Inkjet-Printed UHF RFID Tags on Renewable Materials

Radio frequency identification (RFID) provides great potential for different Internet of Things (IOT) applications. In the future, material choices in these IOT devices will have a huge effect on the environment and thus use of renewable materials is a growing trend. In this paper, passive ultra high frequency (UHF) RFID tags were inkjet-printed directly on wood, paper, and cardboard substrates, and their performance was evaluated by measuring two key properties: threshold power and theoretical read range. According to our measurements, the tags on wood showed read ranges of 7 - 8 meters, the tags on cardboard exhibited read ranges of 4 - 7 meters, and the tags printed on paper showed read ranges of 2 - 7 meters through the global UHF RFID band. According to these results, the performance of these inkjet-printed UHF RFID tags is sufficient for many IOT devices and potential applications e.g. in construction and packaging industry.

Perspectives for Wearable Electronics in Healthcare and Childcare

This paper starts with a literature survey that introduces possibilities of wearable electronics (WE) in different healthcare and childcare applications. Next, 24 personal interviews and an Internet forum survey were conducted in Finland about the use of WE in applications mentioned above. According to the results, most of the people feel positive about clothes used for wireless identification purposes in healthcare and childcare, but when more information about the person is added that can be wirelessly read, the feelings become more negative. Several important points to consider before implementation of WE for healthcare and childcare environments were brought up.

Challenges in Qualitative Accelerated Testing of WSN Hardware

Internet of Things (IOT) is a conceptual vision to connect things in order to create a ubiquitous computing world. In order to create such an ever-present network, a simple, reliable, and cost-effective technology is crucial. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an important wireless technology that has wide variety of applications and provides unlimited future potentials for IOT. Since WSNs in IOT will be used in varying and challenging applications and environments, reliability and reliability testing of WSN hardware becomes extremely important. In accelerated reliability testing, test stresses are increased to cut down the time required to obtain a weakening effect similar to one resulting from normal service conditions in the field. This paper introduces three common difficulties that engineers may experience in qualitative accelerated testing of WSN devices: 1. Challenges in use of standard accelerated tests, 2. Challenges in component-level testing, and 3. Challenges in testing of prototypes. The paper will also introduce examples from real life reliability research and accelerated tests to clarify the presented challenges.

Personal Perspectives: Individual Privacy in the IOT

The Internet of Things (IOT) is the extension of the Internet to the next level, i.e., bringing the Internet to the real physical world of things. In this research, 22 people working with different aspects of IOT development were interviewed in Finland and in China, in order to investigate their thoughts and personal opinions on the IOT and the individual privacy in the IOT. This paper presents the background of the IOT, interviews and collected answers, as well as highlights of collected free comments.

Privacy of Wearable Electronics in the Healthcare and Childcare Sectors: A Survey of Personal Perspectives from Finland and the United Kingdom

The innovative development of Wearable Electronics (WE) is creating exciting opportunities for application across many industries. Two sectors with high potential are healthcare and childcare. However, it is in these two sectors where the challenges of privacy are presumed to be of the highest. In order to ascertain the personal views of people about potential privacy problems in WE application in these two sectors, interviews with questionnaires were conducted in two different countries: Finland and the United Kingdom (UK). The results indicated that the majority of people in both countries are positive about the use of WE in healthcare and childcare environments. However, when more information is added to be read wirelessly, the attitudes become more negative. In general, the application of WE is more favorable in the UK and the reason as to the difference will make for interesting further research. Several interesting viewpoints and concerns were presented in the interviews. It can be concluded that the implementation of WE in these two sectors will require the collaboration of work on several areas and the development of versatile user studies.

Perspectives for Sharing Personal Information on Online Social Networks

The goal of this research was to study how people feel about sharing personal information on social networks. The research was done by interviews;50 people were interviewed, mostly from China's Mainland, Hong Kong, and Finland. This paper presents the included 12 questions and discusses the collected answers. It was discovered, e.g., that 38 out of the 50 answerers use social media every day and share versatile personal information on the Internet. Half of the answerers also share information about other people on the Internet. It was also discovered that compared to male answerers, the female answerers were more active in sharing information about other people. There was a significant variety in opinions: what should be the age limit for sharing personal information online, while 22 out of the 50 answerers felt that there is no need for an age limit at all. According to the answers, only a few people use social media for making new friends. Instead, an important reason for using social media is that their existing friends are using. An interesting finding was that the answerers see the Internet as a part of the real world;the privacy that you have on the Internet is the privacy that you have in the real world.