Applications of IoT in Multidisciplinary Areas

Hydrogel-and-nanomaterial-integrated wearable biosensor networks are promising platforms for real-time biomedical monitoring because they combine soft biointerfaces, sensitive signal transduction, and wireless data connectivity. Hydrogels provide tissue-like softness, hydration, adhesion, permeability, and biocompatibility, whereas nanomaterials such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, MXenes, metallic nanoparticles, and conductive polymers enhance conductivity, electrochemical activity, optical responsiveness, mechanical durability, and signal amplification. This review summarizes recent advances in hydrogel-and-nanomaterial-integrated wearable biosensors, ranging from soft material interfaces and stand-alone sensing devices to wireless wearable nodes, IoT-connected platforms, and emerging closed-loop sensor–actuator systems. Because these platforms differ substantially in their level of integration and validation, this review distinguishes enabling material and device concepts from fully connected or closed-loop systems. The distinctive contribution of this review is a materials-to-systems, evidence-graded framework that links hydrogel and nanomaterial interface design with sensing mechanisms, wearable sensor-node integration, wireless and IoT connectivity, and closed-loop actuation while distinguishing device-level proof of concept from clinically validated performance. We discuss functional hydrogel design, nanomaterial-based conductive networks, hybrid hydrogel–nanomaterial structures, and key requirements for skin compatibility, adhesion, stretchability, and long-term stability. Major sensing mechanisms and biomedical targets are reviewed, including electrochemical and optical biosensing, mechanical and physiological signal sensing, and sweat biomarker monitoring. We further highlight system-level integration strategies involving wearable sensor nodes, wireless communication, smartphone and cloud connectivity, data processing, power management, security, and reliability. Representative biomedical applications are summarized, including sweat-based metabolic monitoring, smart wound monitoring, hydrogel-based wound dressings, cardiovascular and respiratory monitoring, and motion sensing. Finally, current technical and translational challenges are discussed with emphasis on the distinction between analytical sensing performance, physiological correlation, and clinical validation. Disease-management and closed-loop healthcare applications are discussed as emerging directions that require appropriate human studies, reference-method comparison, agreement analysis, long-term monitoring, and safety validation before clinical implementation. Full article

Loudness discrepancies between Internet advertisements and the program material they accompany affect user comfort, yet, unlike broadcast television, streaming services are subject to few binding loudness regulations. This article presents a combined objective and subjective exploratory study of the loudness of Internet advertisements. Objective loudness was measured in LUFS units according to Recommendation ITU-R BS.1770-4 using an application built on the pyloudnorm package and validated against the ITU-R BS.2217-2 compliance material. Fifteen advertisement–program pairs collected from popular Polish streaming and video-on-demand services were analyzed. In the subjective experiment, thirty listeners compared the loudness of each advertisement with that of the accompanying program material using a bounded, bipolar category-rating scale administered through the webMUSHRA framework; the analysis explicitly acknowledges the ordinal nature of these ratings and the experiment’s repeated-measures structure. The per-sample mean ratings were correlated with the objective loudness differences (R = 0.89), and exploratory analyses of variance were carried out within listener groups. The association between subjective and objective assessments was weaker among listeners declaring low familiarity with sound processing, and more markedly, among listeners reporting hearing problems; given the small, self-declared subgroups, these group-level observations are presented as exploratory. The results document the extent to which loudness recommendations are exceeded in Internet advertising and provide a reusable methodology for monitoring compliance. Although the problem is illustrated with examples drawn from Polish services, the authors’ exploratory checks of foreign platforms indicate that a similar situation prevails across most Internet services worldwide. Full article

Continuous monitoring of water quality is essential for supporting environmental management and enabling timely decision-making in wastewater treatment facilities. Although numerous Internet of Things (IoT) solutions have been proposed for environmental monitoring, many rely on proprietary cloud platforms or commercial gateways that limit flexibility, scalability, and integration with customized applications. This paper presents the design, implementation, and field validation of a modular IoT architecture for real-time water quality monitoring based on distributed sensor nodes, long-range LoRa communication, and a self-hosted web platform. The proposed architecture integrates sensor nodes equipped with calibrated pH, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity sensors, a hybrid LoRa/Wi-Fi Main Controller implementing a custom master–slave communication protocol, and a Python-based back-end with a PostgreSQL database for data acquisition, storage, visualization, and historical analysis. The complete system was deployed and experimentally validated in a real coupled constructed wetland located at the Universidad del Atlántico, Colombia, where three monitoring stations continuously acquired and transmitted water quality measurements over a one-month evaluation period. During the experimental deployment, the system generated more than 4.5 million measurement records (297 MB) while recording average RSSI values between −55.7 and −58.1 dBm (standard deviation: 1.6–2.2 dB). The developed web platform successfully supported real-time visualization and historical analysis of all acquired measurements. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture as a practical, scalable, and modular solution for continuous environmental monitoring that can be readily adapted to other distributed water quality monitoring applications. Full article

This paper presents the development and experimental validation of a low-cost IoT-enabled turbidity monitoring platform intended for laboratory-scale bioprocess applications. The proposed system was designed as a modular turbidity acquisition subsystem that can be integrated into broader bioreactor automation platforms. The hardware architecture is based on an ESP8266 microcontroller, a TS-300B optical turbidity sensor, a resistive voltage divider for analog signal conditioning, an OLED display for local visualization, and a Google Sheets-based cloud logging solution. A blank-based relative Turbidity Index was defined in order to compensate for optical configuration and environmental variations. The embedded firmware implements multi-sample averaging, blank calibration, serial command control, local display updates, CSV logging, and optional cloud transmission through HTTP requests. The calibration procedure was performed using serial dilutions of a yeast suspension, and the obtained data were fitted using a nonlinear power-law model and a log-log representation. An additional comparison with OD600 reference measurements showed a monotonic relationship between the proposed Turbidity Index and conventional optical-density measurements. The system was further validated through a yeast-based monitoring experiment performed under consistent optical conditions. The results showed the capability of the platform to acquire, process, visualize, and store turbidity-related data over an extended interval. The proposed platform provides a practical, affordable, and reproducible solution for turbidity monitoring and IoT-based data acquisition in small-scale bioprocess applications. Full article

Cage-based tilapia farming is highly vulnerable to rapid variations in water-quality parameters, particularly dissolved oxygen (DO) fluctuations, which can cause fish stress, fish mortality, and economic losses. In this study, we developed and field-evaluated an Internet of Things (IoT)- and LoRa-based water-quality-monitoring and aeration-actuation system for open-water tilapia cage farming. The system consists of distributed control nodes, a main node, a cloud database, and a mobile application for real-time monitoring of DO, pH, and water temperature, as well as remote and automatic oxygen-pump actuation. An automatic probe-lifting mechanism is integrated into the control node to reduce probe-submersion duration and mitigate the risk of sensor fouling during field operation. Field validation showed that the node equipped with the probe-lifting mechanism achieved better agreement with the reference instruments than the continuously submerged node, particularly for DO measurement, with RMSE values of 0.186 mg/L and 0.683 mg/L, respectively. A communication-performance evaluation showed 100% packet reception up to 1640 m, whereas packet reception was reduced at the longest tested distance of 2290 m, indicating that the field-deployment range should be interpreted cautiously under the tested LoRa configuration. Detection-latency experiments showed sub-second responsiveness, with average delays of 208.6–289.7 ms for single-hop communication and 438.9–529.4 ms for two-hop communication. Expert evaluation and farmer satisfaction assessment indicated positive perceptions of the system’s usability and practical relevance. However, the study has several limitations, including the short field-validation period, limited sensor replication, and a lack of direct fish production outcome measurements, which should be considered when interpreting the findings. Overall, the proposed system provides a practical platform for water-quality monitoring and aeration actuation in cage-based tilapia farming. Full article

Securing IoT networks presents fundamental challenges rooted in hardware constraints: firmware is often non-upgradeable and every security boundary is fixed at manufacture. Machine learning-based intrusion detection offers a scalable response, yet nearly all published systems assume clean training data and clean inference conditions. Production IoT environments satisfy neither assumption. Sensors degrade, packets drop, and adversaries deliberately corrupt telemetry streams to evade detection. The framework described here is built around that reality. The proposed framework is distinguished from prior work by four design decisions. First, three encoding branches, a residual DNN, a 1D-CNN, and a BiLSTM, are run in parallel and are fused by concatenation, each capturing structural patterns in tabular traffic data that the others miss. Second, a dual-view consistency loss trains the model under simultaneous feature masking and Gaussian noise, penalizing prediction divergence between two independently corrupted views of the same sample. Third, we introduce entropy-weighted attention: rather than fixed learned weights, per-feature importance is adjusted dynamically from information entropy measured across training batches, giving higher-entropy features stronger influence because they carry more discriminative variation. Fourth, branch-dropout regularization randomly silences entire branches during training, forcing each to develop independently useful representations instead of co-adapting. Class imbalance is handled through severity-aware loss weighting which scales contributions by the operational cost of missing each attack category, not purely by inverse frequency. On UNSW-NB15, the full model achieves 99.99% accuracy, 100% precision, 99.97% recall, and a false-negative rate of 2.65 × 10⁻⁴—the lowest across all compared architectures. Full article

Addressing the high-dimensional, strongly constrained multi-objective optimization problem of air–ground collaborative jamming scheduling in complex terrain, existing methods are often limited by incomplete modeling and low optimization efficiency in discrete feasible regions. This paper proposes a Terrain-Aware Multi-Scale Discrete Operator (TA-MSDO). A joint optimization model integrating discrete terrain characteristics and practical combat constraints is first constructed. Then, by leveraging the topological adjacency of terrain units, TA-MSDO employs a block-level crossover and a multi-scale mutation mechanism, replacing traditional continuous genetic operations to enable efficient and directional exploration of the discrete feasible region. Integrating TA-MSDO into the NSGA-III framework yields the enhanced ENSGA3 algorithm. Experimental results in a typical hilly terrain scenario demonstrate that ENSGA3 achieves a statistically significant performance improvement over the decomposition-based MOEA/D algorithm in terms of maximum achievable suppression effectiveness and hypervolume. As a comprehensive metric integrating convergence and Pareto frontier coverage, hypervolume further verifies the superior comprehensive optimization capability of the proposed algorithm. Meanwhile, compared with other classic mainstream multi-objective optimization algorithms including NSGA-II, standard NSGA-III and SPEA2, the proposed algorithm exhibits clear positive advantages in the upper bound of suppression effectiveness for elite solutions and operational stability across random initializations, with a favorable trend in Pareto frontier coverage for multi-objective collaborative optimization. This work provides an effective solution for jamming resource scheduling in complex battlefield environments. Full article

Centralized agricultural data platforms raise concerns about ownership, provenance, and vendor lock-in, motivating decentralized alternatives. This study evaluates BigchainDB as a blockchain-database hybrid for owner-controlled precision agriculture data sharing. We address three research questions: (1) functional feasibility for data integrity, access control, and heterogeneous sensor integration; (2) integration patterns bridging IoT ingestion with blockchain consensus; and (3) operational trade-offs versus centralized alternatives. A proof-of-concept implementation comprising a sensor simulator, FastAPI middleware, and three-node BigchainDB cluster demonstrates end-to-end data flow with cryptographic provenance. Key contributions include the following: identification of three integration patterns (message queue buffering for high-throughput ingestion, hierarchical asset modeling, and dual-key access control); comparative analysis against five blockchain-database alternatives; and characterization of deployment complexity. Results show BigchainDB satisfies the functional requirements for data integrity and access control, while requiring increased operational overhead compared to single-node databases. The architecture is viable when multi-party governance outweighs operational simplicity, though production deployments require further scalability validation, including detailed performance benchmarking. Full article

Healthcare 5.0 and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is emerging as a scalable model for the delivery of customised healthcare and chronic disease management, through Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) in patient smart home environments. Large-scale RPM initiatives are being rolled out by healthcare providers (HCPs); however, the constrained nature of IoMT devices and proximity to poorly administered smart home technologies create a cyber risk for highly personalised patient data. The recent Network and Information Systems (NIS 2) directive requires HCPs to improve their cyber risk management approaches, mandating heavy penalties for non-compliance. Current research into cyber risk management in smart home-based RPM does not address scalability. This research examines scalability through the lens of the Non-adoption, Abandonment, Scale-up, Spread and Sustainability (NASSS) framework and develops a novel Scalability Index (SI), informed by a PRISMA guided systematic literature review. Our search strategy identified 57 studies across major databases including ACM, IEEE, MDPI, Elsevier, and Springer, authored between January 2016 and March 2025 (final search 21 March 2025), which focussed on cyber security risk management in the RPM context. Studies focussing solely on healthcare institutional settings were excluded. To mitigate bias, a sample of the papers (30/57) were assessed by two other raters; the resulting Cohen’s Kappa inter-rater agreement statistic (0.8) indicating strong agreement on study selection. The results, presented in graphical and tabular format, provide evidence that most cyber risk approaches do not consider scalability from the HCP perspective. Applying the SI to the 57 studies in our review resulted in a low to medium scalability potential of most cyber risk management proposals, indicating that they would not support the requirements of NIS 2 in the RPM context. A limitation of our work is that it was not tested in a live large-scale setting. However, future research could validate the proposed SI, providing guidance for researchers and practitioners in enhancing cyber risk management of large-scale RPM initiatives. Full article

Self-powered sensors are critically important for IoT, yet most rely on synthetic polymers that lack environmental sustainability. This work presents a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) made from marine biowaste which operates as both an energy generator and humidity sensor. Abalone shell powder (ASP) majorly composed of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) was used as its tribopositive layer in combination with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) as tribonegative layer. The developed ASP-TENG device generated 410 V peak to peak open-circuit voltage (V_OC) and 2.79 W·m⁻² peak power density at an operating frequency of 4 Hz. These obtained results match or surpass existing biowaste-based TENGs. ASP-TENG efficiently worked as a self-powered humidity sensor because its output voltage decreased steadily from 410 V to 176 V in response to an increase in relative humidity (%RH) from 40% to 80% (decreases of 5.8 V for every 1%RH). The triboelectric charges become screened by water molecules that adsorb onto the porous CaCO₃ surface which leads to faster leakage current. This work demonstrates a sustainable method to create TENGs with multiple functions while developing environmentally friendly sensing systems for environmental tracking and sustainable energy harvesting. Full article