Katzis, Konstantinos

Future smart healthcare systems – often referred to as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) – will combine a plethora of wireless devices and applications that use wireless communication technologies to enable the exchange of healthcare data. Smart healthcare requires sufficient bandwidth, reliable and secure communication links, energy-efficient operations, and Quality of Service (QoS) support. The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions into healthcare systems can significantly increase intelligence, flexibility, and interoperability. This work provides an extensive survey on emerging IoT communication standards and technologies suitable for smart healthcare applications. A particular emphasis has been given to low-power wireless technologies as a key enabler for energy-efficient IoT-based healthcare systems. Major challenges in privacy and security are also discussed. A particular attention is devoted to crowdsourcing/crowdsensing, envisaged as tools for the rapid collection of massive quantities of medical data. Finally, open research challenges and future perspectives of IoMT are presented.

The MedSecurance project focus on identifying new challenges in cyber security with focus on hardware and software medical devices in the context of emerging healthcare architectures. In addition, the project will review best practice and identify gaps in the guidance, particularly the guidance stipulated by the medical device regulation and directives. Finally, the project will develop comprehensive methodology and tooling for the engineering of trustworthy networks of inter-operating medical devices, that shall have security-for-safety by design, with a strategy for device certification and certifiable dynamic network composition, ensuring that patient safety is safeguarded from malicious cyber actors and technology 'accidents'.

Recent advances in medical and electronic technologies have introduced the use of Body Area Networks as a part of e-health, for constant and accurate monitoring of patients and the transmission as well as processing of the data to develop a holistic Electronic Health Record. The rising global population, different BAN manufacturers and a variety of medical systems pose the issue of interoperability between BANs and systems as well as the proper way to propagate medical data in an organized and efficient manner. In this paper, we describe BANs and propose the use of certain web technologies to address this issue.

The internet of everything (IoE) is a concept that resides upon four distinctive pillars: people (connecting people in more relevant, valuable ways), data (converting data into intelligence to make better decisions), process (delivering the right information to the right person or right machine at the right time) and things (devices and objects connected to each other, also known as internet of things, IoT). The purpose of this contribution is to align the four IoE pillars to the mobile data sources in order to create a database of significant size, for the medical research society. Each one of the four pillars is analyzed and the possibilities, advantages and disadvantages are discussed.

This chapter investigates the Network Layer aspects that will characterize the merger of the cellular paradigm and the IoT architectures, in the context of the evolution towards 5G-and-beyond, including some promising emerging services as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or Base Stations, and V2X communications.

In this study, we aimed to determine Cypriot primary mathematics teachers’ perspectives and lived experiences during the transition to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. An in-depth online survey combining closed-ended and open-ended questions was administered to sixty-two (n = 62) educators teaching mathematics in public primary schools during the first lockdown in spring, 2020. The data from closed-ended questions were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics, whereas, for the open-ended questions, a thematic analysis approach was employed. Our findings provide useful insights regarding teachers’ self-reported technology backgrounds and levels of instruction regarding the use of technology in mathematics prior to the pandemic, as well their level of preparedness for ERT and the main challenges they faced in implementing ERT of mathematics. Our findings also indicate teachers’ levels of satisfaction with their ERT practices and their beliefs concerning the extent of achievement of the curriculum learning objectives through ERT, and how these varied based on teachers’ self-reported levels of familiarity with technology, their self-reported levels of preparedness for teaching at a distance, and their engagement (or non-engagement) in synchronous instruction during ERT. Teachers’ suggestions, based on their experiences from the lockdown period, regarding how to transform mathematics teaching and learning in the post-COVID-19 era are also presented.

Employing technological advances in communications along with the available aerial and space platforms can enable us, to setup a safety monitoring and management system for delivering proactive and reactive surveillance of our forests. This work stresses the importance of protecting our forests considering the socioeconomic impact they have on our world. It also outlines the available platform technologies and proposes a tool for setting up a monitoring system that employs current technologies. This tool simulates forest fires and uses wireless sensors to monitor the fire. Results show that the number and the location of the sensors in a forest are critical in increasing the chances of sensing the fire on time. Since positioning sensors in an organized manner within a forest is tedious if not impossible to implement, it is recommended that areas with higher flammability are equipped with greater number of sensors.

Network Flying Platforms (NFPs) such as unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned balloons or drones flying at low/medium/high altitude can be employed to enhance network coverage and capacity by deploying a swarm of flying platforms that implement novel radio resource management techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel layered architecture where NFPs, of various types and flying at low/medium/high layers in a swarm of flying platforms, are considered as an integrated part of the future cellular networks to inject additional capacity and expand the coverage for exceptional scenarios (sports events, concerts, etc.) and hard-to-reach areas (rural or sparsely populated areas). Successful roll-out of the proposed architecture depends on several factors including, but are not limited to: network optimisation for NFP placement and association, safety operations of NFP for network/equipment security, and reliability for NFP transport and control/signaling mechanisms. In this work, we formulate the optimum placement of NFP at a Lower Layer (LL) by exploiting the airborne Self-organising Network (SON) features. Our initial simulations show the NFP-LL can serve more User Equipment (UE)s using this placement technique.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will facilitate communications among multiple entities or Things to enable interaction among them in a more extensive manner with endless possibilities for collaboration. These Things will support operations in critical infrastructures, such as in health care. In this work we investigate the scenario of IoT deployment in hospitals to monitor and assist in-hospital patient care. We introduce the notion of trust grading of Things at both the individual and group level, to assess the trustworthiness of entities for patients' progress. Weights are assigned to different sensing nodes as a means of properly aggregating criteria for trust and mitigating associated risks for the patients. Based on the proposed methodology, a GUI is implemented that allows for the visualization of malicious or irregular IoT behavior, and the dynamic calculation of trustworthiness. This work aims to support existing work for Io T deployment in hospitals.

Inspired by the emerging technologies of Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR), the Enlivened Laboratories in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (EL-STEM) project aims to develop a new approach, integrating these technologies into school laboratories, for encouraging secondary school students’ STEM engagement. In particular, EL-STEM’s main objectives are to attract students who might not be interested in STEM-related studies/careers, enhance the interest of those who have already chosen these fields of studies/careers, and improve students’ performance in STEM-related courses. Moreover, EL-STEM provides teachers with high quality professional development opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills to effectively embed AR/MR in teaching and learning. This book chapter aims to provide an overview of the EL-STEM project and describe use cases of Augmented Reality in STEM education.