IoT Technologies in Chemical Analysis Systems: Application to Potassium Monitoring in Water.

The in-line determination of chemical parameters in water is of capital importance for environmental reasons. It must be carried out frequently and at a multitude of points; thus, the ideal method is to utilize automated monitoring systems, which use sensors based on many transducers, such as Ion Selective Electrodes (ISE). These devices have multiple advantages, but their management via traditional methods (i.e., manual sampling and measurements) is rather complex. Wireless Sensor Networks have been used in these environments, but there is no standard way to take advantage of the benefits of new Internet of Things (IoT) environments. To deal with this, an IoT-based generic architecture for chemical parameter monitoring systems is proposed and applied to the development of an intelligent potassium sensing system, and this is described in detail in this paper. This sensing system provides fast and simple deployment, interference rejection, increased reliability, and easy application development. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that takes advantage of Cloud services by applying them to the development of a potassium smart sensing system, which is integrated into an IoT environment for use in water monitoring applications. The results obtained are in good agreement (correlation coefficient = 0.9942) with those of reference methods.

New Contact Sensorization Smart System for IoT e-Health Applications Based on IBC IEEE 802.15.6 Communications.

This paper proposes and demonstrates the capabilities of a new sensorization system that monitors skin contact between two persons. Based on the intrabody communication standard (802.15.6), the new system allows for interbody communication, through the transmission of messages between different persons through the skin when they are touching. The system not only detects if there has been contact between two persons but, as a novelty, is also able to identify the elements that have been in contact. This sensor will be applied to analyze and monitor good follow-up of hand hygiene practice in health care, following the "World Health Organization Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care". This guide proposes specific recommendations to improve hygiene practices and reduce the transmission of pathogenic microorganisms between patients and health-care workers (HCW). The transmission of nosocomial infections due to improper hand hygiene could be reduced with the aid of a monitoring system that would prevent HCWs from violating the protocol. The cutting-edge sensor proposed in this paper is a crucial innovation for the development of this automated hand hygiene monitoring system (AHHMS).

A New Ammonium Smart Sensor with Interference Rejection.

In many water samples, it is important to determine the ammonium concentration in order to obtain an overall picture of the environmental impact of pollutants and human actions, as well as to detect the stage of eutrophization. Ion selective electrodes (ISEs) have been commonly utilized for this purpose, although the presence of interfering ions (potassium and sodium in the case of NH4+-ISE) represents a handicap in terms of the measurement quality. Furthermore, random malfunctions may give rise to incorrect measurements. Bearing all of that in mind, a smart ammonium sensor with enhanced features has been developed and tested in water samples, as demonstrated and commented on in detail following the presentation of the complete set of experimental measurements that have been successfully carried out. This has been achieved through the implementation of an expert system that supervises a set of ISEs in order to (a) avoid random failures and (b) reject interferences. Our approach may also be suitable for in-line monitoring of the water quality through the implementation of wireless sensor networks.

Active Low Intrusion Hybrid Monitor for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Several systems have been proposed to monitor wireless sensor networks (WSN). These systems may be active (causing a high degree of intrusion) or passive (low observability inside the nodes). This paper presents the implementation of an active hybrid (hardware and software) monitor with low intrusion. It is based on the addition to the sensor node of a monitor node (hardware part) which, through a standard interface, is able to receive the monitoring information sent by a piece of software executed in the sensor node. The intrusion on time, code, and energy caused in the sensor nodes by the monitor is evaluated as a function of data size and the interface used. Then different interfaces, commonly available in sensor nodes, are evaluated: serial transmission (USART), serial peripheral interface (SPI), and parallel. The proposed hybrid monitor provides highly detailed information, barely disturbed by the measurement tool (interference), about the behavior of the WSN that may be used to evaluate many properties such as performance, dependability, security, etc. Monitor nodes are self-powered and may be removed after the monitoring campaign to be reused in other campaigns and/or WSNs. No other hardware-independent monitoring platforms with such low interference have been found in the literature.