Objectives 1. To consider the challenges of recruiting and retaining medical patients in trials of complex interventions, that include ‘psychological’ components. 2. To discuss practical solutions to these challenges that ensure trials recruit to target and maximise outcome data collection. Examples are taken from three trials of complex interventions: SMaRT Oncology-2, SMaRT Oncology-3 and SMa...

Smart cards have been proliferated into many aspects of modern life. Historically, the ownership of smart cards has remained with the smart card issuers. Although this ownership model is favoured by a wide range of industries and service providers, it does not provide optimum convenience and flexibility to cardholders. One potential solution could be to shift the control of smart cards from the...

Smart systems such as physical infrastructures infused with information technology offer a great opportunity for satisfying the customer needs and managing the resources more effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we examine the smart infrastructures in terms of their sustainability potential, which in turn requires a consideration of human aspects. We consider the currently defined metric...

Smart Grid has been evolved as the innovative idea globally as a solution for the power demand problems. Countries worldwide are looking for an efficient implementation of the same. A lot of research is now going on the various issues and challenges on the implementation and real time operation of the various components of Smart Grid. This paper presents a review on different challenges of elec...

The so-called smart factory is a novel paradigm that is rapidly gaining ground in scenarios for factories of the future. Many manufacturing companies try to raise the level of smartness by considering a number of aspects related to the smart factory. However, there is a lack of field-oriented systematic research to help them fit the interest of industry for promoting interest and diffusion of s...

So-called “Smart Dust” is envisioned to combine sensing, computing, and wireless communication capabilities in an autonomous, dust-grain-sized device. Dense networks of Smart Dust should then be able to unobtrusively monitor real-world processes with unprecedented quality and scale. In this paper, we present and evaluate a prototype implementation of a system for tracking the location of real-w...

Smart Cities require reliable means for managing installations that offer essential services to the citizens. In this paper we focus on the problem of evacuation of smart buildings in case of emergencies. In particular, we present an abstract architecture for situation-aware evacuation guidance systems in smart buildings, describe its key modules in detail, and provide some concrete examples of...

Many of the services a smart city can provide to its citizens rely on the ability of its infrastructure to collect and process in real time vast amounts of continuous data that sensors deployed through the city produce. In this paper we present the server infrastructure we have designed in the context of the HERMES project to collect the data from sensors and aggregate it in streams for their u...