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UK IoT Research IoTUK Industry InsightsGet in touch: IoTUK.org.uk @[email protected]

IoTUK INDUSTRY INSIGHTS

UK IoT RESEARCH: THE POWERHOUSE BEHIND THE NATION’S IoT ACTIVITY

AUGUST 2016

1UK IoT Research IoTUK Industry InsightsGet in touch: IoTUK.org.uk @[email protected]

Research into the Internet of Things (IoT) is helping to drive technology forward, with a range of public sector bodies, private sector firms and academics undertaking studies in the UK that are going to have a profound impact on our lives. The IoT will transform industries such as health and social care through better remote monitoring techniques, create a joined-up transportation network, and bring investment into the UK, ensuring our place at the heart of the global IoT community and at the forefront of burgeoning technology trends.

IoTUK has been investigating the current climate for IoT research to demonstrate the breadth of the innovative research and development that is happening today.

SUMMARY


The UK is a smart nation. There are developing smart cities, everyone has smartphones, we spend more on ecommerce than any other nation, per capita1. New technology is helping to drive along the digital economy nationally and internationally, making improvements across the board with new and exciting innovations. The Internet of Things is no different from any other technology research area – here in the UK, there is exciting research driving knowledge forward.

IoTUK has been exploring IoT in Britain2, tracking IoT-specific research activity; examining work undertaken prior to product or service prototyping, or development, or testing, or formal deployment of IoT technologies in a real-world context. This paper maps out some of the developments that are happening today.

1 https://www.ft.com/content/79619766-8133-11e4-b956-00144feabdc0

2 Since December 2015, the Digital Catapult has been researching and compiling the IoTNation database as part of the IoTUK Programme. The database identifies, investigates and tracks IoT activity across the UK economy.

INTRODUCTION


Examining the topic focus of the ongoing projects across the board reveals a wide spread across many different areas of interest. The chart below shows the research studies categorised according to their primary area(s) of focus3. Healthcare and wellbeing, cybersecurity and transport/smart city research projects are the most common, but there is a mix of study topics.

DISTRIBUTION OF COUNT OF RESEARCH PROJECTS BY TOPIC

3 Many research projects have multiple areas of focus – for example, the majority of research projects into IoT will consider questions of data analysis at some level. We have tried to identify the primary focus areas for research projects identified during our investigations, and classified projects on this basis.

WHAT AREAS ARE RESEARCHERS EXPLORING?


Much research in the UK is being driven by universities. As part of the IoTUK Programme4, the start of 2016 saw the launch of a new Internet of Things Research Hub for the UK, PETRAS5, underpinned by £9.8m support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)6, and boosted by partner contributions to approximately £23m. Designed to lead interdisciplinary research in a number of areas critical for the development of the country’s Internet of Things capability, the foundation of the PETRAS IoT hub adds to what is already a vibrant and industrious research community. PETRAS comprises nine UK universities – UCL, Imperial College London, University of Oxford, The University of Warwick, Lancaster University, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, University of Edinburgh and Cardiff University. It is expected to bring in expertise from over 50 other partners from the public sector and from industry.

THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY’S RESEARCH IN IOT

Over three years PETRAS will continue the research into solving many of the challenges facing IoT developers – including the ethics, privacy, trust, reliability, acceptability and security issues already being given significant attention. The funding awarded to PETRAS accounts for a significant proportion of all UK IoT research value (around 10%)7. In addition, the consortium represents many of the organisations that have already been most active in UK IoT research, and that have received funding for research in other areas8.

4 The IoTUK Programme is the UK government’s ambitious fully-integrated IoT acceleration programme, which saw £32m of funding distributed across an end-to-end ecosystem of IoT activities from 2015. The programme includes academic research (PETRAS), hardware accelerators (Startupbootcamp and R/GA), large scale demonstrators (CityVerve and two NHS Testbeds) and dissemination models to increase take-up rates (Future Cities Catapult and NHS England). The Digital Catapult provides co-ordination, SME acceleration and amplification services to the programme.

5 www.petrashub.org

6 www.epsrc.ac.uk

7 The IoTNation database has identified £122m of research fund-ing, of which c£100m is still deployed in live projects in 2016. The PETRAS funding of £9.8m is therefore 10% of the total. See the table of research funding Annex 1.0


With the frequency with which the national press is dominated by stories about security breaches, and given the potential sensitivity of any IoT deployment, cybersecurity is a strong focus for the IoT research currently being undertaken by the UK’s academic organisations.

The University of Oxford is running a £3.7m project9 into various aspects of cybersecurity including continuous authentication based on user behaviour, enhancing security architectures through integration of physical and digital security, awareness of physical characteristics of things in IoT systems (such as location and time), and security of sensitive data once in the cloud.

Southampton University is working on security approaches for road traffic management systems10 that integrate machine learning to detect malicious behaviour, and deploy real-time defence mechanisms.

The largest project identified is being run by Queen’s University Belfast. This £38m project11 developing CSIT2 is promising some exciting results (see box).

Demonstrating the diversity of the research that is happening in this field, Nottingham University is investigating what can be learned from human immune response systems in order to design cybersecurity systems12 that can not only detect intrusions, but also take appropriate actions.

With continuous development in this area, the aim is for businesses and consumers to be able to stay ahead of cyber attacks which are becoming more prevalent and more dangerous to society as everything becomes interconnected.

THE SEARCH FOR SECURITY

CSIT is the UK’s Centre for Secure Information Technologies, a research and innovation hub based in Belfast. It has been involved in several European-funded research projects focused on cybersecurity, and its activities have led to the creation of several spin-out ventures including start-ups and SMEs which have provided the nucleus for an emerging cybersecurity cluster in the city.

The initial phase led to the Centre having an 80 person team of researchers and it becoming the largest academic centre of its type.

CSIT2 is an extension of CSIT and will deliver a new phase of research work looking at security for smart cities and Internet of Things. Delivering on the theme of ‘Securing our Digital Tomorrow’, CSIT2 research will cover three areas: secure ubiquitous networking, device authentication and security analytics, and autonomous sensor security. Around £5m of the funding for CSIT2 is coming from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Innovate UK, £9m from Queen’s University. Partnerships with other industrial and academic organisations are expected to bring total levels of investment in the research to £38m over five years.

The university’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Patrick Johnston, said, ‘The need for strong and resilient cyber security technologies has never been greater. CSIT is home to some of the world’s foremost cyber security experts. It is, and will continue to be, at the forefront of efforts to protect the UK from cyber attacks and to maintain the public’s trust that their online privacy and data is kept safe.’

Professor John McCanny, Principal Investigator at CSIT2, said, ‘Our unique strength lies in its approach to the innovation and commercialisation of Queen’s ground-breaking research. It overlays an excellent academic research environment with an infrastructure that is more common in high-technology companies, creating a unique team of researchers, innovators and engineers that accelerates the translation of research into business.’

QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST – CSIT2

9 http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=EP%2FK035606%2F1

10 http://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/impact/intelligent_traffic_systems.page

11 https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/CSIT/

12 http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/N007115/1


ONE OF THE KEY AREAS OF CONCERN IN THE MODERN DIGITAL ERA IS THE NOTION OF DATA AND OWNERSHIP14. THIS IS AN AREA OF INVESTIGATION FOR A NUMBER OF INSTITUTIONS. IT MUST BE NOTED THAT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND THEIR DATA IS GOING TO BE A MAJOR SOURCE OF ECONOMIC VALUE, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT OF DATA PORTABILITY IN THE FORTHCOMING GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION BEING DEVELOPED BY EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS14.

So much data is generated by the Internet of Things. Who owns it? Is it the companies that produce the hardware? The apps and software? The people that purchase the products? When people purchase their IoT devices, many have an expectation of privacy. Researchers are examining how we can ensure that this is met while still ensuring that there is a certain amount of verified identification possible to be able to develop theories and new technology from the data generated.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation is coming into force by May 25, 2018. Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the digital single market, European Commission has called this:

“…a major step towards a Digital Single Market.”15

It has made companies accountable and set privacy expectations, made clear the role of data processors and ensured that users have to consent to their data being used and demands transparency in what data is collected. Whilst Brexit has thrown the UK’s adoption of EU laws into question, there will still need to be consensus on how the UK engages with GDPR, and integration with the EU laws may well be the most efficient way to handle people’s data.

PEOPLE AND PRIVACY

14 http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/reform/index_en.htm

15 See the European Commission press release, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-6321_en.htm


Nottingham University has been running a five-year £1.14m project to work out how to build privacy into IoT systems by design16. Partnered by various private sector organisations including BBC, BT, O2 Telefonica, E.ON, and Unilever, as well as Digital Catapult, it aims to develop new methods and models for working that make data sharing ‘observable’ and ‘controllable’ by system end users, and to make usage of data accountable.

The University of Surrey is engaged in researching potential new business models for the business economy including B2B and B2C applications17, exploring issues such as privacy and confidentiality alongside data integrity and security in the context of customised and bespoke service creation using the wealth of new data made available by Internet of Things deployments.

Another university exploring the relationships between people and their data is the University of Warwick. In conjunction with Warwick Manufacturing Group it is running a project called HARRIET to develop a platform, the hub of all things or HAT18 (see box), that people will be able to use to trade their personal data with third parties. Whilst the platform itself has been built, significant ongoing research work is continuing with the development of RUMPEL, a personal data browser which pulls all your personal data into a single browser.

HAT, or the Hub of All Things, is a research project aimed at collecting data from user’s lives using rage of sensors in the home and through wearables. This data will all be stored in one place, with the data owned by the person that creates it.

HAT is unique in allowing an individual to configure, combine, display or visualize their data gained from any source, and to permit the exchange of this data with other individuals or organisations. It does this by use of a schema that flattens data from any source (provided there is an API) allowing it to be recombined in any order according to the HAT user’s interest. From there, researchers can have access to this information where it can then be analysed and used to create newer, better apps and devices built around the needs of real people. The team behind the technology said: ‘the project will uncover insights of unprecedented depth and breadth into how we live our lives in relation to the experience of things and people around us’.

Original research funding was from RCUK, at £1.2m. There was also an IndieGoGo campaign which raised some initial funding to establish HAT Community Foundation to provide regulation of the ecosystem on behalf of users and to lead on development of the underlying open source software.

Industry partners include Dyson, Osram, GlaxoSmithKline, Dropletpay, Sprue Aegis, Strand Hardware, RDM Telematics, 1248 Ltd, Mydex and DCS Europe. There is ongoing work to find new partners that can make the most of the exciting opportunities that HAT offers.

The University of Warwick: HAT

16 http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/B470ECD8-715D-408D-8261-A705DC3FA1F6

17 http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ics/research/internet-of-things/pro-jects/completed/iot-i/

18 http://hubofallthings.com/


The Internet of Things is here to make people’s lives easier. While there is a lot of research conducted on the technological aspects of the IoT, at the heart of it is the people that these technologies serve. Everyone can benefit from the IoT, from the youngsters who are coming of age in smart cities with the expectation that all of their devices are connected, their transport system intelligent and their environment energy-saving and safe, working together to make their lives easier than their parents’ lives were; through to the elderly and disabled who are using IoT technologies to enable them to live longer, happier and more productive lives.

The human side of IoT emerges as a strong theme of academic research19. Aside from the ability to trade data, effort is going into understanding how people might interact with IoT systems – to make them better and to make them more user friendly. Interesting projects include SPHERE at the University of Bristol20 (see box), studies by the University of Manchester to research behavioural patterns21 in order to understand what drives interaction between people and IoT devices and applications; work by the University of Southampton to test how people would be willing to interact with IoT systems22; and a project by the University of Warwick to explore the way people interact with the data generated through their interaction with IoT systems.23

THE HUMAN SIDE OF IOT

Today’s increasingly aging population alongside the rise in long term health conditions and increased pressures on NHS budgets is precipitating a move from inpatient treatments, instead encouraging people to manage their own care and well-being at home.

To that end, one of the most extensive healthcare-related projects is SPHERE (Sensor Platform for HEalthcare in a Residential Environment), a project designed to provide data from cameras and multiple health and environment sensors in the home to a range of potential users (including the occupants, emergency and health services).

It encompasses several streams of work:

Sensor platform for environment and activity sensing in the home.

Real-time multi-camera movement monitoring system for the home.

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL: SPHERE

Autonomous body sensors designed to be worn, including research into ultra-low power systems and energy harvesting.

Data collation and analytics bringing together the data from all the systems and making sense of it.

Development of a system bringing all this together, deployed in a test bed of 100 homes.

The project is intended to find cost-effective ways to solve healthcare challenges such as monitoring mental state, tracking exercise, medication and food consumption, or detecting or predicting issues such as falls or strokes.

SPHERE has received £15m in funding, £11.7m of which came from an EPSRC grant. There are almost 100 researchers currently working on SPHERE- related projects.

19 Although only 4% of research projects identified by IoTUK are primarily focused on human interaction with the IoT, the majority of projects include some investigation into how IoT services will be received, and how recipients of services will interact with them.

20 http://www.irc-sphere.ac.uk/

21 http://hubofallthings.com/


23 http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=EP/L023911/1


With the costs of healthcare rising due to an increase in elderly population and more long-term conditions, finding more efficient, effective and patient-friendly ways to look after patients has an increased commercial, economic and social imperative. Examples of projects underway include use of sensors to monitor movement, behaviour and stress amongst dementia sufferers (Glasgow Caledonian University24), psychiatric patients (Goldsmiths25), autistic people (Lancaster University26) and Parkinson’s sufferers (Newcastle University27); as well as wearable sensors or fabrics that can be used as part of a preventative approach to mental healthcare (Nottingham Trent University28).

Data generated from biosensors are also being linked to big data projects in an attempt to generate new insights in areas such as Quality of Life profiles of individuals suffering from a variety of conditions by monitoring data captured by a variety of IoT assets during their daily lives. For instance, the University of Oxford is generating new cancer treatment approaches29, and the University of Lincoln30 and University of Bedfordshire31 (separate projects) in the area of ophthalmic care. The research effort has also extended to the development of the sensors themselves with biosensing wireless tags (University of Kent32).

24 http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsroom/news/article/?id=128885

25 http://www.gold.ac.uk/unit-of-play/

26 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2015/theres-a-revo-lution-brewing-in-the-technology-kitchen/

27 http://www.ncl.ac.uk/caru/research/publication/220718

28 http://www4.ntu.ac.uk/apps/news/165794-22/Study_into_how_wearable_tech_can_improve_mental_health.aspx

29 http://www.hitcentral.eu/british-journal-healthcare-comput-ing/oxford-university-team-billionaire-big-data-health-project

It ’s not just health that is an area of interest, but also the accompanying topic of social care. Research is underway that uses IoT systems to help understand the challenges faced by particular members of the population. For instance, Newcastle’s Older Drivers project33

addresses the issue of social exclusion for older people, especially in rural areas where a car is a vital means of inclusion. Researchers have used specially modified vehicles with cameras and biosensors to work out how older people cope with driving. They found the effects of distractions were greater than previously understood due to the decline in memory and vision of older drivers. To counter this, they have come up with more effective route guidance information based on landmarks. These will be delivered through a combination of audio instructions and an icon-based visual display to help these drivers with their navigation. Results of the work are now being considered as part of transport policy-making processes34.

30 http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/L023679/1

31 http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/L023830/1


33 http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/news/item/keeping-older-drivers-on-the-road5

34 http://www.newcastlecityfutures.org/NewcastleCityFutures-2065Report.pdf


Energy is a hot topic at the moment in the UK. With warnings that the world is on the brink of a major energy crisis, potential rolling brownouts and environmental warnings from climate change due to burning fossil fuels causing havoc to the nations of the world, working out ways in which the IoT can take some of the pressures off the industry is essential research.

IoT systems are being designed to manage how well people use energy and energy generation; consumption has been a major theme of IoT. We have identified over a dozen ongoing research projects. The universities of Southampton, Essex, Edinburgh, Bath, Loughborough, Nottingham and Coventry have all been independently running research programmes to monitor energy consumption within domestic and business settings using a variety of sensors and devices, then provide feedback to users, identify levers that can be used to encourage changes in behaviour.

Each project takes a slightly different approach. Coventry’s project35 with funding of £669,209 provides real-time feedback on home energy consumption through a dashboard and a gaming visualisation. Loughborough’s £1.55m research project36 looks at the impact of device set-up on energy consumption, analysing devices in more than 600 homes. Bath’s £1.5m study37

analyses energy consumption in households

CHANGING HOW WE USE ENERGY

and tests innovative energy tariffs as a means of incentivising behaviour change. Edinburgh’s project38, one of the largest at £1.7m, encompasses analysis of energy usage in different types of dwelling with feedback to users provided by a tablet. The University of Southampton’s research39 is using sensors to investigate the potential impact of energy poverty on home energy usage. In a commercial context, The University of Nottingham40 is running a £1.1m project to investigate energy consumption by businesses, and methods of encouraging behaviours that reduce energy usage by people at work.

Cambridge University41 and University College London42 are focusing on the energy consumption of the sensor technologies themselves. They have been looking at energy generation and harvesting by the sensors in IoT deployments, whilst Lancaster University43 has been investigating the potential for energy transfer amongst IoT devices using wireless signals to transfer electrical energy as well as data. Lancaster’s team is looking at how this might work in a real-world environment with mini robots and sensors transferring energy to one another. Looking at the issue from a slightly different perspective, a team at the University of Edinburgh44 has been reviewing the potential to turn solar panels into self-powered communications devices.

35 http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-pro-jects/2014/smarter-households/

36 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/design-school/research/projects/improvingdomesticheatingcontrols/

37 http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/case-studies/enlitening-household- energy-literacy

38 http://www.ed.ac.uk/global-environment-society/news-events/news/news-archive/2013-news/ideal-home-energy-project

39 http://www.energy.soton.ac.uk/teddi/

40 http://www.energyforchange.ac.uk/

41 http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/D299152F-D462-4DF2-B99D-9DA4326A34B4

42 http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/392B7729-7487-4C48-8774-6F7C-B5827A97

43 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2015/uk-researchers-aim-to-develop-ways-to-control-and-charge-robots-remotely/

44 http://www.research-innovation.ed.ac.uk/Opportunities/com-bined-light-communication-and-energy-harvesting-from-solar- panel-receivers


NEW INSIGHTS BY AGGREGATING DATA

According to IBM, data is growing by 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day45. The advent of the Internet of Things is serving to grow this number exponentially, with each new sensor generating more and more information to be analysed, explored, and utilised.

In many ways, all deployments of IoT systems deliver new insights. But a number of academic projects are looking in-depth at ways of generating new insights by aggregating data from a variety of different sources. This involves developing systems to bring datasets together, and to combine them in formats that enable interrogation.

The University of Surrey has been running the CityPulse project46 to design, develop and test a framework for discovery, processing and interpretation of real-time city-related data streams. The University of Strathclyde47 has been working too on extracting useful data from smart-city sensor deployments.

The University of Glasgow has been researching ways for IoT devices to hand computation tasks over to one another48, increasing potential computational scale and flexibility in a system;

whilst the University College London is investigating ways to help a network understand the context of data in an IoT deployment49, and refine decisions based on those contexts. The University of Surrey is involved in the international iKaaS project50 to develop a secure, smart city platform using a variety of sensors, all built on top of heterogeneous cloud platforms.

Bangor University and Lancaster University are mashing up IoT data in the rural environment51. They are working together alongside Welsh Water, Natural Resources Wales (merged Environment Agency Wales, Forestry Commission Wales and Countryside Council for Wales), The Welsh Government and Conwy County Council to measure and explore interdependencies between rural ecosystems, and to manage them all more effectively. Initial work has focused on bringing together complex data from soil and water sensors, and tracking animal behaviour to start to understand how to interpret them to answer questions and to identify risks to the environment or people.

45 As quoted by IBM, www-01.ibm.com/software/in/data/bigdata/

46 http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ics/research/internet-of-things/projects/cur-rent/citypulse/

47 http://www.strath.ac.uk/whystrathclyde/mediacentre/strathclydeenter-spartnershipwithworld-leadingsensorcompany/

48 http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/research/S4/

49 Op. Cit.

50 http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ics/research/internet-of-things/projects/current/ikaas/

51 https://www.bangor.ac.uk/senrgy/news/move-over-smart-cities-the-internet-of-things-is-off-to-the-country-21757


WHERE IS THE FUNDING GOING IN IOT RESEARCH?

IoTUK has identified 135 IoT-specific research projects and projects containing significant elements of IoT-focused research conducted since 2009 that are recently completed, underway or due to start in the UK. Some of these projects will run until 2020. We estimate they have received or will receive public investment of nearly £122m. While just over 40% (representing around £22.9m in funding) came to an end in 2015, nearly 60% (representing the bulk of investment at almost £100m) are currently active, and involve £88m of investment from the UK public purse and £10.9m contributed by European funding programmes as shown in the chart below. We estimate that of this £100m, around £32m will be spent in 2016. Some of the projects included will continue into 2020 although most finish this year.

The majority of the research projects are small in size. Around 55 of the 70 ongoing projects have been awarded funding of £1m or less.

DISTRIBUTION OF ONGOING UK IoT RESEARCH PROJECTS: BY ESTIMATED UK VALUE, BY SOURCE


Academic institutions are not the only organisations undertaking IoT research in the UK. Many businesses are also researching Internet of Things technologies and applications, and a number of businesses are undertaking research funded by one of the UK’s seven research councils52 (generally, EPSRC or SFTC), or in partnership with the Catapults53 (for example, with the Transport Systems, Future Energy Systems, High Value Manufacturing, Future Cities, Satellite Applications and Digital Catapults) usually with the development of a specific solution or platform in mind. We have identified around £16m of research grants for projects that are currently underway or are due to start soon. This is a low-end estimate as there are numerous projects for which we have no value or investment data.

Some of the beneficiaries of bigger research grants include:

A consortium including Cisco Systems, Abellio, Workware Systems, Bronze Software Labs and Telent working to develop a £2m project, the ‘Stations as a Service’ (StaaS) software platform, that brings together various systems and technologies used in railway stations (including IoT applications) to provide services for security providers, rail operators, retailers and travellers. This project received a grant of £986,07754.

Hebe Works: Using a low power M2M sensor network and Leeds’ Open Data Platform to develop applications encouraging community recycling with a £324,560 grant55.

NquiringMinds: Several research grants cover the development of its Open City Data Platform designed to gather data from multiple sources in various formats, and tools to aid development of mobile apps that can use the data, and a secure communications platform optimised for embedded devices. These include a major £1m contract from the UK Government56.

Omnisense: £584k funding for CAMEL, a platform for Construction Asset Management using Enhanced Location-based services57.

A consortium of STS Defence, LWPartners, NGnuity, University of Portsmouth, Satellite Applications Catapult, University of Southampton and Burgess Marine received £1,029,640 funding from Innovate UK for Project IConIC58, a marine vessel performance-management solution, drawing together data from autonomous measurement systems (via satellite) into shore-based data exchange and analytics tools.

CORPORATE RESEARCH - IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE UNIVERSITIES

52 www.rcuk.c.uk

53 www.catapult.org.uk

54 http://gblogs.cisco.com/uki/all-aboard-for-stations-as-a-service/

55 http://www.local.gov.uk/documents/10180/11541/Leeds+open+data+re-port/f3416c54-dffe-4c98-b1e3-1895ef569432

56 http://nquiringminds.com/

57 http://www.omnisense.co.uk/index.html

58 https://sa.catapult.org.uk/news-events-gallery/news/catapult-help-ing-develop-ground-breaking-marine-vessel-efficiency-system/


The IoT has the potential to help all aspects of our daily lives. Researchers are finding new ways to think about industries such as transport and logistics, using data generated by IoT sensors to ensure that all of the people and goods that are on the move are travelling in the safest, easiest and most economical way possible. Our health can be treated by doctors remotely, with a full picture of what exactly is happen to our bodies available to our clinicians at the touch of a button. Our homes, our workplaces, our cities – there is not an area of our lives that the IoT will not benefit and through the research that is being carried out here in the UK, this dream is becoming closer to a reality.

The research field in IoT is vibrant in the UK. Many academics and private sector companies are excited by the potential of the IoT and how it will make incremental improvements to our lives and potentially big sweeping changes to the way that we do business. While leaving the EU has put some of the investment we receive on hold, only 11% of the research funding in IoT comes from the EU. This gap could potentially be filled by private investment and UK government money. We will continue to attract the brightest talents to our universities and researchers will always want to choose the centres for excellence that we have here in the UK as the home for their theses.

CONCLUSION

This paper gives you a flavour of some of the groundbreaking research projects taking place around the UK right now. If you know about others, do contact us at [email protected]


ANNEX 1.0: IDENTIFIED, CURRENT IoT RESEARCH PROJECTS LED BY UK ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS

INSTITUTION PROJECT FOCUS

DETAILS VALUE

Bangor University

Environment Understanding and managing the natural environment through Internet of Things technology

£61,710

City University London

Data analytics TOREADOR model driven approach for automating and ensuring compliance of data analytics

£366,237

Coventry University

Home energy Use of smart meters and a range of sensors to provide real-time monitoring of energy consumption linked to behaviours

£669,209

Edinburgh Napier University

Industrial Reliable Internet of Things-based monitoring and surveillance in oil and gas fields

Not Known

Glasgow Caledonian University

Healthcare Use of LED lighting to track dementia patient movements Not Known

Goldsmiths Healthcare Wearable behaviour and distress monitors for psychiatric patients Not Known

Imperial College London

IoT-enabled design

Use of IoT sensors to develop models for Ubiquitous Computing Enabled Design: engineering design reflecting how people actually use products

£295,395

King’s College London

Energy transfer amongst IoT devices

See Lancaster University

Lancaster University

Environment

Healthcare


IoT interoperability platform and apps to gather and analyse disparate data from a natural environment to deliver new understanding of environmental interdependencies

‘Stress ball’ used to monitor social anxiety of autistic people

Wireless Energy Transfer (use of wireless signals to transfer electrical energy alongside data); an application of this in an Internet of Things system consisting of MEMS multi-antenna robots and advanced sensors

£171,495

£293,031

£305,891

London College of Fashion

Fashion Exploring the interface between digital technologies and fashion design Not Known

Newcastle University

Social inclusion through the digital economy (SiDE)

Various streams of research into use of digital technology to tackle social ex-clusion. IoT-related examples include sensors for tracking physical movement, sleep and health that have been used in a range of research projects such as looking at behaviour of young autistic people, tracking sufferers from Parkinson’s disease; and a system that analyses data from in-vehicle and roadside sensors, weather conditions, etc to monitor the driving performance of older people and provide adaptive


INSTITUTION PROJECT FOCUS

DETAILS VALUE

The University of Nottingham

Digital objects

Human interaction with technology

Privacy

Energy efficiency

Cybersecurity

Images and graphical elements on decorative and practical objects that can be used to encode a digital record of user interactions with the object

New technologies to collect and interpret human data, create new experiences for fulfilment, wellbeing and sustainability, and address ethics

Developing transparent and accountable data gathering and sharing models for home IoT applications

Automated monitoring of energy usage in the workplace, feeding into study of energy usage in the workplace, and effectiveness of different approaches for reducing consumption

Investigating use of human immune system inspired intrusion and defence techniques in IoT and smart home environments

£359, 626

Not Known

£1,137,420

£1,075,109

£101,309

Loughborough University

Home Energy Use of different smart devices to enable remote monitoring and control of energy consumption in the home

£1,547,189

Nottingham Trent University

Healthcare Wearable sensors/smart fabrics that engage their wearers as part of a preventative approach to mental healthcare

£294,021

Queen Mary University of London

Food production Using sensors and tracking systems to analyse the use and exchange of seeds by an urban food-growing community. Intended to contribute towards general principles for how to harness IoT for sustainable food production

£257,878

Queen’s University Belfast

Cybersecurity Cybersecurity for IoT and smart cities £5,032,500

SwanseaUniversity

Healthcare, social development, cybersecurity

Research in three human/social contexts, with the aim of producing digital prod-ucts and services: Health and social care (i.e., medical devices, e-health, health informatics, patient services), Resource Constrained Communities (i.e., devices and services to access technology for social development and economic regener-ation) and safety and security

£3,091,610

University of Bath

Building energy Home energy advisor. Uses sensors and automated and human gathering of data on behaviour of individuals to model energy consumption in buildings, and suggest/incentivise ways to reduce it

£1,511,972

University of Bedfordshire

Healthcare Hub for aggregating and processing sensors and monitoring data on the physical and mental health, and mobility, of visually impaired persons following eye surgery

£196, 558

University of Birmingham

Transport Real-time monitoring of road conditions to inform salting strategy £165,429

University of Bristol

Healthcare

Smart city

SPHERE: large-scale project to assess the use of sensor and video monitoring in predicting and responding to health issues of elderly people in their homes

Developing citizen engagement for devising IT/IoT apps and services, and ad-dressing key issues around traffic congestion, air pollution and sustainable energy use

£15,000,000

University of Cambridge

Energy harvesting

Platforms

Machine interaction

Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Voice-enabled interfaces for learning IoT systems

Facebook for machines, enabling them to exchange data on usage, condition and performance

£275, 842

£603, 425


INSTITUTION PROJECT FO-CUS

DETAILS VALUE

University College London

Energy efficient sensors

Data analytics

Accessibility and planning

Including energy harvesting

Developing models and working examples of ‘knowledge-centric networking’, in which the network understands the different knowledge contexts of the data it processes, and makes decisions based on that. IoT is one of those contexts

Use of sensors and IoT to provide user-specific accessibility support, and to feed user experience back to urban planners to aid improvements

£587, 611

£982,915

£344,915

University of Dundee

Social inclusion through the digital economy (SiDE)

See Newcastle University (above)

University of Edinburgh

Home energy

Connected high street

Energy generation

Study of energy use in different types of dwellings, using sensors linked to a data-base. Analysis of the energy cost of specific activities, with feedback to users

Using IoT to interconnect shoppers, sales staff and stock data across different outlets on the high street, to enable the high street to compete more effectively with online and out-of-town retailers

Turning solar panels into self-powered communications devices

£1,747,823

£306,871

University of Essex

Home energy Study that uses a combination of movement sensors and metering of the energy consumption of devices to build a picture of energy usage patterns; then, work-ing with users, design of a user interface and controls that will help the user sustain energy reduction in the long term

£771,789

University of Glasgow

Data analytics Unified computation standard for IoT devices so they can hand over computation tasks to one another

£1,166,422

University of Kent

Sensors

Sensors

Development of biosensing wireless tags

Fabrication of low energy passive wireless sensors

£148,602

£411,579

University of Leeds


See Lancaster University (above)

University of Lincoln

Healthcare Hub for aggregating ophthalmic care data logged by a variety of sensors £125,230

The University of Manchester

Sensors

Human interaction with technology

Techniques for creating one-atom-layer, printable surfaces and atomic-scale 3D superstructures for self-powered sensors and radio transmitters for IoT applica-tions

Researching behavioural patterns that precede a particular activity to develop more intuitive interaction between users and devices/applications in IoT solutions

£4,056,135

£100,299

University of Oxford

Cybersecurity

Healthcare

Research into new models for cybersecurity in IoT environments for contexts such as critical infrastructure monitoring, transport and assisted living

Development of big data infrastructure, linked to wearable sensors, to develop new cancer treatment approaches

£3,654,612

Not known


INSTITUTION PROJECT FOCUS DETAILS VALUE

University of Sheffield

Centre of excellence for ICT research

Including IoT research Not known

University of Southampton

Home energy

Sensors

Human interaction with IoT

Cybersecurity

Developing a sensor and IoT kit to analyse the impact of energy poverty in order to provide better advice to the energy poor

Improved sensors for (external) environmental monitoring

Research how people interact with, and how they would be willing to interact with, autonomous IoT systems to improve interaction

Cybersecurity for road traffic management systems

£277,067

£143,526

£806,241

£199,167

University of Strathclyde

Data analytics To derive useful and useable data from diverse sets of sensors in a smart city environment

£643,307

University of Surrey

5G mobile communications for IoT

Business models, privacy

Data analytics

Smart city, privacy

Smart city

At its 5G testbed it is developing a holistic control framework for supporting IoT applications and devices in 5G networks alongside other use cases

Exploring business models, privacy and trust issues for IoT involving sharing of data

CityPulse project to design, develop and test a distributed framework for discovery, processing and interpretation of large-scale real-time data streams in a city environment

iKaaS is to develop an intelligent, privacy-preserving and secure smart city platform built atop heterogeneous cloud platforms, using data from a variety of IoT sensors

Development of a platform for sharing of data from IoT environments combined with citizen-generated intelligence data to enable socially beneficial applications

Not known

£561,973

£1,883,250

£1,140,098

£2,061,306

The University of Warwick

Human interaction with IoT

Researching the way users interact with the data generated by their interac-tion with IoT-connected smart devices

£385,273

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