Next Generation IoT - a new EU research and innovation action project at HIC

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and applications are bringing fundamental changes to all sectors of society and economy and constitute an essential element of the Next Generation Internet (NGI).

“The challenge is to leverage EU technological strength to develop the next generation of IoT devices and systems which leverage progress in enabling technologies such as 5G, cyber-security, distributed computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality and tactile internet”, explains Sokratis Nifakos, researcher at the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics.

“In addition, it is important to build and sustain a competitive ecosystem of European technology and system providers in IoT as well as ensuring end-user trust, adequate security and privacy by design”, he continues.

TERMINET will provide a novel next generation reference architecture based on cutting-edge technologies such as SDN, multiple-access edge computing, and virtualisation for next generation IoT, while introducing new, intelligent IoT devices for low-latency, market-oriented use cases. Among other tasks KI will be involved in the development and evaluation of a digital education surgery training pilot, where immersive technologies (VR/AR/XR) will be used to facilitate a digital surgery training environment, interconnected with TERMINET platform.

“Different research areas will be explored during the project duration such as digital education with the usage of immersive technologies, cybersecurity and privacy issues in healthcare digital education environment and finally system performance as well user experience evaluation”, says Sokratis Nifakos.

Next generation IoT architectures with a focus on user-aware, self-aware and semi-autonomous IoT systems may benefit from this research. This should also address new real-time capable solutions, which solve performance challenges such as streaming and filtering at the edge, latency and network constraints. A further challenge is to make use of distributed AI, address security, privacy and trust requirements by design and allow for new de-centralised topologies and governance.

What are the biggest challenges in your research? 

"Currently, traditional cloud computing and IoT solutions are not able to support real-time applications since they are designed to offer non real-time services. Connecting, configuring, and managing devices and services in the traditional way (manually, statically and per IoT domain) is no longer viable", Sokratis Nifakos explains.

"A new interoperability approach of supporting Next Generation IoT (NG-IoT) applications is needed to alleviate the increased complexity of the huge number of connected ‘things’ together. Thus, one of the biggest challenges within this research project is to present a new approach in integrating AI and IoT ecosystem without posing privacy issues, while providing a security by design concept, where multiple IoT ecosystem instances are trained by info coming from all the IoT infrastructure without actual data exchange”, he adds.

Who else at Karolinska Institutet is involved in this project?

Project members from Karolinska Institutet include Sokratis Nifakos (main applicant from KI), Sabine Koch (principal investigator) and Natalia Stathakarou (project member) and Klas Karlgren (senior researcher), all at the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME).