PDIOT: Principles and Design of IoT Systems

Welcome to Principles and Design of IoT Systems

For the inaugural meeting of PDIoT course, all students should come to Appleton Tower room 3.09 on Wednesday, 18 September at 10:00. There will be an introduction to the course, followed by formation of groups and collection of hardware. In subsequent weeks each group can choose between 10:00, 11:00 and 12:00 on Wednesdays for the compulsory lab session.

You can now download the introductory slides and main course document below.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Perform the end-to-end design, implementation and demonstration of a typical Internet of Things system.
2. Demonstrate skills in data collection, cleaning, pre-processing, feature extraction and classification of noisy time-series sensor data, using machine learning techniques.
3. Develop Android apps and communicate with Bluetooth low-energy devices.
4. Gather information from primary sources, such as research papers, and distill in your own review paper.
5. Work productively in a team, where members have complimentary skill sets, and demonstrate competence in project management, requirements capture, negotiations, and oral and written presentations.

Summary

The course is concerned with the emerging discipline of digitising the physical world with networks of wireless sensors, analysing the sensor data using machine learning techniques to extract concise actionable information, and influencing the physical world via actuators, with an optional human in the loop. 

The course imparts foundational concepts in IoT through personal research distilled in the form of one research paper on foundational topics in IoT, and students working in pairs gain hands-on experience by realising a healthcare application idea as a demonstrable IoT system using wearable sensors by the end of the semester.

Course Description

The course aims to deliver a sound understanding of the design and analysis of Internet of Things systems through personal research and practice. The research in selected topics in IoT provides the foundational knowledge distilled in the form of a 3000-word survey paper. 

The students conduct a major piece of coursework working in pairs to develop an IoT application using wearable sensors. Students will experience all the stages in the design and implementation of a complex system, from its specification to the demonstration of a working prototype. They will be exposed to aspects of embedded systems programming, sensor data analytics using machine learning methods, user interface design, system integration and testing. Each pair will demonstrate a working prototype at the end of Semester 1 and deliver a written report at the start of Semester 2. 

Each student pair is given a  couple of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)  with 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope sensors, and Android app for sensor data collection. The task will be to design, implement and demonstrate a system for human activity recognition in real-time using the wearable sensor which interfaces to an Android app.