Enhancing Safety on Construction Sites: A UWB-Based Proximity Warning System Ensuring GDPR Compliance to Prevent Collision Hazards

Construction is known as one of the most dangerous industries in terms of worker safety. Collisions due the excessive proximity of workers to moving construction vehicles are one of the leading causes of fatal and non-fatal accidents on construction sites internationally. Proximity warning systems (PWS) have been proposed in the literature as a solution to detect the risk for collision and to alert workers and equipment operators in time to prevent collisions. Although the role of sensing technologies for situational awareness has been recognised in previous studies, several factors still need to be considered. This paper describes the design of a prototype sensor-based PWS, aimed mainly at small and medium-sized construction companies, to collect real-time data directly from construction sites and to warn workers of a potential risk of collision accidents. It considers, in an integrated manner, factors such as cost of deployment, the actual nature of a construction site as an operating environment and data protection. A low-cost, ultra-wideband (UWB)-based proximity detection system has been developed that can operate with or without fixed anchors. In addition, the PWS is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. A privacy-by-design approach has been adopted and privacy mechanisms have been used for data protection. Future work could evaluate the PWS in real operational conditions and incorporate additional factors for its further development, such as studies on the timely interpretation of data.

Assessing a Methodology for Evaluating the Latency of IPv6 with SCHC Compression in LoRaWAN Deployments

The Internet of Things (IoT) approach relies on the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a pervasive network protocol. IP acts as a "glue" for interconnecting end devices (on the field side) and end users, leveraging on very diverse lower-level and upper-level protocols. The need for scalability would suggest the adoption of IPv6, but the large overhead and payloads do not match with the constraints dictated by common wireless solutions. For this reason, compression strategies have been proposed to avoid redundant information in the IPv6 header and to provide fragmentation and reassembly of long messages. For example, the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) protocol has been recently referenced by the LoRa Alliance as a standard IPv6 compression scheme for LoRaWAN-based applications. In this way, IoT end points can seamlessly share an end-to-end IP link. However, implementation details are out of the specifications' scope. For this reason, formal test procedures for comparing solutions from different providers are important. In this paper, a test method for assessing architectural delays of real-world deployments of SCHC-over-LoRaWAN implementations is presented. The original proposal includes a mapping phase, for identifying information flows, and a subsequent evaluation phase, in which flows are timestamped and time-related metrics are computed. The proposed strategy has been tested in different use cases involving LoRaWAN backends deployed all around the world. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been tested by measuring the end-to-end latency of IPv6 data in sample use cases, obtaining a delay of less than 1 s. However, the main result is the demonstration that the suggested methodology permits a comparison of the behavior of IPv6 with SCHC-over-LoRaWAN, allowing the optimization of choices and parameters during deployment and commissioning of both infrastructure components and software.

An IoT Based Architecture for Enhancing the Effectiveness of Prototype Medical Instruments Applied to Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

Human errors are probably the most critical cause of the large amount of medical accidents. Medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) have been suggested as a possible approach for detecting and limiting the impact of errors and wrong procedures. However, during the initial development phase of medical instruments, regular MCPS systems are not a viable approach, because of the high costs of repeating complex validation procedures, due to modifications of the prototype instrument. In this work, a communication architecture, inspired by recent Internet of Things (IoT) advances, is proposed for connecting prototype instruments to the cloud, to allow direct and real-time interaction between developers and instrument operators. Without loss of generality, a real-world use case is addressed, dealing with the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis. The proposed infrastructure leverages on a message-oriented middleware, complemented by historical database for further data processing. Two of the most diffused protocols for cloud data exchange (MQTT and AMQP) have been investigated. The experimental setup has been focused on the real-time performance, which are the most challenging requirements. Time-related metrics confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach, resulting in an end-to-end delay on the order of few tens of milliseconds for local networks and up to few hundreds of milliseconds for geographical scale networks.