The rapid development and implementation of smart and IoT (Internet of Things) based technologies have allowed for various possibilities in technological advancements for different aspects of life. The main goal of IoT technologies is to simplify processes in different fields, to ensure a better efficiency of systems (technologies or specific processes) and finally to improve life quality. Sustainability has become a key issue for population where the dynamic development of IoT technologies is bringing different useful benefits, but this fast development must be carefully monitored and evaluated from an environmental point of view to limit the presence of harmful impacts and ensure the smart utilization of limited global resources. Significant research efforts are needed in the previous sense to carefully investigate the pros and cons of IoT technologies. This review editorial is partially directed on the research contributions presented at the 4th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies held in Split and Bol, Croatia, in 2019 (SpliTech 2019) as well as on recent findings from literature. The SpliTech2019 conference was a valuable event that successfully linked different engineering professions, industrial experts and finally researchers from academia. The focus of the conference was directed towards key conference tracks such as Smart City, Energy/Environment, e-Health and Engineering Modelling. The research presented and discussed at the SpliTech2019 conference helped to understand the complex and intertwined effects of IoT technologies on societies and their potential effects on sustainability in general. Various application areas of IoT technologies were discussed as well as the progress made. Four main topical areas were discussed in the herein editorial, i.e. latest advancements in the further fields: (i) IoT technologies in Sustainable Energy and Environment, (ii) IoT enabled Smart City, (iii) E-health – Ambient assisted living systems (iv) IoT technologies in Transportation and Low Carbon Products. The main outcomes of the review introductory article contributed to the better understanding of current technological progress in IoT application areas as well as the environmental implications linked with the increased application of IoT products.
Smart Cities use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to manage more efficiently the resources and services offered by a city and to make them more approachable to all its stakeholders (citizens, companies and public administration). In contrast to the view of big corporations promoting holistic "smart city in a box" solutions, this work proposes that smarter cities can be achieved by combining already available infrastructure, i.e., Open Government Data and sensor networks deployed in cities, with the citizens' active contributions towards city knowledge by means of their smartphones and the apps executed in them. In addition, this work introduces the main characteristics of the IES Cities platform, whose goal is to ease the generation of citizen-centric apps that exploit urban data in different domains. The proposed vision is achieved by providing a common access mechanism to the heterogeneous data sources offered by the city, which reduces the complexity of accessing the city's data whilst bringing citizens closely to a prosumer (double consumer and producer) role and allowing to integrate legacy data into the cities' data ecosystem.
Because of the features provided by an abundance of specialized experimental software packages, personal computers have become prominent and powerful tools in cognitive research. Most of these programs have mechanisms to control the precision and accuracy with which visual stimuli are presented as well as the response times. However, external factors, often related to the technology used to display the visual information, can have a noticeable impact on the actual performance and may be easily overlooked by researchers. The aim of this study is to measure the precision and accuracy of the timing mechanisms of some of the most popular software packages used in a typical laboratory scenario in order to assess whether presentation times configured by researchers do not differ from measured times more than what is expected due to the hardware limitations. Despite the apparent precision and accuracy of the results, important issues related to timing setups in the presentation of visual stimuli were found, and they should be taken into account by researchers in their experiments.
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