Monitoring IoT Objects in Wearable Applications: an Alloy-Based Approach

With the rise of Internet of Things, end-users expect to obtain data from well-connected smart sensors and stations. Wearables are lightweight devices that rely on such a data-driven communication to keep people connected for specific purposes (e.g., fire-fighting, health check-up). The state machine of the wearable as a whole is governed by business rules and application logic in the said enterprise context. At a finer level of granularity, the states represented for these wearables could be further refined into the data values of the Internet of Things objects involved. In this paper, we propose an approach to monitoring the states of these objects against the said enterprise rules and the algorithmic logic that are logically expressed in a lightweight, declarative language called Alloy. Our monitoring machinery would detect any abnormal situation where the application logic of the said wearable is violated, allowing an external entity (e.g., a supervising robot, a software agent, a smart device) to step in to take action in due course. We illustrate our techniques using a case-study that describes an Internet of Things solution given to a fast-food restaurant.