Ubiquitous smart environments, equipped with lowcost and easy-deployable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and widespread mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), are opening brand new opportunities in wide-scale urban monitoring. Indeed, MANET and WSN convergence paves the way for the development of brand new Internet of Things (IoT) communication platforms with a high potential for a wide range of applications in different domains. Urban data collection, i.e., the harvesting of monitoring data sensed by a large number of collaborating sensors, is a challenging task because of many open technical issues, from typical WSN limitations (bandwidth, energy, delivery time, etc.) to the lack of widespread WSN data collection standards, needed for practical deployment in existing and upcoming IoT scenarios. In particular, effective collection is crucial for classes of smart city services that require a timely delivery of urgent data such as environmental monitoring, homeland security, and city surveillance. After surveying the existing WSN interoperability efforts for urban sensing, this paper proposes an original solution to integrate and opportunistically exploit MANET overlays, impromptu, and collaboratively formed over WSNs, to boost urban data harvesting in IoT. Overlays are used to dynamically differentiate and fasten the delivery of urgent sensed data over low-latency MANET paths by integrating with latest emergent standards/specifications for WSN data collection. The reported experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness (e.g., limited coordination overhead) of the proposed solution.Index Terms-Mobile ad hoc networks, routing protocols, wireless sensor networks.
How we feel is greatly influenced by how well we sleep. Emerging quantified-self apps and wearable devices allow people to measure and keep track of sleep duration, patterns and quality. However, these approaches are intrusive, placing a burden on the users to modify their daily sleep related habits in order to gain sleep data; for example, users have to wear cumbersome devices (e.g., a headband) or inform the app when they go to sleep and wake up. In this paper, we present a radically different approach for measuring sleep duration based on a novel best effort sleep (BES) model. BES infers sleep using smartphones in a completely unobtrusive way-that is, the user is completely removed from the monitoring process and does not interact with the phone beyond normal user behavior. A sensor-based inference algorithm predicts sleep duration by exploiting a collection of soft hints that tie sleep duration to various smartphone usage patterns (e.g., the time and length of smartphone usage or recharge events) and environmental observations (e.g., prolonged silence and darkness). We perform quantitative and qualitative comparisons between two smartphone only approaches that we developed (i.e., BES model and a sleep-with-the-phone approach) and two popular commercial wearable systems (i.e., the Zeo headband and Jawbone wristband). Results from our one-week 8-person study look very promising and show that the BES model can accurately infer sleep duration (± 42 minutes) using a completely "hands off" approach that can cope with the natural variation in users' sleep routines and environments.
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