With the advent of rapid development of wearable technology and mobile computing, huge amount of personal health-related data is being generated and accumulated on continuous basis at every moment. These personal datasets contain valuable information and they belong to and asset of the individual users, hence should be owned and controlled by themselves. Currently most of such datasets are stored and controlled by different service providers and this centralised data storage brings challenges of data security and hinders the data sharing. These personal health data are valuable resources for healthcare research and commercial projects. In this research work, we propose a conceptual design for sharing personal continuousdynamic health data using blockchain technology supplemented by cloud storage to share the health-related information in a secure and transparent manner. Besides, we also introduce a data quality inspection module based on machine learning techniques to have control over data quality. The primary goal of the proposed system is to enable users to own, control and share their personal health data securely, in a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant way to get benefit from their personal datasets. It also provides an efficient way for researchers and commercial data consumers to collect high quality personal health data for research and commercial purposes.

Background Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing. Objective This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution. Methods The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA’s distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification. Results A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing. Conclusions DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.

According to the Industry 4.0 paradigm, all objects in a factory, including people, are equipped with communication capabilities and integrated into cyber-physical systems (CPS). Human activity recognition (HAR) based on wearable sensors provides a method to connect people to CPS. Deep learning has shown surpassing performance in HAR. Data preprocessing is an important part of deep learning projects and takes up a large part of the whole analytical pipeline. Data segmentation and data transformation are two critical steps of data preprocessing. This study analyzes the impact of segmentation methods on deep learning model performance, and compares four data transformation approaches. An experiment with HAR based on acceleration data from multiple wearable devices was conducted. The multichannel method, which treats the data for the three axes as three overlapped color channels, produced the best performance. The highest overall recognition accuracy achieved was 97.20% for eight daily activities, based on the data from seven wearable sensors, which outperformed most of the other machine learning techniques. Moreover, the multichannel approach was applied to three public datasets and produced satisfying results for multi-source acceleration data. The proposed method can help better analyze workers’ activities and help to integrate people into CPS.

IntroductionEssential tremor (ET) shows amplitude fluctuations throughout the day, presenting challenges in both clinical and treatment monitoring. Tremor severity is currently evaluated by validated rating scales, which only provide a timely and subjective assessment during a clinical visit. Motor sensors have shown favorable performances in quantifying tremor objectively.MethodsA new highly portable system was used to monitor tremor continuously during daily lives. It consists of a smartwatch with a triaxial accelerometer, a smartphone, and a remote server. An experiment was conducted involving eight ET patients. The average effective data collection time per patient was 26 (±6.05) hours. Fahn–Tolosa–Marin Tremor Rating Scale (FTMTRS) was adopted as the gold standard to classify tremor and to validate the performance of the system. Quantitative analysis of tremor severity on different time scales is validated.ResultsSignificant correlations were observed between neurologist’s FTMTRS and patient’s FTMTRS auto-assessment scores (r = 0.84; p = 0.009), between the device quantitative measures and the scores from the standardized assessments of neurologists (r = 0.80; p = 0.005) and patient’s auto-evaluation (r = 0.97; p = 0.032), and between patient’s FTMTRS auto-assessment scores day-to-day (r = 0.87; p < 0.001). A graphical representation of four patients with different degrees of tremor was presented, and a representative system is proposed to summarize the tremor scoring at different time scales.ConclusionThis study demonstrates the feasibility of prolonged and continuous monitoring of tremor severity during daily activities by a highly portable non-restrictive system, a useful tool to analyze efficacy and effectiveness of treatment.

Information-intensive transformation is vital to realize the Industry 4.0 paradigm, where processes, systems, and people are in a connected environment. Current factories must combine different sources of knowledge with different technological layers. Taking into account data interconnection and information transparency, it is necessary to enhance the existing frameworks. This paper proposes an extension to an existing framework, which enables access to knowledge about the different data sources available, including data from operators. To develop the interoperability principle, a specific proposal to provide a (public and encrypted) data management solution to ensure information transparency is presented, which enables semantic data treatment and provides an appropriate context to allow data fusion. This proposal is designed also considering the Privacy by Design option. As a proof of application case, an implementation was carried out regarding the logistics of the delivery of industrial components in the construction sector, where different stakeholders may benefit from shared knowledge under the proposed architecture.

Indoor air pollution has been ranked among the top five environmental risks to public health. Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is proven to have significant impacts on people’s comfort, health, and performance. Through a systematic literature review in the area of IAQ, two gaps have been identified by this study: short-term monitoring bias and IAQ data-monitoring solution challenges. The study addresses those gaps by proposing an Internet of Things (IoT) and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT)-based IAQ data-monitoring system. The developed data-monitoring solution allows for the possibility of low-cost, long-term, real-time, and summarized IAQ information benefiting all stakeholders contributing to define a rich context for Industry 4.0. The solution helps the penetration of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based monitoring strategies in the specific case of Occupational Safety Health (OSH). The study discussed the corresponding benefits OSH regulation, IAQ managerial, and transparency perspectives based on two case studies conducted in Spain.

Recent advances in technology have empowered the widespread application of cyber–physical systems in manufacturing and fostered the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In the factories of the future, it is possible that all items, including operators, will be equipped with integrated communication and data processing capabilities. Operators can become part of the smart manufacturing systems, and this fosters a paradigm shift from independent automated and human activities to human–cyber–physical systems (HCPSs). In this context, a Healthy Operator 4.0 (HO4.0) concept was proposed, based on a systemic view of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and wearable technology. For the implementation of this relatively new concept, we constructed a unified architecture to support the integration of different enabling technologies. We designed an implementation model to facilitate the practical application of this concept in industry. The main enabling technologies of the model are introduced afterward. In addition, a prototype system was developed, and relevant experiments were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system architecture and the implementation framework, as well as some of the derived benefits.

The strategic design of organizations in an environment where complexity is constantly increasing, as in the cyber-physical systems typical of Industry 4.0, is a process full of uncertainties. Leaders are forced to make decisions that affect other organizational units without being sure that their decisions are the right ones. Previously to this work, genetic algorithms were able to calculate the state of alignment of industrial processes that were measured through certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure that the leaders of the Industry 4.0 make decisions that are aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization. However, the computational cost of these algorithms increases exponentially with the number of KPIs. That is why this work makes use of the principles of quantum computing to present the strategic design of organizations from a novel point of view: Quantum Strategic Organizational Design (QSOD). The effectiveness of the application of these principles is shown with a real case study, in which the computing time is reduced from hundreds of hours to seconds. This has very powerful practical applications for industry leaders, since, with this new approach, they can potentially allow a better understanding of the complex processes underlying the strategic design of organizations and, above all, make decisions in real-time.