Smartphone as a device for managing and monitoring Environment in an IoT network

Last Updated 6 months ago by Kenya Engineer

The past couples of years have seen an increased attention in the internet of things (IoT) transcending industry, academia and governments. Its vision is everything will be equipped with processing, sensing and actuating capabilities and be connected to the internet to deliver prospective benefits. To be realistic there is need for ubiquitous IoT gateway to connect together things for data analysis, obtain sensing data and make independent decisions. Sensor enabled mobile phone are now the center of next revolution in environment monitoring, social networks green applications and transport systems because they are pervasive with many embedded sensors that serves to collect ,process and distribute data around people. Smartphone can be augmented to provide sensing nodes as well as give gateway functionalities to the internet and cloud. The role of the gateway improved smartphone is to interface wireless sensor network (WSN) data then enrich data using smartphone embedded sensors before they are send to remote server. The question is it possible to gather adequate information using smartphone?

Development of Internet of things (IoT) has brought connectivity of most devices and instigated a new kind of data flow. It is believe that IoT is part of the future Internet and will embrace billions of intelligent communicating ‘things’. The imminent Internet will comprise of heterogeneously connected devices that will further outspread the borders of the world with physical entities and virtual components .The vision of IoT is to convey even further connectivity and interface among the simplest and most common devices (e.g., light bulbs, grains, TV fridges) fetching more and more devices into the connected world. Providing a good connection to such wide number of devices is a big challenge. Smartphone has mass diffusion and are equipped with several communication interfaces with storage, computing capabilities and also comes with embedded sensors. Smartphone can be used as a sensor node as well as a gateway in the design of a model capable of managing the environment.

Cloud computing is capable of holding up many users with their increasing amount of data. There is a focus on a novel paradigm where Cloud and IoT are amalgamated together anticipated as an enabler of an enormous number of application scenarios. The emphasis on the incorporation of Cloud and IoT is called Cloud IoT paradigm. Experiments have shown that  computational power of present Smartphone can put up with more set of wireless standards; this makes it conceivable to link IoT devices to the mobile computing platform thus novel IoT applications. The phone incorporated with Internet of things and cloud computing will initiate revolution of myriad industrial monitoring and management systems by supporting integrated data analysis and process automation. Connectivity to wide area network is primary to gather sensed data or to direct control information to and from IoT field devices. Mobile phones providing a hub role can play as the gateway for personal IoT environment, similarly with their embedded sensors can be used for sensing, consequently capability of managing and monitoring environmental safety. Cloud computing has made sharing and accessing data convenient and working with big streams of data easy as well as manageable. These technologies supports products or physical objects to store, send or receive information in ways that could change the way we do things. IoT is for that reason bringing more devices into the connected world, whereas cloud computing is able to support many users and their increasing amount of data.  It is apparent that these two technologies coming together and employing Smartphone as the gateway as well as a sensor node is a plus. Most of the commercial IoT devices, universally connected mobile platforms can make available inclusive connectivity and permit numerous applications. Nonetheless, the types of IoT resource-utilizing applications are still limited due to the outmoded stovepipe software architecture, where the vendors deliver supporting software on an end-to-end basis.

Participants must  be willing to use mobile app to play a part in the sensing .Either opportunistic sensing in which sensing and streaming happens automatically if the required criteria is met or  participatory sensing where sensing and streaming is manually achieved by the participants. The sensed data from internal sensors in the smartphone and wireless sensor nodes external to the phone can connect to the wireless interface using Bluetooth low energy that is popular interface for connecting sensor nodes to the smartphones. Irrespective of whether the sensor is internal to the smartphone or outside the sensed data must be available via API within the smartphone software development environment in order to be used directly or send to the cloud through any internet connectivity e.g. Wi-Fi.

Smartphones are carried around daily by people thus have an important role in the internet of things because they have several supporting communication interface and protocols, they can be attractive for opportunistic gateway functionality when occurring in the vicinity of WSN. Several sensor are embedded in the device. They include barometer sensor used to track changes in atmospheric pressure and to estimate weather conditions and altitude. The Bluetooth sensor used to discover nearby Bluetooth devices that are in discoverable mode. The camera can be used for taking pictures, video calls, and scanning QR codes (Quick Response Codes). The compass sensor can be used to detect the orientation and direction of the phone. Global Positioning System (GPS) sensor uses satellite information for localization of the mobile phone. The gyro sensor is useful to measure the phone’s orientation and is used for gesture recognition in gaming related applications. Microphone is a fundamental sensor and is present in every mobile phone it can be used to identify the speaker, detect the user’s emotions, and to determine noise levels in the environment. Near Field Communication (NFC) chip in a phone can be useful for short range communication between similar devices usually no more than four centimeters apart. Light sensor is useful in detection of the ambient light levels in the environment of the phone. Proximity sensor is used to detect if an object is blocking the surface of phone, the screen of the mobile phone hence can be utilized as a sensor to detect if the user is interacting with the phone. We may regard the Wi-Fi and cellular radios in mobile phones as sensors, these radios can be used to perform localization.

Though mobile devices are making it easier for users to communicate, many users get frustrated while accessing certain applications and services using their mobile devices. Some of the major limitations are

• Limited memory
• Limited processing power
• Battery consumption
• Simplicity
• Accessibility

The main challenge faced by software production and usage for mobile consumer devices is limitations in the memory. As the physical memory is limited thus at times programs are forcibly terminated leading to fatal errors particularly in situations where the operating system is running on low memory. Currently the main aim of research works being carried out on mobile devices is to improve memory management for performance, safety, ease of use and efficiency.

Mobile cloud computing  (MCC) offers several advantages for data storage and data processing takes place outside the mobile device. IoT has several limitations however MCC advantages can alleviate the drawback of IoT. Convergence of IoT and MCC has great potential for success. IoT requires sufficient support for ubiquitous communication and access to services and information. Middleware approach is proposed where smartphones provide service gateways to bridge the gap between IoT services and Cloud services. Since smartphones are mobile gateways, they should be able to reconfigure themselves according to their place, things discovered around, and their own resources such battery. A lot of research has been done on Smartphone but Smartphone sensor have not been fully tested in comparison to standard sensors so us to be fully used for environment sensing safety application. Amalgamation of Smartphone embedded sensors as well as being used as gateway to cloud has great potential for success, this synergy will motivate new business models.