Telemedicine and in-home technologies
WearUp is a study focusing on Parkinson’s Disease (PD), its interventions, and existing wearable technologies for movement disorders. Along with the advancements of smart textiles, this study looked into the design aspects of the electronic textiles, wearable systems, and experiments for validating the involved technology. The WearUp project describes the algorithms required to process data recorded from sensors integrated into the WearUP glove, Figure 5 depicts this process. In the experiment, the WearUP glove was used to quantify the repeatability and accuracy of finger tapping in both time and amplitude. The setup realized that sensing, communicating, and processing in real-time requires orchestrating information between the glove and mobile device. Mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets are less constrained as far as battery life, storage, and processing capacity.
Figure 1: An overview of WearUP, a smart glove technology for Parkinson’s Disease. The left
side depicts, the glove to be worn during the exercise along its is the embedded Arduino 101
board responsible for streaming the raw data to the tablet. The middle shows finger tapping midexercise.
The right is a real-time stream of processed data originating from the glove.
In the pilot study, nine healthy human participants were asked to perform a finger tapping task. The task involves tapping the pointer finger against the thumb 15 times, relatively quickly. Participants then rested their hands in the fully-opened position for
five seconds. The participants were then asked repeat the finger tapping task at a slower speed. Data was collected from each participant for 3 rounds of this procedure. The participants were instructed to determine their own speeds to evaluate the performance of the WearUp glove in detecting variations in finger tapping velocity. After human patients completed the exercise, a robotic hand repeated the procedure in order to calculate the standard deviation of error when known movements were measured by the WearUP glove.
At the conclusion of the experiment the system was able to consistently detect finger taps and calculate their frequency. The system can also assess the amplitude of the tapping motion. The experiment showed that the breaking down of required processing and delegating those processes to external devices is effective in providing an IoT Service for humans with near real-time feedback.
Smart City in action
New York City has a couple example smart city initiatives. There are multiple projects, with a common general purpose or mission between the applications. The aim is to improve the efficiency of basic city operations to enable more civic services within existing budgetary constraints. While working towards this goal, it is important for the city to address concerns of bandwidth and connectivity issues that pop up during implementation stages. This is one reason why the push for 5G will be a great relief to many of these concerns . Two eye catching projects in New York City are showing progressive initial results:
● The first is from the Accelerated Conservation and Efficiency (ACE) program. They focus on smart indoor lighting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in city agencies. It is especially useful for agencies which must operate 24/7, such as firehouses. They successfully implemented this project and found a 3 million kilowatt-hour reduction in energy consumption. That is to say, it reduced gas emissions by roughly 520 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. This shows how appropriate solutions utilizing new forms of communication to automate control of previously unwatched devices can reduce both the cost and environmental
impact of these devices.
● LinkNYC is another relatively appreciated project. It is a free to use communication network replacing over 7,500 payphones with new Link structures. These structures provide free public WiFi, phone calls, devices charge sets, and a tablet for city information about services, maps and directions. These two specific use cases are by no means exhaustive. However, these cases highlight some of the complexities and advantages of integrated fog computing. In keeping with the order, healthcare and activity tracking is another booming area of interest trying to integrate this technology most appropriately.
