The evolution of intelligent manufacturing has had a profound and lasting effect on the future of global manufacturing. Industry 4.0 based smart factories merge physical and cyber technologies, making the involved technologies more intricate and accurate; improving the performance, quality, controllability, management, and transparency of manufacturing processes in the era of the internet-of-things (IoT). Advanced low-cost sensor technologies are essential for gathering data and utilizing it for effective performance by manufacturing companies and supply chains. Different types of low power/low cost sensors allow for greatly expanded data collection on different devices across the manufacturing processes. While a lot of research has been carried out with a focus on analyzing the performance, processes, and implementation of smart factories, most firms still lack in-depth insight into the difference between traditional and smart factory systems, as well as the wide set of different sensor technologies associated with Industry 4.0. This paper identifies the different available sensor technologies of Industry 4.0, and identifies the differences between traditional and smart factories. In addition, this paper reviews existing research that has been done on the smart factory; and therefore provides a broad overview of the extant literature on smart factories, summarizes the variations between traditional and smart factories, outlines different types of sensors used in a smart factory, and creates an agenda for future research that encompasses the vigorous evolution of Industry 4.0 based smart factories.

Design of a tapered‐slot ultra wideband (UWB) band‐notched wearable antenna is presented in this study. The antenna operation covers the whole UWB frequency spectrum of 7.5 GHz ranging from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, while rejecting the wireless local area network operation at 5.25 GHz band. The performance of the antenna is analysed through simulations and validated through measurements. The antenna makes use of ultra‐thin liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate. The presented return loss and radiation pattern results show that the antenna offers excellent performance in the UWB frequency band in free space. Use of the LCP substrate makes the antenna to efficiently mitigate the bending effects. Moreover, the antenna performs well in on‐body configurations and its working is little affected in adversely hot and humid weather conditions. Furthermore, it offers good on‐body communication link and pulse fidelity. These features make the proposed antenna design a well‐suited choice for hand‐held and wearable UWB applications.

Increasing prevalence of dementia has posed several challenges for care-givers. Patients suffering from dementia often display wandering behavior due to boredom or memory loss. It is considered to be one of the challenging conditions to manage and understand. Traits of dementia patients can compromise their safety causing serious injuries. This paper presents investigation into the design and evaluation of wandering scenarios with patients suffering from dementia using an S-band sensing technique. This frequency band is the wireless channel commonly used to monitor and characterize different scenarios including random, lapping, and pacing movements in an indoor environment. Wandering patterns are characterized depending on the received amplitude and phase information of that measures the disturbance caused in the ideal radio signal. A secondary analysis using support vector machine is used to classify the three patterns. The results show that the proposed technique carries high classification accuracy up to 90% and has good potential for healthcare applications.

A novel study on monitoring and analysis of debilitating condition of patients suffering from neurological disorder is presented. Parkinson's disease is characterized by limited motor-ability of a patient. Freezing-of-gait is a major non-motor condition among ageing patients and its evaluation can reduce the chances of any secondary disorders. In this work, amplitude and phase information of the radio signals observed for a fixed period of time are used to differentiate the motor and non-motor symptoms. The amplitude information is classified using support vector machine while linear transformation is applied to obtain sanitized phase information for detection. The proposed method is highly cost effective and very handy with minimum deployment overhead. The analysis shows that this method also offers a high accuracy level of around 99% based on the observation of a number of patients. These features make it an attractive solution for real-time patient monitoring systems.

The lack of healthcare staff and increasing proportions of elderly population is alarming. The traditional means to look after elderly has resulted in 255,000 reported falls (only within UK). This not only resulted in extensive aftercare needs and surgeries (summing up to £4.4 billion) but also in added suffering and increased mortality. In such circumstances, the technology can greatly assist by offering automated solutions for the problem at hand. The proposed work offers an Internet of things (IoT) based patient bed-exit monitoring system in clinical settings, capable of generating a timely response to alert the healthcare workers and elderly by analyzing the wireless data streams, acquired through wearable sensors. This work analyzes two different datasets obtained from divergent families of sensing technologies, i.e., smartphone-based accelerometer and radio frequency identification (RFID) based accelerometer. The findings of the proposed system show good efficacy in monitoring the bed-exit and discriminate other ambulating activities. Furthermore, the proposed work manages to keep the average end-to-end system delay (i.e., communications of sensed data to Data Sink (DS)/Control Center (CC) + machine-based feature extraction and class identification + feedback communications to a relevant healthcare worker/elderly) below 1 10 th of a second.

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Abstract-Millimetre-Wave frequencies are a front runner contender for the next generation body-centric wireless communications. In this paper, design of a very low profile antenna is presented for body-centric applications operating in the millimetre-wave frequency band centred at 60 GHz. The antenna has an overall size of 14×10.5×1.15 mm 3 and is printed on a flexible printed circuit board. The performance of the antenna is evaluated in off-body, on-body and body-to-body communication scenarios using a realistic numerical phantom and verified through measurements. The antenna has a bandwidth of 9.8 GHz and offers a gain of 10.6 dBi in off-body (free space) configuration while 12.1 dBi in on-body configuration. It also acheives an efficiency of 74% in off-body and 63% in on-body scenario. The small and flexible structure of the antenna along with excellent impedance matching, broad bandwidth, high gain and good efficiency makes it a suitable candidate to attain simultaneous data transmission/reception at millimetre-wave frequencies for the 5G body-centric applications.

The addition of massive machine type communication (mMTC) as a category of Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile communication, have increased the popularity of Internet of Things (IoT). The sensors are one of the critical component of any IoT device. Although the sensors posses a well-known historical existence, but their integration in wireless technologies and increased demand in IoT applications have increased their importance and the challenges in terms of design, integration, etc. This survey presents a holistic (historical as well as architectural) overview of wireless sensor (WS) nodes, providing a classical definition, in-depth analysis of different modules involved in the design of a WS node, and the ways in which they can be used to measure a system performance. Using the definition and analysis of a WS node, a more comprehensive classification of WS nodes is provided. Moreover, the need to form a wireless sensor network (WSN), their deployment, and communication protocols is explained. The applications of WS nodes in various use cases have been discussed. Additionally, an overlook of challenges and constraints that these WS nodes face in various environments and during the manufacturing process, are discussed. Their main existing developments which are expected to augment the WS nodes, to meet the requirements of the emerging systems, are also presented.