiquitous devices in ad-hoc networks. In these networks the mobility of the devices could increase the complexity of the requirements to be considered. As a case study, we present a Bluetooth application that has been developed to fulfill a variety of established requirements. The application allows the creation of different types of networks for non-expert users thanks to the context aware capacity of Bluetooth.