RESUMEN
Smart cities are expected to improve the quality of life of citizens by relying on new paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and its capacity to manage and interconnect thousands of sensors and actuators scattered across the city. At the same time, mobile devices widely assist professional and personal everyday activities. A very good example of the potential of these devices for smart cities is their powerful support for intuitive service interfaces (such as those based on augmented reality (AR)) for non-expert users. In our work, we consider a scenario that combines IoT and AR within a smart city maintenance service to improve the accessibility of sensor and actuator devices in the field, where responsiveness is crucial. In it, depending on the location and needs of each service, data and commands will be transported by an urban communications network or consulted on the spot. Direct AR interaction with urban objects has already been described; it usually relies on 2D visual codes to deliver object identifiers (IDs) to the rendering device to identify object resources. These IDs allow information about the objects to be retrieved from a remote server. In this work, we present a novel solution that replaces static AR markers with dynamic markers based on LED communication, which can be decoded through cameras embedded in smartphones. These dynamic markers can directly deliver sensor information to the rendering device, on top of the object ID, without further network interaction.
RESUMEN
Large-scale wireless sensor networks have not achieved market impact, so far. Nevertheless, this technology may be applied successfully to small-scale niche markets. Shipyards are hazardous working environments with many potential risks to worker safety. Toxic gases generated in soldering processes in enclosed spaces (e.g., cargo holds) are one such risk. The dynamic environment of a ship under construction makes it very difficult to plan gas detection fixed infrastructures connected to external monitoring stations via wired links. While portable devices with gas level indicators exist, they require workers to monitor measurements, often in situations where they are focused on other tasks for relatively long periods. In this work, we present a wireless multihop remote gas monitoring system for shipyard environments that has been tested in a real ship under construction. Using this system, we validate IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee wireless networks as a suitable technology to connect gas detectors to control stations outside the ships. These networks have the added benefit that they reconfigure themselves dynamically in case of network failure or redeployment, for example when a relay is moved to a new location. Performance measurements include round trip time (which determines the alert response time for safety teams) and link quality indicator and packet error rate (which determine communication robustness).