Application of IoT in Healthcare: Keys to Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals

A Comprehensive Review of Behavior Change Techniques in Wearables and IoT: Implications for Health and Well-Being

This research paper delves into the effectiveness and impact of behavior change techniques fostered by information technologies, particularly wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, within the realms of engineering and computer science. By conducting a comprehensive review of the relevant literature sourced from the Scopus database, this study aims to elucidate the mechanisms and strategies employed by these technologies to facilitate behavior change and their potential benefits to individuals and society. Through statistical measurements and related works, our work explores the trends over a span of two decades, from 2000 to 2023, to understand the evolving landscape of behavior change techniques in wearable and IoT technologies. A specific focus is placed on a case study examining the application of behavior change techniques (BCTs) for monitoring vital signs using wearables, underscoring the relevance and urgency of further investigation in this critical intersection of technology and human behavior. The findings shed light on the promising role of wearables and IoT devices for promoting positive behavior modifications and improving individuals' overall well-being and highlighting the need for continued research and development in this area to harness the full potential of technology for societal benefit.

An IoT-Based Road Bridge Health Monitoring and Warning System

Recent earthquakes worldwide have led to significant loss of life and structural damage to infrastructure, especially road bridges. Existing bridge monitoring systems have limitations, including restricted detection capabilities, subjectivity, human error, labor-intensive inspections, limited access to remote areas, and high costs. Aging infrastructures pose a critical concern for organizations and government funding policies, showing signs of decay and impending structural failure. To address these challenges, this research proposes an IoT-based bridge health status monitoring and warning system that is wireless, low-cost, durable, and user-friendly. The proposed system builds upon engineering standards and guidelines to classify bridge health status into categories ranging from excellent to collapse condition. It incorporates deflection, vibration, temperature, humidity, and infrared sensors, combined with IoT and a fuzzy logic algorithm. The primary objective is to reduce bridge maintenance costs, extend lifespans, and enhance transportation safety through an early warning system via a mobile application. Additionally, a Google Maps interface has been developed to display bridge conditions along with real-time traffic video. To validate the proposed system, a 3-D prototype model was constructed and tested. Practical testing of the fuzzy logic algorithm aligned with the simulation outcomes, demonstrating expected accuracy in determining bridge health status.

Sustainable development goals applied to digital pathology and artificial intelligence applications in low- to middle-income countries

Digital Pathology (DP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be useful in low- and middle-income countries; however, many challenges exist. The United Nations developed sustainable development goals that aim to overcome some of these challenges. The sustainable development goals have not been applied to DP/AI applications in low- to middle income countries. We established a framework to align the 17 sustainable development goals with a 27-indicator list for low- and middle-income countries (World Bank/WHO) and a list of 21 essential elements for DP/AI. After categorization into three domains (human factors, IT/electronics, and materials + reagents), we permutated these layers into 153 concatenated statements for prioritization on a four-tiered scale. The two authors tested the subjective ranking framework and endpoints included ranked sum scores and visualization across the three layers. The authors assigned 364 points with 1.1-1.3 points per statement. We noted the prioritization of human factors (43%) at the indicator layer whereas IT/electronic (36%) and human factors (35%) scored highest at the essential elements layer. The authors considered goal 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure; average points 2.33; sum 42), goal 4 (quality education; 2.17; 39), and goal 8 (decent work and economic growth; 2.11; 38) most relevant; intra-/inter-rater variability assessment after a 3-month-washout period confirmed these findings. The established framework allows individual stakeholders to capture the relative importance of sustainable development goals for overcoming limitations to a specific problem. The framework can be used to raise awareness and help identify synergies between large-scale global objectives and solutions in resource-limited settings.

Evaluation of the Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on an Activity Recognition Platform for Healthcare Systems

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure peace and prosperity for all by 2030. The 17 SDGs have been designed to end poverty, hunger, AIDS and discrimination against women and girls. Despite the clear SDG framework, there is a significant gap in the literature to establish the alignment of systems, projects or tools with the SDGs. In this research work, we assess the SDG alignment of an activity recognition platform for healthcare systems, called ACTIVA. This new platform, designed to be deployed in environments inhabited by vulnerable people, is based on sensors and artificial intelligence, and includes a mobile application to report anomalous situations and ensure a rapid response from healthcare personnel. In this work, the ACTIVA platform and its compliance with each of the SDGs is assessed, providing a detailed evaluation of SDG 7-ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. In addition, a website is presented where the ACTIVA platform's compliance with the 17 SDGs has been evaluated in detail. The comprehensive assessment of this novel platform's compliance with the SDGs provides a roadmap for the evaluation of future and past systems in relation to sustainability.

Impact of IoT on Achieving Smart Primary Healthcare Building Facilities in Gauteng, South Africa

Processes and services undertaken in smart primary healthcare building facilities capture operational data through advanced monitoring and enable experts to use these building facilities for efficient healthcare service delivery. This study assessed the impact of Internet of Things (IoT) services on achieving efficient primary healthcare in the rural areas of South Africa. The study identified three (3) basic constructs of IoT services. They include IoT location recognition and tracking services, the application of the IoT high-speed communication network-based services, and the application of IoT-based services. The study is quantitative, and a questionnaire was used to collect data from the project managers and healthcare practitioners working with the primary healthcare agency in South Africa. The study found a variable degree of impact between the three (3) IoT constructs and the successful development of primary healthcare building facility services in South Africa. The study recommends adopting IoT essential services for achieving efficient primary healthcare services in the rural areas of South Africa and other developing countries facing similar primary healthcare delivery challenges.

Requirements Engineering for Internet of Things (loT) Software Systems Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is growing, affecting human life and aiming to solve problems in the real world, i.e., in education, healthcare, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and other areas. However, it is a fact that the development of IoT systems is complicated compared to that of traditional software systems, especially in relation to requirements engineering (RE). The RE of IoT systems is not implemented frequently due to their broad aspects, such as the variety of user needs, making these systems difficult to construct. In this sense, the use of loT-based systems has not been well explored by the research community in order to provide well-planned proposals to improve the quality of their performance. In this work, we present a comprehensive and inclusive review of the RE of loT-based systems. To accomplish this, a systematic mapping study (SMS) is presented to evaluate the use of parameters based on the existing literature. SMS is a methodology used for research in the medical field and has recently been implemented in software engineering (SE) to sort and organize research publications to gain knowledge on progress and identify research gaps. In this article, we aim to classify the existing research publications in the current scientific literature regarding RE proposals for IoT software systems and review their implications for future research. This will make it possible to establish lines of research in order to improve the quality of the development of future IoT systems.

Analyzing and visualizing global research trends on COVID-19 linked to sustainable development goals

This study is intended to afford a comprehensive overview of the implications of COVID-19 on progress toward achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set out in the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda and the state of related research activities on COVID-19 linked to the SDGs. Bibliometric techniques and visual mapping are proposed as methodological tools to better approach the objectives of the present work. This includes: retrieving related publications from Scopus database, investigating the trends and growth trajectories of research works, and analyzing the scenarios post-COVID-19 either optimistic or pessimistic outlooks. The national and international contributions and collaboration toward this theme of research are further analyzed at countries, institutions, and sources levels. This analysis indicates that research works conducted on the impacts of COVID-19 on the achievement of the SDGs are still in the immaturity level. The global research productivity on this topic was just 160 documents (0.19% of total global research productivity in all fields of science with relevance to COVID-19). The implications of COVID-19 on good health and well-being, SDG-3, have attracted considerable attention. It is followed by SDG-13 that concerned with climate changes. The post-COVID-19 scenarios showed deep and justified worries in relation to achieving the SDGs by 2030. This study figures the major issues debated in the literature with respect to COVID-19 and its implications on the SDGs. The study, furthermore, attempts to assess the required actions to advance the SDGs post-COVID-19.

More than seven decades of Acta Tropica: Looking back to move into the future

Acta Tropica is an international, peer-reviewed journal advancing scientific research in the fields of tropical medicine and parasitology. This article elucidates the rich history of the journal and speculates about its future. Acta Tropica was launched in 1944 and formed an integral part of the establishment and running of the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel. After two distinct periods of relatively small publication activities (1944-1976 and 1977-1988), in 1989, Acta Tropica was transferred to the Dutch publisher Elsevier. Subsequently, the annual number of publications steadily increased and the scope of the journal broadened to the biology of pathogens and their vectors, to genetics, host-parasite relationships, mechanisms of pathogenicity, diagnostics, and treatment of tropical diseases. The body of published articles contributed to an improved understanding of the prevention, surveillance, control, and elimination of diseases that are intimately linked to poverty, such as malaria and neglected tropical diseases. In recent years, the scope of Acta Tropica was widening to target emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, epidemics and pandemics, interrelations of microbes, viruses, and parasites, co-dependencies of epidemiology, ecology, environment, and climate change. Importantly, non-communicable diseases are gaining interest in low- and middle-income countries due to urbanization, globalization, and rapidly changing life styles, and hence, these issues receive growing prominence. Acta Tropica continues to embrace inter- and, indeed, transdisciplinary research to address pressing global health issues and sustainable development.

Next-Generation Electronics and Sensing Technology

This Special Issue is dedicated to several aspects of next-generation electronics and sensing technology and contains eight papers that focus on advanced sensing devices, sensing systems, and sensing circuits that focus on the state-of-the-art methods for sensing technologies [...].

UJAmI Location: A Fuzzy Indoor Location System for the Elderly

Due to the large number of elderly people with physical and cognitive issues, there is a strong need to provide indoor location systems that help caregivers monitor as many people as possible and with the best quality possible. In this paper, a fuzzy indoor location methodology is proposed in a smart environment based on mobile devices and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons where a set of Received Signal Strength Indicators (RSSI) is received by mobile devices worn by the inhabitants. The use of fuzzy logic and a fuzzy linguistic approach is proposed to deal with the imprecise nature of the RSSI values, which are influenced by external factors such as radio waves, causing significant fluctuations. A case study carried out at the Smart Lab of the University of Jaén (UJAmI Smart Lab) is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, where our proposal is compared with a non-fuzzy logic approach, obtaining an accuracy of 91.63%, approximately 10 points higher than the methodology without using fuzzy logic. Finally, our theoretical proposal is accompanied by a description of the UJAmI Location system, which applies the theory to the functionality of locating elderly people in indoor environments.