Smart offices are dynamically evolving spaces meant to enhance employees’ efficiency, but also to create a healthy and proactive working environment. In a competitive business world, the challenge of providing a balance between the efficiency and wellbeing of employees may be supported with new technologies. This paper presents the work undertaken to build the architecture needed to integrate voice assistants into smart offices in order to support employees in their daily activities, like ambient control, attendance system and reporting, but also interacting with project management services used for planning, issue tracking, and reporting. Our research tries to understand what are the most accepted tasks to be performed with the help of voice assistants in a smart office environment, by analyzing the system based on task completion and sentiment analysis. For the experimental setup, different test cases were developed in order to interact with the office environment formed by specific devices, as well as with the project management tool tasks. The obtained results demonstrated that the interaction with the voice assistant is reasonable, especially for easy and moderate utterances.
Air quality in urban environments has become a central issue of our present society as it affects the health and lives of the population all over the world. The first step in mitigating negative effects is proper measurement of the pollution level. This work presents a portable air pollution measurement system, built from off-the-shelf devices, that is designed to assure user privacy and data authenticity. Data is collected from sensor modules that can be hand carried or installed on vehicles, possibly leading to a vehicular sensor network that may cover a larger area. The main challenge is to provide authenticity for the sensor data while also ensuring user privacy. The proposed system assures authenticity and non-repudiation for the collected data by using group signatures and a blockchain-like structure for secure storage. We use regular key-exchange protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography in order to securely bootstrap a session key, then we benefit from secure tunneling to export data from sensors to the remote server. Post-update tampering is prevented by the use of a blockchain-like structure on the data server. We carry experiments both to determine the computational requirements of the procedures, as well as to measure indicators of air quality on nearby areas.
Water is a vital source for life and natural environments. This is the reason why water sources should be constantly monitored in order to detect any pollutants that might jeopardize the quality of water. This paper presents a low-cost internet-of-things system that is capable of measuring and reporting the quality of different water sources. It comprises the following components: Arduino UNO board, Bluetooth module BT04, temperature sensor DS18B20, pH sensor—SEN0161, TDS sensor—SEN0244, turbidity sensor—SKU SEN0189. The system will be controlled and managed from a mobile application, which will monitor the actual status of water sources. We propose to monitor and evaluate the quality of water from five different water sources in a rural settlement. The results show that most of the water sources we have monitored are proper for consumption, with a single exception where the TDS values are not within proper limits, as they outperform the maximum accepted value of 500 ppm.
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