A collaborative agreement between ENEA and the l'Aquila local government was established in 2010 to support the l'Aquila city centre rebuilding, severely damaged by the April 2009 earthquakes. The collaborative agreement produced the “Smart Ring” project, which, on the bases of a Smart City Paradigm, supported the integration of mobility urban services, environmental monitoring and smart lighting along a 4-5 km circular path, the “Smart Ring”, around the historical centre of l'Aquila.

This work presents the activities of the “City Dynamics and Smart Environment” work package of the Smart Ring project. It focuses on the integration of the mobility urban public service “Smartbus”, an experimental on-demand public service electric bus based, with the multiparametric air quality low-cost electrochemical sensors NASUS IV, deployed to sample ambient air gas components (NO₂, CO, SO₂, H₂S).

 For five days (28-29 August 2014 and 1-3 September 2014), the multiparametric air quality sensor was installed inside the Smartbus, and measured air quality parameters during the Smartbus service. The air quality data for NO₂, CO, SO₂, H₂S , were collected, visualised and statistically analysed also on the base of an Air Quality Index. The results provide an insightful view of the status of the air potentially experienced by the Smartbus users, and indirectly, on the air quality along the Smart Ring track.

A new optical pH sensor based on Polysulfone (PSU) and Polyaniline (PANI) was developed. The transparent and flexible PSU membrane was employed as a support. The electrically conductive and pH-responsive          PANI was deposited onto the membrane surface by in situ chemical oxidative polymerization (COP). The absorption spectra of the PANI-coated PSU membranes exhibited sensitivity to pH changes in the range of 4-12, which allowed for designing dual wave length pH optical sensor. The performance and durability of the membranes were assessed by measuring their response starting from high pH and going down to low pH, and vice versa. The effect of synthesis conditions and film thickness were investigated. The effect of the membrane's storage conditions on the reproducibility of the results was also investigated

Sensors that measure magnetic resonance relaxation times are increasingly finding applications in areas such as food and drink authenticity and waste water treatment process control. Modern permanent magnets are used to provide the static magnetic field in many commercial instruments and advances in electronics, such as field programmable gate arrays, have provided  lower cost console electronics for generating the series of RF pulses and detecting the resultant magnetic resonance signals. One area that still remains prohibitively expensive for many sensor applications of pulsed magnetic resonance is the requirement for a high frequency power amplifier. With many permanent magnet sensors providing a magnetic field in the 0.25T to 0.5T range, a power amplifier that operates in the 10MHz to 20MHz rage is required.  This frequency range falls at the low end of the amateur “ham” radio frequency spectra designated for private recreation and non-commercial exchange of messages. In this work we demonstrate that low cost commercial amateur radio amplifiers can be simply modified, to operate as pulsed magnetic resonance power amplifiers. We demonstrate two amplifier systems, one medium power that can be constructed for less than Euro 100 and a second higher power system which produces comparable results to commercial pulse amplifiers that are an order of magnitude more expensive. Data is presented using both the commercial NMR MOUSE and a permanent magnet system used for monitoring the clog state of constructed wetlands.  

Magnetic resonance relaxometry, conducted by field cycling, has become an increasingly popular technique in recent years. In particular, it has the ability to monitor biomass transformation which is of particular interest to wastewater treatment. Traditional field cycling often uses expensive and large electromagnets. In this work we present a small, portable field cycling sensor which can detect changes in biomass in constructed wetland samples.

Fast field cycling is a technique that uses a varying magnetic field applied to a sample, polarising it at a high field, allowing it time to develop at a lower field and then collecting the data at the same initial high field. This change in T₁ can reveal interesting properties of the samples not achievable by traditional methods.

A desktop magnetic resonance sensor that undertakes relaxometry measurements using field cycling has been developed using a combination of permanent magnets and electrical coils which has been used to test a range of samples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this sensor by conducting measurements of T₁ at different field strengths for wetland samples at different stages of biofilm growth.

Experimental methods in Biomechanics have been adopted for studying the underlying mechanisms of sport performance, although a systematic use has been not widely diffused. An important factor for this limitation lies in the difficulty of extending results obtained inside a motion analysis laboratory, to a real sport performance or training session. Recent technological developments in Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems raise the possibility to overcome such a limitation. The present work represents a feasibility study to evaluate both kinematics and muscle activation during a typical elite soccer team coaching session. One professional soccer player under the S.S. Lazio was enrolled in the study. The subject was equipped with wireless Inertial Measurement Units and wireless electromyography micro-modules, placed on the lower limb. Measurement data were acquired in real-time during running, sprinting, and jumping trials, performed in the regular team coaching field, with the aim of exploring biomechanical variables such as knee flexion/extension angles and activation time of four muscles of each side: rectus femoris, biceps femoris, tibialis anterior, and gastrocnemius. Results showed the symmetric kinematic behavior of both the sides of the lower limb, during the three activities. Conversely, electromyography highlighted an asymmetric activation of the correspondent muscles of the two sides, especially during jumping and running. The outcomes of the present study open the way for a novel method for sport training, leveraging findings made available via microtechnology to permit a more focused and specific training. This preliminary study calls for a more extended experimental session, including a higher number of subjects, both healthy and injured, to collect baseline data and to further explore the possibility of novel form of athlete-specific muscular rehabilitation.

A miniature surface plasmon resonance system for bio and chemical sensing is described based on several improvements in the substrates and the reading methodology. Recently we have developed several novel evanescent wave configurations that improve the performance of these sensors: (i) a self-referenced sensor based on enhanced optical transmission through metal nanoslits, (ii) a self-referenced ultra-large penetration depth SPR sensor, (iii) a TIR sensor in which the angular edge is converted into a dip with high figure of merit, (iv) a self-referenced SPR sensor based on thin dielectric grating on top of thin metal film, and (v) enahnced sensitivity by combining the metal film with high index dielectric layers. The self-referencing provides a more stable measurement compensated for thermal drifts and optomechanical instabilities, thus enabling a better detection limit. High penetration helps in detecting large bioentities more reliably such as bacteria and cells. Figure of merit is defined as the ratio between the sensitivity to the width of the resonance dip, hence its enhancement also improves the detection limit. Combining all these properties in one system together with a compact reading methodology using our diverging beam approach with unique image processing allows refractive index sensing limits down to 10^-8. The system is provided with a built in software that monitors the refractive index or concentration in solutions continuously with response time as short as 16msec.

In-core vibration measurements are crucial in view of preventing excessive vibration already in the design stage or assessing component integrity during operation. This issue is exacerbated in new reactor designs that use liquid metals, such as for example a molten lead-bismuth eutectic, as coolant. In this paper we demonstrate the use of optical fibre sensors to measure the vibration induced by the coolant flow in a lead-bismuth eutectic cooled installation and we apply modal analysis techniques to derive modal parameters of the system. This first-of-a-kind experiment demonstrates the potential of optical fibre based instrumentation in these harsh environments. We focus on measuring the vibration of the individual fuel rods in the fuel assembly, but the technique can also be applied to other components or sections of the installation. We show that the vibration on the fuel rods can be experimentally measured with limited intervention on the fuel pin owing to the small geometry and fundamental properties of the optical fibres. With these sensors, we determine the vibration amplitude and modal parameters of the fuel assembly containing the fuel rods during different steps of the operation of the facility, including the initial start-up of the coolant circulation as well as during continuous operation.

A lack of water information, management and decision support tools that present meaningful and personalized information about usage, price, and availability of water to end users, hinders the efforts to manage water as a resource. WATERNOMICS is an EU-funded research project that aims to address these issues using innovative information, communication and technology (ICT) tools. The project will develop and introduce ICT as an enabling technology to manage water as a resource, increase end-user conservation awareness and affect behavioral changes, and to avoid waste through leak detection and diagnosis. This paper describes the first version of a standards-based methodology for the development and implementation of ICT-enabled water management programs. This methodology will, given constraints, standards, corporate preferences, and KPIs, provide decision makers and designers with a systematic way to select technologies, measurement points, data collection methods, and data management techniques for ICT-based water management systems.

The term affective computing was coined twenty years ago to refer to computers human-like capabilities to detect and recognize user’s emotions.  Mobile sensing systems can be used to sense the emotional state of one or more users and let a third-party can use this information to produce changes in the user’s emotional state, or analyze hundreds of thousands of pictures, gestures, speechs and so on of people and train recognition systems for affective computing applications. For example teachers or e-learning systems as third-party systems can react appropriately maintaining motivation for their students according their emotional states using augmented reality techniques or changing the multimedia resources used in the lectures. Despite the direct benefits of knowing the emotional states, people in general is opposed to a system captures their emotions with smart phones equipped with built-in or external sensors such as image sensor to capture images and record videos, or a pressure sensor  to detect the force or rhythm of  a finger or stylus pen strokes  within the display area. For that reason, currently privacy is one of the important barrier that limits the social acceptance of mobile sensing systems to do affective computing. In this paper we focus on mobile sensing systems to do affective computing preserving the user’s privacy to motivate the users to be sensed. 

This paper aims at helping to bring about a better understanding of the relationship between Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Smart Systems (SSI)^[1] paradigms analysing the coexistence, overlap and specific differences in terms of domains of application of the two concepts, in an IoT and Industrie/y4.0 context.

For that purpose, in this paper different ‘views’ are presented that correspond to different modalities or classes of applications, and examples are given of their application to support the analysis.

A first look is taken at definitions.

A definition for Smart Systems in common use emphasises externally visible functionality and the heterogeneous components required to realise Smart Systems, in particular direct or indirect sensing and actuating functions and respective interfacing.

The common CPS definition emphasises collaboration and communication between the CPS nodes, treating sensing, actuation and external communications technologies more as an abstract given.

The analysis observes that SSI and CPS are largely overlapping paradigms describing what it considered to be the essentially the same phenomenon; however, differentiated by the fact that each includes an area not, or not so well covered by the other.

To illustrate this, the analysis makes use of 3 ‘views’:

The ‘edge view’:

• ‘edge (of a system) view’: there is a single ‘edge’, the boundary between ‘the system’ and the outside

The ‘system view’

• emphasis on an externally visible functionality of a more or less complex system

The ‘DAD view’  Distributed, Autonomous and Dynamic decision taking

• clusters, incl. large clusters and ‘clouds’, with local decision taking according to a Distributed, Autonomous and Dynamic paradigm

The analysis of the three views leads to relatively simple set of conclusions, giving guidance on when both paradigms are to be considered equivalent, and when one paradigm is better suited than the other, as better describing an application scenario.

The paper then gives examples of overlap and specificity of each view applied to different IoT scenarios, and to different Ind4.0 scenarios.

Finally, suggestions are given for refining the analysis for specific application domains.

The analysis presented has been proposed to EPoSS in order to improve the perception of these paradigms within the EPoSS and ECSEL communities, and outside in the FoF and Ind4.0 communities.

[1] We use SSI, Smart System Integration, as abbreviation for Smart Systems, strictly speaking, however, Smart System Integration refers to the principles and techniques that are used in the realisation of Smart Systems and Cyber Physical Systems.