Module 5

IoT Case Studies and Future Trends

 Vehicular IoT
The use of connected vehicles is increasing rapidly
across the globe.
However, the evolution of IoT helps to form a
connected vehicular environment to manage the
transportation systems efficiently.
Vehicular IoT is applied in on-road to off-road traffic
management, driver safety for heavy to small vehicles,
and security in public transportation.
In a connected vehicular environment, vehicles are
capable of communicating and sharing their
information.
IoT enables a vehicle to sense its internal and external
environments to make certain autonomous decisions.
Architecture of Vehicular IoT:
The architecture of the vehicular IoT is divided into
three sublayers: device, fog, and cloud.
Device: The device layer is the bottom-most layer,
which consists of the basic infrastructure of the
scenario of the connected vehicle. This layer includes
the vehicles and road side units (RSU). These vehicles
contain certain sensors which gather the internal
information of the vehicles. On the other hand, the
RSU works as a local centralized unit that manages the
data from the vehicles.
Fog: In vehicular IoT systems, fast decision making is
pertinent to avoid accidents and traffic mismanagement.
In such situations, fog computing plays a crucial role by
providing decisions in real-time, much near to the
devices. Consequently, the fog layer helps to minimize
data transmission time in a vehicular IoT system.
Cloud: Fog computing handles the data processing near
the devices to take decisions instantaneously. However,
for the processing of huge data, fog computing is not
enough. Therefore, in such a situation, cloud computing
is used. In a vehicular IoT system, cloud computing
helps to handle processes that involve a huge amount of
data. Further, for long-term storage, cloud computing is
used as a scalable resource in vehicular IoT systems.
Components of vehicular IoT
Sensors: In vehicular IoT, sensors monitor different
environmental conditions and help to make the system more
economical, efficient, and robust. Traditionally, two types of
sensors, internal and external, are used in vehicular IoT
systems.
o Internal: These types of sensors are placed within the vehicle.
The sensors are typically used to sense parameters that are
directly associated with the vehicle. Along with the sensors,
the vehicles are equipped with different electronic
components such as processing boards and actuators. The
internal sensors in a vehicle are connected with the processor
board, to which they transmit the sensed data. Further, the
sensed data are processed by the board to take certain
predefined actions. A few examples of internal sensors are
GPS, fuel gauge, ultrasonic sensors, proximity sensors,
accelerometer, pressure sensors, and temperature sensors.
o External: Sensors used in the smart traffic system that
are capable of sensing vacant parking lots in a
designated parking area. The still images and videos
from cameras are important inputs to generate
decisions in a vehicular IoT system. Therefore, on-road
cameras are widely used as external sensors to capture
still images and videos. The captured images and videos
are processed further, either in the fog or in the cloud
layer, to take certain pre-programmed actions. As an
example, camera sensor can capture the image of the
license plate of an over speeding vehicle at a traffic
signal; the image can be processed to identify the owner
of the vehicle to charge a certain amount of fine.
Similarly, temperature, rainfall, and light sensors are
also used in the vehicular IoT infrastructure.
Satellites: In vehicular IoT systems, automatic vehicle
tracking and crash detection are among the important
available features. Satellites help the system to track
vehicles and detect on-road crashes. The satellite image is
also useful for detecting on-road congestions and road
blocks.
Wireless connectivity: Communication is an important
enabling component. For transmitting the sensed data
from multiple sensors to RSU (roadside unit) and from
RSUs to the cloud, connectivity plays an indispensable
role. In the vehicular IoT scenario, the high mobility of the
vehicles necessitates the connectivity type to be wireless
for practical and real-time data transmission. Different
communication technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
and GSM, are common in the vehicular IoT systems.
Road Side Unit (RSU): The RSU is a static entity that
works collaboratively with internal and external
sensors. Typically, the RSUs are equipped with sensors,
communication units, and fog devices. Vehicular IoT
systems deal with time critical applications, which
need to take decisions in real time. In such a situation,
the fog devices attached to the RSUs process the
sensed data and take necessary action promptly. If a
vehicular system involves heavy computation, the RSU
transmits the sensed data to the cloud end.
Sometimes, these RSUs also work as an intermediate
communication agent between two vehicles.
Cloud and fog computing: In vehicular IoT systems,
fog computing handles the light-weight processes
geographically closer to the vehicles than the cloud.
Consequently, for faster decision making, fog computing
is used in vehicular IoT systems. for a heavy-weight
process, fog computing may not be a suitable option. In
such a situation, cloud computing is more adept for
vehicular IoT systems.
Analytics: Similar to different IoT application domains,
in vehicular IoT, analytics is a crucial component.
Vehicular IoT systems can be made to predict different
dynamic and static conditions using analytics. For
example, strong data analytics is required to predict on-
road traffic conditions that may occur at a location after
an hour.
Advantages of vehicular IoT:
The typical advantages of IoT architectures directly
impact the domain of connected vehicular systems.
Easy tracking: The tracking of vehicles is an essential
part of vehicular IoT. Moreover, the system must know
from which location and which vehicle the system is
receiving the information..
Fast decision making: Most of the decisions in the
connected vehicle environment are time critical.
Therefore, for such an application, fast and active
decision making are pertinent for avoiding accidents.
In the vehicular IoT environment, cloud and fog
computing help to make fast decisions with the data
received from the sensor-based devices.
Connected vehicles: A vehicular IoT system provides
an opportunity to remain connected and share
information among different vehicles.
Easy management: Since vehicular IoT systems consist
of different types of sensors, a communication unit,
processing devices, and GPS, the management of the
vehicle becomes easy. The connectivity among different
components in a vehicular IoT helps in
managing/tracking etc.
Safety: Safety is one of the most important advantages
of a vehicular IoT system. With easy management of the
system, both the internal and external sensors placed at
different locations play an important role in providing
safety to the vehicle, its occupants, as well as the people
around it.
Record: Storing different data related to the
transportation system is an essential component of a
vehicular IoT. The record may be of any form, such as
video footage, still images, and documentation. By
taking advantage of cloud and fog computing
architecture, the vehicular IoT systems keep all the
required records in its database.
Crime assistance in a smart IoT transportation
system:
The system highlights a fog framework for intelligent
public safety in vehicular environments (fog-FISVER).
The primary aim of this system is to ensure smart
transportation safety (STS) in public bus services. The
system works through the following three steps:
I. The vehicle is equipped with a smart surveillance
system, which is capable of executing video processing
and detecting criminal activity in real time.
II. A fog computing architecture works as the mediator
between a vehicle and a police vehicle.
III. A mobile application is used to report the crime to a
nearby police agent.
Architecture:
Healthcare IoT
These technologies have given rise to small, power-
efficient, health monitoring and diagnostic systems.
The development of numerous healthcare
technologies and systems has rapidly increased over
the last few years.
IoT-enabled healthcare devices are in wide use around
the globe for diagnosing human diseases, monitoring
human health conditions, caring/monitoring for
elders, children, and even infants.
IoT-based healthcare systems and services help to
increase the quality of life for common human beings
The basic skeleton of an IoT-based healthcare system
is very similar to the conventional IoT architectures.
IoT-based healthcare services, the sensors are
specifically designed to measure and quantify different
physiological conditions of its users/patients.
Layer 1: Layer 1 contains different physiological sensors
that are placed on the human body. These sensors
collect the values of various physiological parameters.
The physiological data are analyzed to extract
meaningful information.
Layer 2: Layer 1 delivers data to Layer 2 for short-term
storage and low-level processing. The devices that belong
to Layer 2 are commonly known as local processing
units (LPU) or centralized hubs. These units collect the
sensed data from the physiological sensors attached to
the body and process it based on the architecture’s
requirement. Further, LPUs or the centralized hubs
forward the data to Layer 3.
Layer 3: This layer receives the data from Layer 2 and
performs application specific high-level analytics.
Typically, this layer consists of cloud architecture or high-
end servers. The data from multiple patients, which may
be from the same or different locations, are accumulated
in this layer. Post analysis of data, some inferences or
results are provided to the application in Layer 4.
Layer 4: The end-users directly interact with Layer 4
through receiver-side applications. The modes of
accessibility of these services by an end user are typically
through cellphones, computers, and tablets.
Components of healthcare IoT
Sensors: We have already explained that Layer 1
mainly consists of physiological sensors that collect
the physiological parameters of the patient.
Wireless Connectivity: Without proper connectivity
and communication, the data sensed by the
physiological sensors are of no use in an IoT-based
healthcare system. The communication between the
wearable sensors and the LPU is through either wired
or wireless connectivity. Bluetooth and ZigBee.
communication between the LPU and the cloud or
server takes place with Internet connectivity such as
Wi-Fi and WLAN.
Privacy and Security: The privacy and security of
health data is a major concern in healthcare IoT services.
Between LPU and the server/cloud, different networking
devices work via network hops (from one networked
device to another) to transmit the data. If any of these
devices are compromised, it may result in the theft of
health data of a patient, leading to serious security
breaches and ensuing lawsuits.
Analytics: For converting the raw data into information,
analytics plays an important role in healthcare IoT.
Several actors, such as doctors, nurses, and patients,
access the healthcare information in a different
customized format. This customization allows each
actor in the system to access only the information
pertinent to their job/role.
Cloud and Fog Computing: In a healthcare IoT system,
several physiological sensors are attached to a patient’s
body. These sensors continuously produce a huge amount
of heterogeneous data. For storing these huge amounts of
heterogeneous health data, efficient storage space is
essential. to store health data in a healthcare IoT system,
cloud storage space is used. Analytics on the stored data in
cloud storage space is used for drawing various inferences.
Interface: The interface is the most important
component for users in a healthcare IoT system. Among
IoT applications, healthcare IoT is a very crucial and
sensitive application. The user interface must be designed
in such a way that it can depict all the required
information clearly.
Advantages and risk of healthcare IoT
Advantages of healthcare IoT
Real-time: In healthcare sectors, different
components, such as the condition of the patients,
availability of doctors and beds in a hospital, medical
facilities with their monetary charges, can vary
dynamically with time. A healthcare IoT system
enables users, such as doctors, end users at the
patient-side, and staff in a healthcare unit, to receive
real-time updates about the healthcare IoT
components
Low cost: Healthcare IoT systems facilitate users with
different services at low cost. For example, an
authorized user can easily find the availability of the
beds in a hospital with simple Internet connectivity
and a web-browser-based portal. The user need not
visit the hospital physically to check the availability of
beds and facilities.
Easy management: Healthcare IoT is an
infrastructure that brings all its end users under the
same umbrella to provide healthcare services. On the
other hand, in such an infrastructure, the management
of numerous tangible and intangible entities is a
challenging task. However, healthcare IoT facilitates
easy and robust management of all the entities.
Automatic processing: Automatic processing features can
remove manual intervention with a fingerprint
sensor/device. Healthcare IoT enables end-to-end
automatic processing in different units and also
consolidates the information across the whole chain: from a
patient’s registration to discharge.
Easy record-keeping: A particular disease requires
particular treatment, which requires knowledge of a
patient’s health history, along with other details about
them. Therefore, the timely delivery of health data of the
patient to the doctor is important. In such a situation, the
permanent storage of the patients’ health data along with
their respective details is essential. A healthcare IoT enables
the user to keep these records in a safe environment and
deliver them to the authorized user as per requirement.
Easy diagnosis: For diagnosing a disease, a huge chunk
of prior data is required. In a healthcare IoT system, the
diagnosis of the disease becomes easier with the help of
certain learning mechanisms along with the availability
of prior datasets.

Risk in healthcare IoT:

Loss of connectivity: A healthcare IoT system consists
of different physiological sensors that sense and
transmit the sensed data to a centralized unit. Moreover,
continuous data transmission from the patient is
expected in a good healthcare system. Intermittent
connectivity may result in data loss, which may result in
a life-threatening situations for the patient.
Security: A healthcare IoT system contains the health
data of different patients associated with the system.
The healthcare system must keep the data confidential.
This data should not be accessible to any unauthorized
person. On the other hand, different persons and
devices are associated with a healthcare IoT system. In
such a system, the risk of data tampering and
unauthorized access is quite high.
Error: Data analytics helps a healthcare IoT system to
predict the patients’ condition and diagnosis of
diseases. A huge amount of data needs to be fed into the
system in order to perform accurate analytics. Errors in
data may lead to misinterpretation of symptoms and
lead to the wrong diagnosis of the patient
AmbuSens system:
In many developing countries, patients need to be
transferred from primary-care to tertiary-care
hospitals for proper diagnosis and treatment. During
the transit, the hospitals at both ends—the referring
one as well as the referred one—do not have any
information about the patient’s health condition
during transit. In such situations, the hospitals are
unable to suggest any precautionary measures in the
event of some emergency during transit.
Consequently, many patients die during the transit
due to lack of proper suggestive care by medical
experts.
 The Smart Wireless Applications and Networking (SWAN)
laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
developed a system: AmbuSens. The system was primarily funded
by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) of
the Government of India
The primary objectives of the AmbuSens system are:
 Digitization and standardization of the healthcare data, which can
be easily accessed by the registered hospital authorities.
 Real-time monitoring of the patients who are in transit from one
hospital to another. At both hospitals, doctors can access the
patients’ health conditions.
 Accessibility by which multiple doctors can access the patient’s
health data at the same time.
 Provision of confidentiality to the health data of the patients in
the cloud.
 In the AmbuSens system, wireless physiological sensor nodes are
used. These sensor nodes make the system flexible and easy to use.
Architecture:
The AmbuSens system is equipped with different
physiological sensors along with a local hub. These
sensors sense the physiological parameters from the
patient’s body and transmit those to a local data
processing unit (LDPU). The physiological sensors
and LDPU form a wireless body area network
(WBAN). Further, this local hub forwards the
physiological data to the cloud for storing and
analyzing the health parameters. Finally, the data are
accessed by different users.
Layer 1: This layer consists of multiple WBANs
attached to a patient’s body. These WBANs acquire the
physiological data from the patient and transmit them
to the upper layer. The physiological sensors are
heterogeneous, that is, each of these sensors senses
different parameters of the body. In order to deliver
the patient’s physiological data from the sensor node
to the LDPU, it is essential to form a proper WBAN.
The formation of WBAN takes place by connecting
multiple physiological sensor nodes to the LDPU so
that the sensors can transmit the data to the LDPU,
simultaneously.
Layer 2: Layer 2 is responsible for handling the cloud-
related functions. From Layer 1, WBANs attached to
the different patients deliver data to the cloud end.
The cloud is used for the long-term analysis and
storage of data in the AmbuSens system. The previous
health records of the patients are stored in the cloud in
order to perform patient-specific analysis.
Layer 3: In the AmbuSens system, the identity of the
patients remains anonymous. An algorithm is
designed to generate a dynamic hash value for each
patient in order to keep the patient’s identity
anonymous.
Layer 4: The users simply register into the system and
use it as per requirement.
Hardware:
Sensors: The sensors used in the AmbuSens system are non-
invasive. The description of the sensors used for forming the
WBAN in the AmbuSens system are as follows:
I. Optical Pulse Sensing Probe: It senses the
photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal and transmits it to a GSR
expansion module. Typically, PPG signals are sensed from the
ear lobe, fingers, or other location of the human body. Further,
the GSR expansion module transfers the sensed data to a
device in real-time.
II. Electrocardiogram (ECG) unit and sensor: The ECG module
used in AmbuSens is in the form of a kit, which contains ECG
electrodes, biophysical 9” leads, biophysical 18” leads, alcohol
swabs, and wrist strap. Typically, the ECG sensor measures the
pathway of electrical impulses through the heart to sense the
heart’s responses to physical exertion and other factors
affecting cardiac health.
Electromyogram (EMG) sensor: This sensor is used to
analyze and measure the biomechanics of the human
body. Particularly, the EMG sensor is used to measure
different electrical activity related to muscle
contractions; it also assesses nerve conduction, and
muscle response in injured tissue.
Temperature sensor: The body temperature of patients
changes with the condition of the body. Therefore, a
temperature sensor is included in the AmbuSens
system, which can easily be placed on the body of the
patient.
Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensor: The GSR sensor
is used for measuring the change in electrical
characteristics of the skin.
Local Data Processing Unit (LDPU): In AmbuSens,
all the sensors attached to the human body sense and
transmit the sensed data to a centralized device, which
is called an LDPU. An LDPU is a small processing
board with limited computation capabilities. The
connectivity between the sensors and the LDPU
follows a single-hop star topology. The LDPU is
programmed in such a way that it can receive the
physiological data from multiple sensor nodes,
simultaneously. Further, it transmits the data to the
cloud for long-term storage and heavy processing.
Communication Module: Each sensor node consists
of a Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1 standard) module. The
communication between the sensor nodes and the
LDPU takes place with the help of Bluetooth, which
supports a maximum communication range of 10
meters in line-of-sight. The LDPU delivers the data to
the cloud with 3G/4G communication.
Front End
In the AmbuSens system, three actors—doctor,
paramedic/nurse, and patient—are able to participate
and use the services. The web interface is designed as
per the requirements of the actors of the system. Each
of the actors has an option to log in and access the
system. The system provides different scopes for data
accessibility based on the category of an actor.
The system provides the flexibility to a patient to log
in to his/her account and download the details of
his/her previous medical/treatment details. Therefore,
in AmbuSens, the database is designed in an efficient
way such that it can deliver the customized data to the
respective actor.
 IoT Analytics:
Sophisticated data analytics are necessary to identify
hidden patterns. These tools include k-means,
decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), k-nearest
neighbor (KNN), and density-based spatial clustering
of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithms.
Machine learning:
ML is a powerful tool that allows a computer to learn
from past experiences and its mistakes and improve
itself without user intervention. Typically, researchers
envision IoT-based systems to be autonomous and
self-adaptive, which enhances services and user
experience. To this end, different ML models play a
crucial role in designing intelligent systems in IoT by
leveraging the massive amount of generated data and
increasing the accuracy in their operations. The main
components of ML are statistics, mathematics, and
computer science for drawing inferences, constructing
ML models, and implementation, respectively.
Advantages of ML:
Applications fueled by ML open a plethora of
opportunities in IoT-based systems, from triggering
actuators to identifying chronic diseases from images
of an eye. ML also enables a system to identify changes
and to take intelligent actions that relatively imitates
that of a human.
Self-learner: An ML-empowered system is capable of learning
from its prior and run-time experiences, which helps in
improving its performance continuously. For example, an ML-
assisted weather monitoring system predicts the weather
report of the next seven days with high accuracy from data
collected in the last six months. The system offers even better
accuracy when it analyzes weather data that extends back to
three more months.
Time-efficient: ML tools are capable of producing faster
results as compared to human interpretation. For example, the
weather monitoring system generates a weather prediction
report for the upcoming seven days, using data that goes back
to 6–9 months. A manual analysis of such sizeable data for
predicting the weather is difficult and time-consuming.
Moreover, the manual process of data analysis also affects
accuracy. In such a situation, ML is beneficial in predicting the
weather with less delay and accuracy as compared to humans.
Self-guided: An ML tool uses a huge amount of data for
producing its results. These tools have the capability of analyzing
the huge amount of data for identifying trends autonomously. As
an example, when we search for a particular item on an online e-
commerce website, an ML tool analyzes our search trends. As a
result, it shows a range of products similar to the original item
that we searched for initially.
Minimum Human Interaction Required: In an ML algorithm,
the human does not need to participate in every step of its
execution. The ML algorithm trains itself automatically, based on
available data inputs. For instance, let us consider a healthcare
system that predicts diseases. In traditional systems, humans
need to determine the disease by analyzing different symptoms
using standard “if– else” observations. However, the ML
algorithm determines the same disease, based on the health data
available in the system and matching the same with the
symptoms of the patient.
Diverse Data Handling: Typically, IoT systems consist of
different sensors and produce diverse and multi-dimensional
data, which are easily analyzed by ML algorithms. For example,
consider the profit of an industry in a financial year . Profits in
such industries depend on the attendance of laborers,
consumption of raw materials, and performance of heavy
machineries. The attendance of laborers is associated with an
RFID (radio frequency identification)-based system. On the
other hand, industrial sensors help in the detection of machiney
failures, and a scanner helps in tracking the consumption of raw
materials. ML algorithms use these diverse and multi-
dimensional data to determine the profit of the industry in the
financial year.
Diverse Applications: ML is flexible and can be applied to
different application domains such as healthcare, industry, smart
traffic, smart home, and many others. Two similar ML algorithms
may serve two different applications.
Challenges in ML:
 Data Description: The data acquired from different sensors are
required to be informative and meaningful. Description of data is a
challenging part of ML.
 Amount of Data: In order to provide an accurate output, a model must
have sufficient amount of data. The availability of a huge amount of data
is a challenge in ML.
 Erroneous Data: A dataset may contain noisy or erroneous data. On
the other hand, the learning of a model is heavily dependent on the
quality of data. Since erroneous data misleads the ML model, its
identification is crucial.
 Selection of Model: We have already discussed the use of ML
algorithms in different applications. Multiple models may be suitable for
serving a particular purpose. However, one model may perform better
than others. In such cases, the proper selection of the model is pertinent
for ML.
 Quality of Model: After the selection of a model, it is difficult to
determine the quality of the selected model. However, the quality of the
model is essential in an ML-based system.
Types of ML: