Drops: A multi-producer and multi-consumer data sharing framework with human experience

Just like the internet, Internet of things (IoT) with right standards and technologies, will impact multiple aspects of human lives including Smart Home, Smart Car and Healthcare. Healthcare of things (HoT) would enhance healthcare using the insight provided by sensor data. Healthcare users will subscribe to HoT services that use sensors to get activity data (such as steps walked, hours slept and so on) along with other health vitals (such as heart rate, temperature and weight) to improve user's health. Similarly Smart home users subscribe to a Smart home cloud service that will use data from home sensors. Most of these IoT scenarios have multiple producer, multiple consumer (MPMC) environments, with multiple sensors as producers of data, and multiple IoT services as consumers of data. Current literature and standards provide many protocols for data paths (data transfers) in these MPMC environments that can be used for IoT. However, data paths in MPMC environment must be easily configurable and manageable by end users in order for IoT to be more appealing to a broader user community. Multiple sensors with multiple applications from each manufacturer to control them would not be preferred by users. Also, IoT users need to be able easily choose between multiple options for service providers. In this demonstration, we highlight how user experience perspectives impact the data framework design in MPMC environments, using our drops data framework infrastructure. We hope to have these concepts included IoT standardization efforts. This demonstration was also made at CES at the IEEE booth.