Edited by
Sudhir Dixit
Ramjee Prasad
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Dixit, Sudhir, editor. | Prasad, Ramjee, editor.
Title: Human bond communication : the holy grail of holistic communication and immersive experience / edited by Sudhir Dixit, Ramjee Prasad.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046268 (print) | LCCN 2017002987 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119341338 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119341468 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119341413 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Telecommunication systems. | Human‐computer interaction. | Digital communications. | Information technology.
Classification: LCC TK5102.5 .H86 2017 (print) | LCC TK5102.5 (ebook) | DDC 621.38201–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046268
Cover design by Wiley
Cover image: © dem10/gettyimages
Naiva kinchit karmiti yukto manyeta tattvit‐vit
Pashyan shunvan sparshan jigrhrann asnan gacchan svapan svasan
Pralapan visrijan grihnann unmishan nimishann api
indriyaanindriyaarthesu vartanta iti dhaaryan
One who knows the truth is always certain that it is the senses that are engaged in observations, like seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting and is the involuntary participant of the actions happening around, just like opening and closing of eyelids. Such observations are not the part of the ultimate knowledge, but, when a seeker looks beyond them, finds the ultimate truth.
—The Bhagavad Gita (5.8 and 5.9)
Ernestina Cianca
Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Maurizia De Bellis
Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Enrico Del Re
Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Mauro De Sanctis
Interdepartmental Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Edoardo Di Maggio
I‐CTIF Steering Board (LAW‐Intellectual Property), Rome, Italy
Sudhir Dixit
CTIF Global Capsule (CGC), Rome, Italy Basic Internet Foundation, Oslo, Norway
Liljana Gavrilovska
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Skopje, Macedonia
Bilal Habib
Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, India
Flemming Hynkemejer
RTX A/S, Wireless Wisdom, Norresundby, Denmark
Sara Jayousi
Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Geir M. Køien
Faculty of Engineering and Science, Department of ICT, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Pierpaolo Loreti
Interdepartmental Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Pradeep K. Mathur
Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, India
Prateek Mathur
CTIF, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Helga E. Melcherts
Varias BVBA, Antwerp, Belgium
Albena Mihovska
Department of Electronic Systems CTIF, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Seshadri Mohan
Systems Engineering, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA
Simone Morosi
Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Lorenzo Mucchi
Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
Federica Paganelli
CNIT, Research Unit of Florence, Florence, Italy
Milica Pejanovic
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro
Ramjee Prasad
CTIF Global Capsule (CGC), Rome, Italy; School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Silvano Pupolin
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Valentin Rakovic
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Skopje, Macedonia
Luca Simone Ronga
CNIT, Research Unit of Florence, Florence, Italy
Marina Ruggieri
Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Gianpaolo Sannino
Center for Teleinfrastructures (I‐CTIF), University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, Italy
Sachin Sharma
Systems Engineering, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA
Domenico Siciliano
Themis Law Firm, Rome, Italy
Dr. Sudhir Dixit recently joined the CTIF Global Capsule (CGC) as the Director of Home for Mind and Body, an international centre for peace, located in Rome, Italy. Additionally, he is a Fellow and Evangelist of basic Internet at the Basic Internet Foundation in Norway. He has also been the CEO and Cofounder of Skydoot, Inc., a start‐up at San Francisco Bay area in the content sharing and collaboration space. From December 2013 to April 2015, he was a Distinguished Chief Technologist and CTO of the Communications & Media Services for the Americas region of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services in Palo Alto, CA, and prior to this he was the Director of Hewlett Packard Labs India from September 2009. From June 2009 to August 2009, he was a Director at HP Labs in Palo Alto. Prior to joining HP Labs Palo Alto, Dixit held a joint appointment with the Centre for Internet Excellence (CIE) and the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of Oulu, Finland. From 1996 to 2008, he held various positions with leading companies, such as with BlackBerry as Senior Director (2008), with Nokia and Nokia Networks in the United States as Senior Research Manager, Nokia Research Fellow, Head of Nokia Research Center (Boston), and Head of Network Technology (USA) (1996–2008). From 1987 to 1996, he was at NYNEX Science and Technology and GTE Laboratories (both now Verizon Communications) as a Staff Director and Principal Research Scientist.
Sudhir Dixit has 21 patents granted by the US PTO and has published over 200 papers and edited, coedited, or authored seven books (Wireless World in 2050 and Beyond: A Window into the Future (2016), Wi‐Fi, WiMAX and LTE Multi‐hop Mesh Networks by Wiley (2013), Globalization of Mobile and Wireless Communications by Springer (2011), Technologies for Home Networking by Wiley (2008), Content Networking in the Mobile Internet by Wiley (2004), IP over WDM by Wiley (2003), and Wireless IP and Building the Mobile Internet by Artech House (2002)). He is presently on the editorial boards of IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Cambridge University Press Wireless Series, and Springer’s Wireless Personal Communications Journal and Central European Journal of Computer Science (CEJS). He was a Technical Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine (2000–2002 and 2006–2012). He is a two‐time winner of the MIT’s Technology Review India Grand Challenge Award (2010).
From 2010 to 2012, he was an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, and, since 2010, he has been a Docent of Broadband Mobile Communications for Emerging Economies at the University of Oulu, Finland. A Life Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of IET and IETE, Dixit received a Ph.D. degree in electronic science and telecommunications from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK and an M.B.A. from the Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida. He received his M.E. degree in Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, and B.E. degree from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India.
Dr. Ramjee Prasad is a Professor in multibusiness model and technology innovation in the School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the Founder President of the CTIF Global Capsule (CGC). He has been a Founder Director of Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF) since 2004. He is also the Founder Chairman of the Global ICT Standardisation Forum for India, established in 2009. GISFI has the purpose of increasing the collaboration between European, Indian, Japanese, North‐American and other worldwide standardization activities in the area of information and communications technology (ICT) and related application areas.
He was the Founder Chairman of the HERMES Partnership —a network of leading independent European research centers established in 1997, of which he is now the Honorary Chair. He is a Fellow of IEEE (USA), IETE (India), IET (UK), and Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) and a member of the Netherlands Electronics and Radio Society (NERG) and the Danish Engineering Society (IDA).
He has received Ridderkorset af Dannebrogordenen (Knight of the Dannebrog) in 2010 from the Danish Queen for the internationalization of top‐class telecommunication research and education. He has been honored by the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, as a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Clinical Sciences and Translational Medicine on March 15, 2016.
He has received several international awards such as IEEE Communications Society Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award in 2003 for making contribution in the field of “Personal, Wireless and Mobile Systems and Networks”; Telenor's Research Award in 2005 for impressive merits, both academic and organizational within the field of wireless and personal communication; 2014 IEEE AESS Outstanding Organizational Leadership Award for “Organizational Leadership in developing and globalizing the CTIF (Center for TeleInFrastruktur) Research Network”; and so on.
He is the Founder Editor in Chief of the Springer International Journal on Wireless Personal Communications. He is a member of the editorial board of other renowned international journals including those of River Publishers. Ramjee Prasad is Founder Cochair of the steering committees of many renowned annual international conferences, for example, Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications Symposium (WPMC) and Wireless VITAE and Global Wireless Summit (GWS).
He has published more than 30 books, 1000 plus journal and conference publications, and more than 15 patents and over 100 PhD graduates and a larger number of master’s students (over 250). Several of his students are today worldwide telecommunication leaders themselves.
Applications today have been enriched with multimedia content consisting of audio, video, augmented reality and consistently progressing toward multidimensional rendering, such as stereo, 3D, ultrahigh definition, and fidelity. In parallel, the user interaction with the devices and applications is delivering engaging experience through voice, gestures, gaze, touch, and so on. Wearable devices and body sensors are continually being integrated with applications and user devices, such as a smartphone, remote control, and finding useful applications in healthcare and remote monitoring. Humans interact with applications and consume content through optical and auditory senses. But the understanding is incomplete in the absence of information from and about the other three sensory inputs, namely, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and tactile (touch). This is because all five senses interestingly interact among themselves and the environment, such that being able to sense them, transmit them, and render them at the receiver can potentially deliver powerful experiences. This book on human bond communication (HBC) is about utilizing all five senses to allow more expressive and holistic sensory information exchange through communication techniques for more human sentiment centric communication. The overall outcome is for the human brain to be holistically cognitive of the subject of interest. This complete perceptive information is well exchanged among humans through these senses and, when collectively agreed, becomes knowledge. This is the first book of its kind to motivate research and innovation in holistic communication and to launch a new era of novel products and services to disrupt the status quo of contemporary applications and services that only deal with aural and optical capture, transmission, and rendering of information.
This book focuses on all technologies and issues related to HBC. It also includes the use cases and business opportunities emanating from human‐to‐machine and machine‐to‐machine applications, interactions, and communication. The chapters have been authored by the experts in the various fields, which collectively would make HBC possible.
This book is intended for graduate students, academic teachers, scholars, researchers, industry professionals, and software developers interested in the design and development of more engaging and holistic interaction experiences. This book will also be of great interest to casual readers not necessarily familiar with sensor and communication technologies. Therefore, the content is more descriptive and qualitative than theoretical in style of writing.
We thank the contributors of this book for their time and effort to make this book possible in a short period of time. We particularly acknowledge their patience and for always responding promptly to numerous requests for revising their chapters.
Ramjee Prasad
Aalborg, Denmark
Sudhir Dixit1,3 and Ramjee Prasad1,2
1 CTIF Global Capsule (CGC), Rome, Italy
2 School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
3 Basic Internet Foundation, Oslo, Norway
Information and communications technologies (ICT) have progressed rapidly in this millennium for people to communicate and exchange information using multimedia (speech, video/image, text), and the same has extended to Internet of things (IoT) and machine‐to‐machine and machine‐to‐human communication. This trend is only going to accelerate in the years to come with powerful human–computer interaction technologies to deliver engaging and intuitive experiences. But these developments have remained confined to only the sensing and transmission of aural and optical information in the digital domain through the use of microphone, camera, speaker, and display devices. However, the ability to integrate the other three sensory features, namely, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), and tactile (touch) in information transfer and replication to deliver “being there in‐person” experience, are still far from reality. Human bond communication (HBC) is a novel concept that incorporates all five sensory information from sensing, to digitization, to transmission and replication at the receiver to allow more expressive, engaging, realistic, and holistic information between humans [1] and in some cases between humans and machines such as in remote sensing and robotic control. Lack of inclusion of the other three senses in the digital world of ICT limits the full exploitation of the cognitive ability of the human mind for a fuller perceptive information experience. The five senses and the environment interact in interesting ways to become complete knowledge for human species as its brain has developed and evolved naturally from the time it came into existence on this planet. The profoundness of perceiving an object depends on the incisiveness and extensity of the sense organs. Incisiveness refers to the granularity and minute details or variations an organ can detect, and extensity refers to the range of the physical property that it can detect.
In the traditional world of digital information exchange, the subject is described and presented partially via its aural and optical rendering, which gives a sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction in fully understanding the subject. In the present era of ever increasing competition through innovation, inclusion of all five senses to deliver complete experience is the holy grail of the research community. Products have begun to appear through wearables and other embedded sensors in the body, but sensors exploiting touch, taste, and smell and embedding them into products remains a distant reality and is an area of intense research today as would become evident from the chapters included in this book.
Auditory and optical sensing is wave based. In audio sound travels through waves and can be sensed and digitized. Similarly, light shining on an object is reflected in electromagnetic radiation, and a part of this spectrum (called visible light in the range of wavelength 390–700 nm) is visible to the human eye and when rendered on the retina becomes a visual formulation of the object in the nervous system. The camera does this nicely to capture an object visually and digitize it for transmission. When rendered remotely on a display device in 2‐D or 3‐D, a person can see the object as though he or she was seeing it by being physically present at a location where the camera was located. Other human senses (tactile, olfactory, gustatory) utilize particle‐based sensing and rely on smearing the object with the sensors. Building such sensors remains a technological challenge for the research community because each type of sensor must deal with large range of parameters and their wide spectrum. Digitization of these parameters is also a major challenge, and even if some finite widely prevalent values can be captured and digitized, their replication from the digital domain to the analog domain and their sensing by a person in an unobtrusive manner is a complex human‐sensor interface issue. Figure 1.1 illustrates the HBC system and depicts what is possible today and what is not.
Figure 1.1 An illustration of human bond communication (HBC) concept. CTP, communication technology platform.
Prasad [1]. Reproduced with the permission of Springer.
HBC is about understanding the human sensory functionality and works similar to human sensory system, which includes providing a perceptually holistic understanding of an object combining all five senses while incorporating the object’s environment.
The HBS architecture extrapolates the contemporary communications architecture to include the missing three senses (or types of sensors): tactile, olfactory, and gustatory, not in use today along with the aural and optic sensors. Nevertheless, some limited deployments are happening in machine‐to‐machine and machine‐to‐human communication use cases where robots are being used, such as in industry, law enforcement, hazardous material handling, and surveillance. A proposed architecture is shown in Figure 1.2 [1]. It should be noted that the architecture goes beyond capturing just a person’s senses to also deploying all five types of sensors in any environment to capture smell (e.g., types of smoke, air pollutants), tactile information (e.g., surface roughness, temperature, wind speed), and taste (e.g., liquids, dirt, waste) and learning about an object or its surroundings.
Figure 1.2 A proposed HBC architecture.
Prasad [1]. Reproduced with the permission of Springer.
The system consists of the three key building blocks: (i) senducers that sense the characteristic parameters through stimuli and transform those analog values to electrical and digital domain for further processing and transmission, (ii) human bond sensorium (HBS) that collects the data from the senducers, processes them to make them consumable for the human perceptive system (i.e., human consumption) by removing a large amount of nonusable and redundant data and information, transmits it to the far end to the receiver gateway, and (iii) human perceivable transposer (HPT) that transforms the received digital data to human consumable format, which includes replication of the senses to a form that one would expect if the person was physically present at the site where the sensory data were collected through senducers. Until such time the replication solutions are not available, the HPT may prefer to render the non‐audio–visual sense data through digital means (such as colors, emoticons, text, other gestures like vibration, pressure, temperature, etc.).
Our journey into the world of intuitive and rich communication begins with the vision of extending the contemporary form of digital communication to more natural human‐to‐human communication through the novel concept of HBC. This chapter has introduced that grand vision. HBC closely embraces the advances in the fields of sensors and wireless distributed computing, physiology, biology, wearables, chemistry, medicine, analytics, Internet, and so on that will be required to bring that vision closer to reality. Therefore, this book has included invited chapters from the experts in the various fields who look at the HBC through their perspectives and delve into the technical challenges that are before the research community. They also discuss the numerous business opportunities that are unlocked due to the intersection of the innovations emanating from interdisciplinary research and entrepreneurship. Whenever appropriate the authors have looked at the historical trends to present their ideas and invoke discourse. Figure 1.3 illustrates some of the key concepts and technologies that will have a profound impact on HBC. These are discussed in the various chapters of the book.
Figure 1.3 Key concepts and technology enablers for HBC.
Chapter 1 is an introduction of the book and lays the foundation of the grand vision for the HBC concept.
Chapter 2 presents the basic concepts behind HBC and provides an insight in the ongoing research related to the concepts of human sensory and emotional replication, physical world augmentation, and human umwelt expansion. This chapter then describes an HBC architecture and discusses its convergence with ICT. Additionally, the chapter discusses the potentials of HBC and gives a vision of possible future applications and services.
In Chapter 3, the authors postulate that the provision of enhanced augmented reality services to mobile users based on the HBC paradigm will rely on the definition of a high performance, high efficiency, and highly reconfigurable network architecture for the exchange of all the five sensory features. The objective of this chapter is to propose a novel HBC communication network architecture that is able to support the provision of such novel services incorporating all five senses. Starting from the definition of the main network, security, and quality of service requirements for HBC, a 5G network architecture based on software‐defined networking, network function virtualization, and Fog–Edge computing paradigms is presented. The main enabling technologies, including WBAN, localization techniques, and content‐oriented networking, are described together with some possible solutions to be adopted to cope with the security threats that may affect the success of HBC services.
Chapter 4 is about data mining of the human being. After describing the definition of data mining (also known as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD)) as the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and extracting hidden information and identifying patterns or relationships among the data, the author describes the various models and thereafter focuses on data mining of the human being, where the data is any fact, number, or text regarding a human being. The data can describe the human being at any level, from atoms to cells, to organs, to social level.
Chapter 5 provides an overview of ongoing research on the proposed models for IoT and summarizes their advantages and disadvantages in the context of human centric IoT. After describing potential human centric sensing (HCS) scenarios that require changes in how HCS‐based IoT should be modeled, the chapter proposes a macro‐level model and describes how it can help to achieve simplicity in the complex IoT world by understanding how to get from micro‐complexity to macro‐simplicity. It also describes HCS networks and federations and their modeling and later goes into end‐to‐end security and privacy issues. This chapter also touches upon the concept of tactile Internet as the enabler for HCS IoT.
Chapter 6 describes human body (i.e., body as a node (ByN)) as the main actor in the ICT systems, which plays an active role as a node of the ICT network, as well as part of the ICT user terminal. In addition, “intrusion” with technological ICT devices in the body provides to the body itself a great opportunity for the early monitoring and the daily cure of critical pathologies. After describing the ByN approach, this chapter delves into applying the underlying concept to oral cavity and presents an overview of the research in this field with its implications and perspectives for the future.
Chapter 7 explores the novel machine learning‐based approaches to cognitive radio (CR) systems developed that will lead to innovative HBC applications to serve the needs of a community. This chapter formulates novel algorithms to share spectrum through dynamic spectrum leasing methodologies and adaptive policy decision, making processes that seek to maximize the utilization of available scarce spectrum.
Chapter 8 is about the application of ICT for wildlife preservation. It is well known that various governments and nongovernmental organizations have launched diverse technology‐driven programs to arrest unprecedented decline and wherever possible successfully restore and rehabilitate wild animal species. While timely integration of technology into wildlife research, monitoring, and conservation in the last couple of decades have definitely yielded positive results, future technology solutions are likely to cater relevant information for decision making and sound management based on application of five human senses instead of just two most common human senses (seeing and hearing). This chapter describes how the sensors for all five senses can be utilized in the solutions for wildlife preservation and concludes that there is an urgent need of sharing mental models between the stakeholders, specifically between the conservationists and technologists.
Chapter 9 investigates the security and privacy issues in HBC. Three different HBC levels are defined and analyzed what these really mean. The approach is to extrapolate and speculate about future progress but to put effort into keeping the extrapolations plausible. Many different fields are involved. Therefore, this chapter serves as a survey about possible future advances in the various fields that will have an impact on HBC. The security and privacy challenges are enormous and they need to be resolved. Thus, this chapter also serves as an urgent call for research in security and privacy issues.
Chapter 10 describes how the Internet of everything (IoE) is the networked connection of people, processes, data, and things. It contains the IoT and the Internet of humans (IoH). The stream of data the IoE will produce can be turned into actionable information and will provide numerous opportunities and will be omnipresent. This chapter attempts to answer the question: Will HBC, the novel concept that incorporates smell, taste, and touch in the exchange of information, be feasible? If the technology to create an HBC ecosystem succeeds, it will bring transformational changes and a paradigm shift. This chapter fast forwards to year 2050 to envision the evolution of the IoE and to predict the anticipated impact and opportunities.
Chapter 11 focuses on the use of HBC for health applications and in particular on the ethical and legal issues that arise. For many years, the use of ICT in medicine was limited to allowing communications between remote patients and doctors (telemedicine). In the recent years, there has been a rapid evolution in the use of ICT in health. The IoT framework allows a pervasive monitoring of anything around and eventually inside us, and this could really open the way to novel diagnostic and therapeutic methods. This rapid evolution has also posed several challenges as many things are not regulated yet. This chapter attempts to address several key questions: What will happen when HBC will be a reality? Would HBC really enable novel applications in health? And if so, would that require new regulations?
Chapter 12 delves into the challenges in intellectual property (IP) and ICT law that will potentially come with the introduction of HBC. From a legal point of view, HBC means that attorneys and legal professionals should be able to conceive in short time the framework of a smart regulation, in order to provide the principles that will be governing the interaction between human beings, machines, and human umwelt expansion. The opportunities that will be unlocked with HBC will undoubtedly trigger the evolution of IP and ICT regulations in several areas. Because of the need for coherency, a multidisciplinary approach will be the key for reaching consensus among different experts and realize full implementation of the legal and general aspects of HBC.
Chapter 13 presents a historical view of the developments in wireless communication brought about by the changes in paradigm of communications from station to station to person to person and because of technology improvement that made the telephone terminal a multimedia mobile device. This chapter then delves into what is next for wireless communications? While future research could be either on technology or on applications, in reality, the success depends on several other factors such as fashion design, creating user needs, user experience, business models, and so on. These other factors require collaboration among teams in quite different areas that we call for interdisciplinary research and development. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the need for this collaborative approach for innovation and commercial success.
Chapter 14 is a broad overview of how communication among humans originated over the history of mankind and how it has evolved over time with the advances in technology. It discusses the paradox of users that while on the one side they have had choice of platforms and applications to provide enormous opportunities to exchange information in increasingly efficient ways, on the other side they chose the platforms that use only the least significant parts of the messages (i.e., text). This chapter quantifies how much information is included in text, speech, and video/image. Then it discusses technology as an enabler for improving communication over distances and differences between the various platforms, why customers seem not to choose the channel that offers optimum communication, and what are the technical characteristics of the various channels (face to face, letter, telegraph, voice, video, television, SMS/MMS, email, etc.). After presenting the data on how much data the users consume through different channels, this chapter goes into the psychological impact of the various communication channels and finally how the inclusion of the remaining three senses (touch, taste, smell) would further augment the quality of communication.
In summary, the book defines the concept of HBC, sets out its vision, and provides details on the technologies that are driving the realization of the vision and how it would transform the communication experience between humans while also significantly unlock the business opportunities between humans, machines, and their environment. This book also goes into the details of the security, privacy, IP, and regulatory challenges that must be addressed for HBC to be commercially realized.