A Communication Framework for the Internet of People and Things Based on the Concept of Activity Feeds in Social Computing

Social networks connect people while internet of things platforms connect things. Although both platforms use various communication tools in efficient ways, platforms for things often don't communicate and interoperate with social networks. As a consequence, there is a lack of unified programming interfaces and platforms to enable internet-based interactions between people and things. This hinders deployment of services where people and things need to co-exist such as in ambient assisted living and collaborative sensing scenarios. We propose activity feeds as a unified communication framework to address this integration challenge. The activity feed concept is widely deployed in social networks and recently also in internet of things platforms. It is a flexible and easy-to-understand concept. We propose a communication framework based on activity feeds consisting of a set of concepts, a set of patterns for using activity feeds, an API for developing applications, and a reference implementation of the framework on smart phones. We describe how we tested this framework in two different applications in the areas of ambient assisted living and crisis management. For these two applications we were able to easily deploy the framework by invoking the activity feed API. We report on how we use communication patterns based on activity feeds and how the framework managed to facilitate people and thing communication.