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The ageing population and related diseases represent some of the most relevant challenges in the healthcare domain. All that will lead to an increasing demand of innovative solutions in order to guarantee a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. In fact, many researchers are studying the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the e-health field. In this paper we report a case study where a locale middleware for portable devices has been used to facilitate the development of IoT mobile application in this respect, allowing the communication among different on board sensing technologies. The mobile middleware is built on top of the WoX (Web of Topics) platform and quickly permits the deployment of innovation services thanks to its abstraction and user centric model. A validation test bed involving 31 elderly people living in Lecce (Italy) has been carried out for the monitoring of their activities, mainly those connected to positioning and motility both in indoor and outdoor scenarios. Our approach has demonstrated a practical way to replace obtrusive monitoring technique (typical of caregivers) with unobtrusive ones, in order to obtain proactive intervention strategies for a smart city.

The smart cities promise to offer innovative services to citizens in order to improve the level of life quality but currently, the integration among different ecosystems of data are still lacking. It is noteworthy that data, produced and consumed by public and private institutions, and citizens, may be a precious resource if abstraction and effectiveness are guaranteed in the interface mechanism between data-producers and data-consumers. This work proposes a coupling model, based on standards, technologies, and methodologies, able to make easy and effective the distribution, access, and use of data between services providers and citizens. The system architecture has been designed and developed by using the OSGi technology exploiting a support supplied by Docker, a platform able to ensure greater freedom in the modularization of software platforms oriented to micro-services. Furthermore, for higher levels, an approach based on the OneM2M standard has been adopted in order to obtain a middle layer useful to large-scale coordination of aspects related to the gathering, discovery, security and distribution of data and services. An use case has been defined and summarized in order to clearly show potential benefits of the proposed system for all stakeholders.

Mobile devices are able to gather more and more functionalities use- ful to control people's daily life facilities. They offer computational power and different kinds of sensors and communication interfaces, enabling users to mon- itor and interact with the environment by a single integrated tool. Near Field Communication (NFC) represents a suitable technology in the interaction be- tween digital world and real world. Most NFC-enabled mobile devices exploit the smart card features as a whole: e.g., they can be used as contactless payment and authentication systems. Nevertheless at present heterogeneity in mobile and IoT technologies does not permit to fully express potentialities of mobile devic- es as authentication systems, since most of the proposed solutions are strictly related to specific technological platforms. Basing on smart payment card ap- proach, Europay, MasterCard e VISA (EMV) protocols and Host Card Emula- tion (HCE) technology, the current work proposes a distributed architecture for using NFC-enabled mobile devices as possession factor in Multifactor Authen- tication (MFA) systems. The innovative idea of the proposal relies on its inde- pendence with respect to the specific software and hardware technologies. The architecture is able to distribute tokens to registered mobile devices for univo- cally identifying user identity, tracing its actions in the meanwhile. As proof of concept, a real case has been implemented: an Android/iOS mobile application to control a car central locking system by NFC.