The technological revolution that has taken place in recent decades, driven by advances and developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has revolutionized the way people communicate, work, travel, live, etc. Cities need to evolve towards intelligent dynamic infrastructures that serve citizens fulfilling the criteria of energy efficiency and sustainability. This article provides an overview of the main smart city applications, and their implementation status in major cities around the world. We also present a study of patents on basic smart city technologies in order to show which countries and companies are making greater efforts to register the intellectual property. The relation between patented technologies and current ongoing smart city applications is also investigated.

Dynamically reconfigurable architectures are emerging as a viable design alternative to implement a wide range of computationally intensive applications. At the same time, an urgent necessity has arisen for support tool development to automate the design process and achieve optimal exploitation of the architectural features of the system. Task scheduling and context (configuration) management become very critical issues in achieving the high performance that digital signal processing (DSP) and multimedia applications demand. This article proposes a strategy to automate the design process which considers all possible optimizations that can be carried out at compilation time, regarding context and data transfers. This strategy is general in nature and could be applied to different reconfigurable systems. We also discuss the key aspects of the scheduling problem in a reconfigurable architecture such as MorphoSys. In particular, we focus on a task scheduling methodology for DSP and multimedia applications, as well as the context management and scheduling optimizations.

Ubiquitous computing has been defined as “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs.” An example of this type of approach is “Smart Sensory Furniture” (SSF) Project. SSF is an ambient assisted living system that allows inferring a potential dangerous action of an elderly person living alone at home. This inference is obtained by a specific sensory layer with sensor nodes fixed into furniture and a reasoning layer embedded in a PC that learns from the users' behavioral patterns and advices when the system detects unusual patterns. This paper aims to explain the SSF sensory layer, which is a distributed signal processing system in a network of sensing objects massively distributed, physically coupled, wirelessly networked, and energy limited. A complete set of experimental test has been carried out. The results show the level of accuracy for each type of sensors and potential use. Finally, the power consumption was experimentally measured and the results show the low maintenance requirements of this solution. The complete system design is described and discussed, including the node mesh details, as well as the type of sensors and actuators and other aspects, such as integration issues and solutions.

The EU funded project i-VITAL investigates an advanced eCall system for motorcycles. Within the consortium three participating SME companies, NZI (helmet manufacturer), Lookwell (garment manufacturer) and CAP (polymer manufacturer) are working together with three research institutes (CETEM, Fraunhofer and TECOS) on a novel vital sign monitoring and accident detection system to be seamlessly integrated into helmets and garments. The project develops and tests sensors to measure vital data of riders in order to enhance the eCall by relevant rider’s data. Next to the eCall functionality, i-VITAL also aims at a continuous analysis of real-time vital data to warn the rider in order to prevent possible accidents or health hazards due to fatigue, sleepiness and inattentiveness respectively. To ensure reliability of the sensor system i-VITAL will develop and integrate energy harvesting capabilities into helmets and garments in order to maximize the duty time of the system. The paper presents the i-VITAL approach for eCall enhancement and vital data acquisition and the first project results

The extensions of the environment with the integration of sensing systems in any space, in conjunction with ubiquitous computing are enabling the so-called Smart Space Sensor Networks. This new generation of networks are offering full connectivity with any object, through the Internet of Things (IoT) and/or the Web, i.e., the Web of Things. These connectivity capabilities are making it feasible to sense the behaviours of people at home and act accordingly. These sensing systems must be integrated within typical elements found at home such as furniture. For that reason, this work considers furniture as an interesting element for the transparent location of sensors. Furniture is a ubiquitous object, i.e., it can be found everywhere at home or the office, and it can integrate and hide the sensors of a network. This work addresses the lack of an exhaustive study of the effect of furniture on signal losses. In addition an easy-to-use tool for estimating the robustness of the communication channel among the sensor nodes and gateways is proposed. Specifically, the losses in a sensor network signal due to the materials found within the communication link are evaluated. Then, this work proposes a software tool that gathers the obtained results and is capable of evaluating the impact of a given set of materials on the communications. This tool also provides a mechanism to optimize the sensor network deployments during the definition of smart spaces. Specifically, it provides information such as: maximum distances between sensor nodes, most suitable type of furniture to integrate sensors, or battery life of sensor nodes. This tool has been validated empirically in the lab, and it is currently being used by several enterprise partners of the Technological Centre of Furniture and Wood in the southeast of Spain.