The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has taken over the business spectrum, and its applications vary widely from agriculture and health care to transportation. A hospital environment can be very stressful, especially for senior citizens and children. With the ever-increasing world population, the conventional patient-doctor appointment has lost its effectiveness. Hence, smart health care becomes very important. Smart health care can be implemented at all levels, starting from temperature monitoring for babies to tracking vital signs in the elderly.

A correct balance of nutrient intake is very important, particularly in infants. When the body is deprived of essential nutrients, it can lead to serious disease and organ deterioration which can cause serious health issues in adulthood. Automated monitoring of the nutritional content of food provided to infants, not only at home but also in daycare facilities, is essential for their healthy development. To address this challenge, this paper presents a new Internet of Things (IoT)-based fully automated nutrition monitoring system, called Smart-Log, to advance the state-of-art in smart healthcare. For the realization of Smart-Log, a novel 5-layer perceptron neural network and a Bayesian network-based accurate meal prediction algorithm are presented in this paper. Smart-Log is prototyped as a consumer electronics product which consists of WiFi enabled sensors for food nutrition quantification, and a smart phone application that collects nutritional facts of the food ingredients. The Smart-Log prototype uses an open IoT platform for data analytics and storage. Experimental results consisting of 8172 food items for 1000 meals show that the prediction accuracy of Smart-Log is 98.6%.

Psychological stress affects physiological parameters of a person. Prolonged exposure to stress can have detrimental effects which might require expensive treatments. Acute levels of stress in people who are already diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia, can cost them their lives. To self-manage this important health problem in the framework of smart healthcare, a deep learning based novel system (Stress-Lysis) is proposed in this article. The learning system is trained such that it monitors stress levels in a person through human body temperature, rate of motion and sweat during physical activity. The proposed deep learning system has been trained with a total of 26,000 samples per dataset and demonstrates accuracy as high as 99.7%. The collected data are transmitted and stored in the cloud which can help in real time monitoring of a person’s stress levels, thereby reducing the risk of death and expensive treatments. The proposed system has the ability to produce results with an overall accuracy of 98.3% to 99.7%, is simple to implement and its cost is moderate. Stress-Lysis can not only help in keeping an individual self-aware by providing immediate feedback to change the lifestyle of the person in order to lead a healthier life but also plays a significant role in the state-of-the-art by allowing computing on the edge devices.

This paper proposes a control strategy for grid-following inverter control and grid-forming inverter control developed for a Solar Photovoltaic (PV)–battery-integrated microgrid network. A grid-following (GFL) inverter with real and reactive power control in a solar PV-fed system is developed; it uses a Phase Lock Loop (PLL) to track the phase angle of the voltages at the PCC and adopts a vector control strategy to adjust the active and reactive currents that are injected into the power grid. The drawback of a GFL inverter is that it lacks the capability to operate independently when the utility grid is down due to outages or disturbances. The proposed grid-forming (GFM) inverter control with a virtual synchronous machine provides inertia to the grid, generates a stable grid-like voltage and frequency and enables the integration of the grid. The proposed system incorporates a battery energy storage system (BESS) which has inherent energy storage capability and is independent of geographical areas. The GFM control includes voltage and frequency control, enhanced islanding and black start capability and the maintenance of the stability of the grid-integrated system. The proposed model is validated under varying irradiance conditions, load switching, grid outages and temporary faults with fault ride-through (FRT) capability, and fast frequency response and stability are achieved. The proposed model is validated under varying irradiance conditions, load switching, grid outages and line faults incorporating fault ride-through capability in GFM-based control. The proposed controller was simulated in a 100 MW solar PV system and 60 MW BESS using the MATLAB/Simulink 2023 tool, and the experimental setup was validated in a 1 kW grid-connected system. The percentage improvement of the system frequency and voltage with FRT-capable GFM control is 69.3% and 70%, respectively, and the percentage improvement is only 3% for system frequency and 52% for grid voltage in the case of an FRT-capable GFL controller. The simulation and experimental results prove that GFM-based inverter control achieves fast frequency response, and grid stability is also ensured.

Image or video exchange over the Internet of Things (IoT) is a requirement in diverse applications, including smart health care, smart structures, and smart transportations. This paper presents a modular and extensible quadrotor architecture and its specific prototyping for automatic tracking applications. The architecture is extensible and based on off-the-shelf components for easy system prototyping. A target tracking and acquisition application is presented in detail to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the proposed design. Complete design details of the platform are also presented. The designed module implements the basic proportional-integral-derivative control and a custom target acquisition algorithm. Details of the sliding-window-based algorithm are also presented. This algorithm performs $20\times $ faster than comparable approaches in OpenCV with equal accuracy. Additional modules can be integrated for more complex applications, such as search-and-rescue, automatic object tracking, and traffic congestion analysis. A hardware architecture for the newly introduced Better Portable Graphics (BPG) compression algorithm is also introduced in the framework of the extensible quadrotor architecture. Since its introduction in 1987, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) graphics format has been the de facto choice for image compression. However, the new compression technique BPG outperforms the JPEG in terms of compression quality and size of the compressed file. The objective is to present a hardware architecture for enhanced real-time compression of the image. Finally, a prototyping platform of a hardware architecture for a secure digital camera (SDC) integrated with the secure BPG (SBPG) compression algorithm is presented. The proposed architecture is suitable for high-performance imaging in the IoT and is prototyped in Simulink. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever proposed hardware architecture for SBPG compression integrated with an SDC.

This article explores the impact of automation on environmental sensing, focusing on advanced technologies that revolutionize data collection analysis and monitoring. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) defines automation as integrating hardware and software components into modern analytical systems. Advancements in electronics, computer science, and robotics drive the evolution of automated sensing systems, overcoming traditional limitations in manual data collection. Environmental sensor networks (ESNs) address challenges in weather constraints and cost considerations, providing high-quality time-series data, although issues in interoperability, calibration, communication, and longevity persist. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs), particularly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), play an important role in environmental monitoring due to their versatility and cost-effectiveness. Despite challenges in regulatory compliance and technical limitations, UAVs offer detailed spatial and temporal information. Pollution monitoring faces challenges related to high costs and maintenance requirements, prompting the exploration of cost-efficient alternatives. Smart agriculture encounters hurdle in data integration, interoperability, device durability in adverse weather conditions, and cybersecurity threats, necessitating privacy-preserving techniques and federated learning approaches. Financial barriers, including hardware costs and ongoing maintenance, impede the widespread adoption of smart technology in agriculture. Integrating robotics, notably underwater vehicles, proves indispensable in various environmental monitoring applications, providing accurate data in challenging conditions. This review details the significant role of transfer learning and edge computing, which are integral components of robotics and wireless monitoring frameworks. These advancements aid in overcoming challenges in environmental sensing, underscoring the ongoing necessity for research and innovation to enhance monitoring solutions. Some state-of-the-art frameworks and datasets are analyzed to provide a comprehensive review on the basic steps involved in the automation of environmental sensing applications.