Smart city is an urban development plan which is economically sustainable and offer high living standards to its residents. Technology has a key role to play in building smart cities. A smart city infrastructure incorporates various factors like Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Internet of things (IOT), public-private partnerships, social and human capital.

What is Internet of Things (IOT)?

Internet of Things (IOT) is connecting electronics devices (other than computers and smartphones) to internet for efficient monitoring and handling of day to day activities. They can be kitchen appliances, buildings, vehicles, health gadgets, lightings, waste disposal, security systems, energy management etc. These devices are connected to internet and monitored remotely.

The beneficiary of these devices are consumers, government and private enterprises. According to an estimate by Gartner INC, there will be 20 billion IOT devices by 2020.

IOT and Smart Cities

.In urban development ICT and IOT are important building blocks in creating a smart infrastructure for managing ever increasing city population. A smart city needs technological efficiency in transport, communication, safety measures and planning infrastructure.

In order to make cost effective, qualitative and self-sustainable infrastructure construction companies are incorporating IOT devices and solutions in their architecture plan. Governments of both developed and developing countries are working on public private partnerships (PPP) to bring IOT solutions in smart cities creation.

Some research firms estimate that by 2020 there will be investment of $400 billion every year in creating smart cities. Nearly $6 billion will be spent of IOT devices which will generate income of $13 trillion by 2025.

Must have technologies for every Smart City

1. Traffic Management and Parking Solutions

Traffic woes are a major problem faced by city dwellers. IOT devices can help immensely in giving dynamic and intelligent solutions to ever increasing traffic problems and parking space. The IOT devices can help in avoiding traffic jams, suggest feasible time to travel and give parking information about crowded places. IOT monitored traffic signals can function on vehicle density instead of time bands. Parking sensors can suggest a spot free for parking. These measures will save time, energy, gas emissions and maintain an easy flow of traffic.

Many European cities have incorporated these technologies successfully. A crowded city like Paris has minimized its traffic problem by adopting parking sensors. London is also working on its smart parking project that will help drivers in locating free parking spots. These cities are also experimenting on electric car and bike sharing models. Some examples of parking apps in Europe and US are ParkingPanda, SpotHero, Parker, and BestParking.

2. Waste Management

Waste management is a big issue for municipal bodies in urban areas. Large population generates large amount of waste. IOT enabled smart bins, garbage disposal methods, monitoring devices for wastes will help neighborhoods to maintain a clean and green surrounding.

Many waste disposal companies are developing devices powered by renewable energy. Some localities are using solar powered devices to assess the required capacity of garbage bins. Identification of trash in the form of bio-degradable, e-waste, non-degradable will save our environment from further degradation. Both government and private firms are looking for smart solutions which have least impact on our eco-system. Big Belly, Smart Bin, Zero Cycle are some companies which are giving IOT enabled waste management.

3. Security Systems

Safety and security are prime concern of Governments world over. Without technology it is difficult to trace the negative elements in overly crowded towns and cities. Top grade surveillance programs are required to eliminate the suspects. IOT sound sensors, smart video surveillance, smart streetlights and latest drone technology can quickly help police and security personnel in detecting the place of terror, number of gunshots or strikes, suspects involved and number of people affected.

IOT in security systems can also help in efficient monitoring of public places like markets, malls, airports, hotels, metro stations, banks and hospitals. They are must haves in residential and commercial buildings.

The recent surge in the market of security and surveillance products around the globe depict their necessity. Both developing and developed world are vulnerable to terror attacks. IOT in this segment can help tremendously in saving people’s lives and resources.

4. Smart Energy Consumption

Technology has made our lives easier but it has also impacted our environment negatively in last 100 years. Over utilization of natural resources in the form of nonrenewable energy like petrol, diesel, coal, wood has harmed our ecosystem. To safeguard the future of our coming generations’ countries are investing in renewable form of energy like solar, wind and water.

In lighting segment, LEDs are game changer. They reduce cost and excel on longevity factor. It is estimated that United States will convert all its streetlights into LEDS that will save $14million every year.

In renewable energy segment, European countries have taken the lead. Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy have fared well in this segment. China, Australia and Japan are also harnessing solar, wind, hydroelectricity.

The new form of energy consumption will be linked with IOT devices which will help individuals, civic bodies, industries to check energy metrics. This will help in saving water consumption, improve air quality, sewage disposal and effective power generation.

5. Healthcare Services

Modern age has brought in sedentary lifestyles. Even though advancement in medicine and technology has improved ‘Life expectancy’ of human beings, it has also created new kinds of diseases and health problems in urban population. IOT in health sector helps in remote monitoring, smart sensors and activity tracker devices.

Smart cities need smart hospitals which can track patients remotely, provide emergency services quickly, offer preventive measures, analyze patient’s data and utilize them in better research practices. For example, some hospitals have smart wristbands for newborns which alert the staff if baby is taken outside the nursing room.  Also, medical staff receive alerts if any patient is critical or need emergency care.

Apart from medical application, they are creating sustainable development through better utilization of food, energy, hospital waste management, inventory management etc. Future of smart cities will be incomplete without proper health and wellness centers for its residents.

Downfall of Internet of things

Like any other new thing IOT comes with certain disadvantages as well. Foremost is security and privacy. All these devices collect lots of personal data and unless it is not encrypted, it can be shared and misused by a known or unknown. These devices are still in a nascent stage and security experts feel that a lot has to be done in this domain.

Complexity is another issue to be tackled. IOT devices make use of multiple technologies based on different platform or architecture. Problem in one device can malfunction the whole system which might incur more cost and time.

Also while implementing them right assessment of infrastructure and capacity, management of different devices, avoiding interference and checking security lapses must be covered.

As it is still in the development process, new and innovative standards are applied by different organizations. It is essential to form a stable, wholesome and common ground for IOT to overcome the disadvantages, reap the positives and benefit the mankind. In the end, smart cities are ever growing phenomenon and without IOT devices it is impossible to see the future of our cities.

Some IoT devices are able to operate for years on a single battery, but there is demand for devices that will operate even longer, or with much smaller power sources. Some experimental technologies hold the promise of (almost) perpetual power.

Powering small remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors that can’t be connected to an external power source has been one of IoT’s big challenges: you don’t want to be changing the battery on a buried parking sensor or water meter every year.

Thankfully that’s not necessary. One of the main claims for all the low powered wide area radio networks such as LoRaWAN, Sigfox and NB-IoT is that they are sufficiently niggardly with their energy requirements for radio communication that devices using them can cheerfully operate for a decade or so on an AA battery.

But that’s not good enough for some people. In particular if you are embedding something into a human body, you don’t want to be digging it out to change the battery: not even once per decade. So there are a number of companies developing technologies that, they say, will keep an IoT device running indefinitely.

One of the most easily understood, and most plausible, is harvesting the radio frequency (RF) energy that is all around us: radio and TV broadcasts, WiFi, mobile cellular communications and even other IoT networks like LoRaWAN and Sigfox.

Some of the others candidates can only be truly understood with at least a PhD in physics, and seem to violate the laws of physics, but I’m going to attempt to give you some insights into them.

Let’s start with the most easily understood: RF energy harvesting. Such products are already available. Freevolt, for example, claims to have technology that harvests RF energy from wireless and broadcast networks such as 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi and Digital TV.

Evercell: Energy from Thin Air?

Far more interesting, and exotic, is Evercell. According to its developers it will be a postage stamp sized device that will come in three variants producing, respectively, 4.32 microwatts, 400 nanowatts and 800 nanowatts of continuous power at 1.2 volts.

Not a lot, granted, but you could string a whole lot together in series and parallel to generate usable electrical power. And where does that power come from? Well, it’s all around us. At any temperature above absolute zero all matter is in motion and the hotter it gets the more energetic that motion becomes.

Evercell claims to be able to tap that energy, and convert it into electricity. On the face of it that makes the device a perpetual motion machine, almost: you could use it to suck energy out of the environment and power a motor until Doomsday, or more precisely until the Universe was at absolute zero and there was no energy left in the environment.

The second law of thermodynamics, as stated in classic physics at least, says you can’t do that. We encounter this very day in our homes: your fridge extracts energy from its contents by cooling them but consumes more energy than is extracted to achieve that cooling.

Evercell claims its device works by implementing an idea put forward only as a ‘thought experiment’ by pioneer physicist James Clark Maxwell, known as Maxwell’s Demon.

Maxwell’s Demon was able to separate the faster moving particles from the slower ones, thus extracting in the form of these faster mobile particles. But it was only a thought experiment, with no expectation that such a function could be realised.

Evercell essentially claims to have developed technology that mimics the action of Maxwell’s Demon, to put it crudely, in the form of some sort of semi-permeable membrane that lets only the faster particles pass through.

Where it gets interesting, and well beyond me, is that recent studies suggest that the second law of thermodynamics might need some modification and that such a device might be theoretically possible. (If you’ve got a PhD in physics send me an email and I will send you some links).

So, it’s just possible that Evercell is real and will be available to buy someday soon.

Wave Energy, Graphene Style

Even more exotic is graphene as a source of energy. Graphene is exotic enough on its own: a one atom thick layer of carbon with some truly amazing properties.

Now, according to this August 2018 article from the World Economic Forum (WEF), “A team of researchers at the University of Arkansas has found evidence to suggest graphene could also be used to provide an unlimited supply of clean energy.”

There was nothing new in the WEF article; it was basically a rehash of a November 2017 press release from the University of Arkansas. It says: “The research of Paul Thibado, professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, provides strong evidence that the motion of two-dimensional materials could be used as a source of clean, limitless energy.”

Thibado, according to the article, “predicts that his generators could transform our environment, allowing any object to send, receive, process and store information, powered only by room temperature heat.”

In principle at least Thibado’s technology is rather easy to understand. His team discovered that a sheet of graphene is in a constant state of micro-motion, rippling up and down, and he has designed a “Vibration Energy Harvester” to extract energy from this motion.

“A negatively charged sheet of graphene [is] suspended between two metal electrodes. When the graphene flips up, it induces a positive charge in the top electrode, and when it flips down, it positively charges the bottom one, creating an alternating current.”

The samples of graphene are about 10 nanometers by 10 nanometers. He claims each can generate 10-11 watts. At this size, 20,000 could fit on a pinhead.

According to the University of Arkansas, Thibado plans to produce a proof of concept—a device capable of charging a capacitor using only ambient heat and the motion of graphene—within a year.

No mention was made of the energy likely to be available from said capacitor, or how long it would take to charge.

Evercell and Thibado’s experiments have something in common. Evercell’s technology seems to impose order on the random movement of matter via some sort of membrane with selective permeability, and so extract usable energy from the energy present in all matter above absolute zero.

Thibado seems to have discovered some order inherent in the motion of atoms in a sheet of graphene; they have a wave motion that can be harnessed and converted into electrical energy.

If either, or both, of these developments prove to be viable they will have profound and far-reaching impacts.

This article was originally publishedhere on www.iotaustralia.org.au on November 27, 2018.

Written by Stuart Corner, Editor at IoTAustralia.org.au.

Now, let’s get to the specifics of IoT wireless protocols, standards and technologies. There are numerous options and alternatives, but we’ll discuss the most popular ones.

Consideration of peak power requirements via careful design and battery selection can dramatically increase battery runtime and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Most electronic devices exhibit a pulsing behavior, where peak power is much higher than standby power. This includes mobile (i.e., battery-operated) devices. Some common examples of battery-operated devices with pulsing behavior include:

• Wireless sensors that periodically transmit information across a long distance
• Electric hand tools and toys with actuating motors
• Bluetooth audio speakers with high dynamic range
• Medical-device pumps with backup-battery supplies

A major design goal for a mobile device is to maximize battery runtime (no one wants to face the ire directed at Apple over their phones’ battery problems). Typically, the largest design efforts to achieve this involve minimizing standby power through careful selection and implementation of components with low quiescent power. An example of products that do this well are biometric sensors powered by energy harvesting. However, there should be an equal emphasis on designing for peak power, because an inability to support these peaks will result in premature battery replacement.

As a battery loses charge, it diminishes its ability to deliver peak power. This is due to a property of batteries known as internal resistance. This resistance is modeled in series with the battery output, and is a function of the battery’s size, chemistry, age, temperature, and state of charge. Figure 1 shows an equivalent circuit of a battery driving a simple load, with internal resistance shown as parameter ‘r’.

1. Here’s an equivalent circuit of a battery driving a simple load, with internal resistance shown as parameter ‘r’.

As the internal resistance increases, more power is dissipated across it and less is available for the load. Eventually, the internal resistance becomes so large that the battery will not be able to deliver sufficient peak power, especially in a pulsing application. A significant factor of internal resistance is state of charge—as a battery becomes depleted, it increases internal resistance. This behavior is shown in Figure 2.

A pulsing application requires low internal resistance for proper function. For example, consider a scenario where a 3-V battery needs to periodically deliver 0.5 A to a pulsed load such as a smoke alarm. From analysis of Fig. 1, if the battery’s internal resistance is 3 Ω, then the voltage available for the motor is 3 – (3 × 0.5) = 1.5 V, and the motor would not run well at all. If the battery matched the behavior shown in Fig. 2, it would reach this bad state (internal resistance = 3 Ω) when it still had 60% capacity left and would already need to be replaced! This is an example of peak power limiting battery runtime. Ideally, a battery should be usable across its entire range of charge.

Fortunately, several design techniques can prevent this from happening:

1. Peak power pulses can be reduced by introducing large capacitors near the load circuit, by spreading out discharge energy over time. This ability is limited by the size and cost of the capacitors that the device can accommodate.

2. Peak power pulses can also be reduced by slowly ramping up (e.g., soft starting) the load. This is limited by the dynamic requirements of the circuit, and how slowly it can ramp up while still functioning well.

3. Series resistance within the circuit can be lowered through careful design of connectors, wiring, and PCB layout. For very high peak power devices like motors, a small reduction of 100 mΩ can have a noticeable effect. One pro tip is to avoid using battery “spring” connectors like those shown in Figure 3 for high-power applications. These connectors can have hundreds of milliohms of series resistance and thus have a detrimental impact on applications with motors.

5. Finally, choose the right battery for the application. Careful consideration should be paid to internal resistance over the life of the product, to prevent premature battery replacement. Good examples of variation are shown in Figures 4 and 5, which indicate significant differences in internal resistance for coin-cell and alkaline batteries.

3. Avoid battery spring connectors, like the ones pictured here, in high-power applications.

The HelmetFit product, a wireless air pump designed at Bresslergroup, employed several of these techniques to optimize performance and battery life. Careful selection of the internal pump (technique #4) and battery (technique #5) were combined with a soft-start algorithm (technique #2) to maximize battery life while delivering peak performance in all applications.

4. There are significant differences in internal resistance for coin-cell and alkaline batteries. Compare this chart showing alkaline AAA battery internal resistance (IR) vs. depth of discharge to that in Fig. 5. (Source: Radio Shack)

5. Choosing the right battery for the application is key to preventing premature battery replacement. This chart shows coin-cell 2450 battery internal resistance (IR) vs. depth of discharge. (Source: Energizer)

Internal resistance can prevent using the entire battery capacity in pulsing applications. Consideration must be given to peak power requirements, through prudent design and battery selection, to significantly boost battery runtime.

 (This article was first published in Electronic Design as Designing for Peak Power in Mobile Devices.)

Kevin Murphy

Senior Electrical Engineer

Kevin considers reliability to be every product’s legacy. « In the long run, nobody remembers the pains it took to create a product, » he says, « but users appreciate if it works every time. » At Bresslergroup, he’s responsible for electronic hardware and firmware design. He helps clients decide which state-of-the-art features to consider and then focuses on making them a reality. The most enjoyable moment of the process is when he first sees a complex design behave as he’d envisioned.

Medical or healthcare industry exists when our species exists. In modern times, our healthcare industry is far away from what we need. The doctor-patient ratio is over 25000:1 in some less developed area. In some developed country, the ratio is also over 200:1. Nowadays, people are finding a way to increase the number of patients that one doctor manage.

IoT(Internet of things) is the solution about that. With IoT medical devices, the doctors can take care of more patients. There are many benefits of IoT for hospitals and healthcare.

1.  Decreased Costs

When healthcare providers take advantage of the connectivity of healthcare solutions, patient monitoring can be done on a real-time basis, thus significantly cutting down on unnecessary visits by doctors. In particular, home care facilities that are advanced are guaranteed to cut down on hospital stays and re-admissions.

2.  Reduced Errors:

Accurate collection of data, automated workflows combined with data-driven decisions are an excellent way of cutting down on waste, reducing system costs and most importantly minimizing errors.

3.  Enhanced Patient Experience:

The connectivity of the health care system through the internet of things. places emphasis on the needs of the patient. That is, proactive treatments, improved accuracy when it comes to diagnosis, timely intervention by physicians and enhanced treatment outcomes result in accountable care that is highly trusted among patients.

With this solution, there are several advantage:

1. 1 or 2 doctors can manage hundreds of patients(Non-emergency condition)

2. Doctors needn’t collect the data from patients, and they can do more important work.

3. Compared with manual data collecting, the system is more efficient and accurate.

4. Doctors can read the historical record in the database. No worry about record missing.