Technologies and Architectures of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) for Health and Well-being

Abstract

The emerging technology breakthrough of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) is expected to offer promising solutions for food supply chain (FSC) and in-home healthcare (IHH), which may significantly contribute to human health and well-being. In this thesis, we have investigated the technologies and architectures of the IoT for these two applications as so-called Food-IoT and Health-IoT respectively. We intend to resolve a series of research problems about the WSN architectures, device architectures and system integration architectures. To reduce the time-to-market and risk of failure, business aspects are taken into account more than before in the early stage of technology development because the technologies and applications of IoT are both immature today. The challenges about enabling devices that we have addressed include: the WSN mobility and wide area deployment, efficient data compression in resource-limited wireless sensor devices, reliable communication protocol stack architecture, and integration of acting capacity to the low cost intelligent and interactive packaging (I2Pack). Correspondingly, the WAN-SAN coherent architecture of WSN, the RTOS-based and multiprocessor friendly stack architecture, the content-extraction based data compression algorithm, and the CDM-based I2Pack solution are proposed and demonstrated. At the system level, we have addressed the challenges about effective integration of scattered devices and technologies, including EIS and information integration architectures such as shelf-life prediction and real-time supply chain re-planning for the Food-IoT, and device and service integration architectures for the Health-IoT. Additionally, we have also addressed some challenges at the top business level, including the Value Chain Models and Value Proposition of the Food-IoT, and the cooperative ecosystem model of the Health-IoT. These findings are generic and not dependent on our proprietary technologies and devices. To be more generalized, we have demonstrated an effective research approach, the so-called Business-Technology Co-Design (BTCD), to resolve an essential challenge in nowadays research on the IoT -- the lack of alignment of basic technology and practical business requirements. We have shown its effectiveness by our design practice. It could be an instructive example of “the change of mindset” which is essential for the IoT research in the future.