Internet of Things Enhanced User Experience for Smart Water and Energy Management

Abstract

Smart environments can engage a wide range of end users with different interests and priorities, from corporate managers looking to improve the performance of their business to school children who want to explore and learn more about the world around them. Creating an effective user experience within a smart environment (from smart buildings to smart cities) is an important factor to success. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing Internet-of-Things-enabled applications within a smart home, school, office building, university, and airport, where the goal has been to engage a wide range of users (from building managers to business travellers) to increase water and energy awareness, management, and conservation.Driven by the idea of using ICT to more effectively and efficiently manage resources, smart environments have emerged in the form of smart cities, smart buildings, smart grids, smart water, and smart mobility. 1 Mark Weiser and colleagues define a smart environment as "a physical world that is richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives, and connected through a continuous network." 2 A key driver in the development of smart environments is the convergence of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, which are driving the

Green Internet of Things (GIoT): Applications, Practices, Awareness, and Challenges

“…There are six distinct characteristics of any smart city: smart economy, smart habitats, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living standards [50]. A smart environment can be one which leverages upon IoT services, and supports resource management (i.e., water\energy) and applications for the efficient and effective use of the environmental resources [51], [52]. A smart water is the real-time management process of monitoring quantity and quality of water [53].…”

Exploration of Solutions for Smart Cities: Challenges in Privacy and Security

“…In implementation of smart cities, data security is one of the key problems and to overcome these security issues, many protection methods have bene proposed. Consequently, the present hi-tech solutions, for the development of smart cities, are described in [1]- [3], [5], [16] & [17] whereas privacy and security concerns are covered in [4], [6], [7] & [18]. From different geographical locations, several continents such as Asian, American and Europeans implemented the concept of smart cities to moderate their cities.…”

“…From different geographical locations, several continents such as Asian, American and Europeans implemented the concept of smart cities to moderate their cities. Among Asian countries, China has implemented smart city concept in two distinct phases, as provided in [3]. Out of these two, the first one is 1.0 that is constructed by increasing the network bandwidth and operate on new generation of information technology i.e., broadband and 4G.…”

“…The Information Communication Technology (ICT) is a big breakthrough in ensuring efficient utilization of energy resources and digitalization of the world [2]. Consequently, the smart cities transfer information (Big data) by effective utilization of energy resources [3]. Additionally, it also provides efficient management system by integrating government and market to create business friendly and comfortable living environment.…”

Design of Wireless Sensors for IoT with Energy Storage and Communication Channel Heterogeneity

“…WSNs are used in many domains, e.g., military, industrial, environmental, residential, and health care [25,26]. Applications include smart homes (systems based on own Wi-Fi platforms [27], or commercial: ESP8266 [28,29]) to smart cities (including smart transportation [30], smart governance [31,32], and smart grid [32])smart utilities(especially water [33,34,35] and energy management [33,35] systems) to smart cars (including software defined networks [36], automotive applications [37], smart parking systems based on ZigBee platforms [38], and car security-based on Arduino Uno board [39]), and precision agriculture (mainly smart farming and irrigation with Wi-Fi platforms, such as ESP8266 [40] and ZigBee platforms, such as eZ430 [41] or 3G/4G/Wi-Fi connections [42] to e-health solutions (mainly patient monitoring and support with Raspberry Pi board [43], or with ZigBee platforms, such as Xbee [44], or with Bluetooth [45]). Depending on their requirements and sensor capabilities, one can define WSNs in terms of size (small to very large scale), sensors’ capacity (homogeneous to heterogeneous), topology, and mobility (static, mobile, and hybrid) [46].…”