The increase of mental illness cases around the world can be described as an urgent and serious global health threat. Around 500 million people suffer from mental disorders, among which depression, schizophrenia, and dementia are the most prevalent. Revolutionary technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) provide us with new capabilities to detect, assess, and care for patients early. This paper comprehensively survey works done at the intersection between IoT and mental health disorders. We evaluate multiple computational platforms, methods and devices, as well as study results and potential open issues for the effective use of IoT systems in mental health. We particularly elaborate on relevant open challenges in the use of existing IoT solutions for mental health care, which can be relevant given the potential impairments in some mental health patients such as data acquisition issues, lack of self-organization of devices and service level agreement, and security, privacy and consent issues, among others. We aim at opening the conversation for future research in this rather emerging area by outlining possible new paths based on the results and conclusions of this work.

The full potential of smart cities is not yet realized, and opportunities continue to exist in relation to the business models which govern service provision in cities. In saying this, we make reference to the waste services made available by councils across cities in the United Kingdom (UK). In the UK, smart waste management (SWM) continues to exist as a service trialed across designated cities, and schemes are not yet universally deployed. This therefore exists as a business model which might be improved so that wider roll-out and uptake may be encouraged. In this paper, we present a proposal of how to revise SWM services through integrating the Internet service provider (ISP) into the relationship alongside home and business customers and the city council. The goal of this model is to give customers the opportunity for a more dynamic and flexible service. Furthermore, it will introduce benefits for all parties, in the sense of more satisfied home and business owners, ISPs with a larger customer base and greater profits, and city councils with optimized expenses. We propose that this is achieved using personalized and flexible SLAs. A proof-of-concept model is presented in this paper, through which we demonstrate that the cost to customers can be optimized when they interact with the SWM scheme in the recommended ways.