The Life Sciences 4.0 project was created at the Department of Information Technologies of the Faculty of Business Economics. Its main goal is to create a platform for data integration from the Life Sciences environment.
Research topic
The current development of civilization and sustainable development are increasingly based on various "smart" solutions based on the processing and use of large volumes of heterogeneous data, e.g. Industry 4.0. The newly created platform reflects these global trends, is based on the focus of CZU in Prague and fills an area that has not yet been addressed - Smart Life Sciences (Life Sciences 4.0).
The development of a technological platform for the integration of heterogeneous data (remote sensing, IoT, GIS, etc.) and their presentation fills a gap that has not yet been comprehensively addressed - analysis, methodology and development of a technological platform for the integration and presentation of a heterogeneous database in an IoT and big data environment .
Billions of sensors, cameras and other devices continuously monitor the events on Earth and the diverse activities of the human population. We live in the "age of data creation". Within the Internet of Things (IoT) alone, approximately 27 billion devices are currently connected and produce data. The increase is expected to be around 125 billion by 2030. In addition, a large amount of data is created in the area of social networks, etc. A non-negligible amount of data is generated by a number of autonomous projects for research and monitoring of various activities and indicators. At the ČZU in Prague alone, several dozen projects are currently underway, where data obtained from drones, various sensors and measurements are produced.
The problem with currently used solutions, including Life Science applications, is their weak interconnection. What about applications, different interfaces and databases. Because of this, the data obtained from the systems cannot easily and automatically be used for advanced data analysis. A typical example is the diverse incompatible applications and interfaces of different manufacturers of measuring and sensor equipment.
The excessive amount of big data has resulted in research and the subsequent development of a technological platform, the aim of which is to effectively use this data and search for possible synergistic effects, it is necessary to solve new approaches that will enable their efficient storage, processing and presentation, ideally in real time, especially for decision-making needs and process management, but also for further research – this area of "Big Data" is still hampered today mainly by standardization.
The key starting points enabling these proposed solutions are the amount of data from the living laboratory of the university's "smart campus" and the new, modernly equipped laboratory for processing big data built at the Faculty of Operational Economics.
Project solution procedure
As part of the project solution, a hackathon has already taken place in application prototyping focusing on the issue of improving the quality of life on the CZU campus with an emphasis on IoT issues. Currently, the project integrates data obtained from projects handled by the department, such as Zvěř online, UTIPA – User-technological index of precision agriculture and others. Details about the projects are available on the department's website.
The platform under development is open to the integration of data from various Life Sciences projects and areas. This will enable better analysis of the results, presentation and promotion of solutions. Information about participation can be obtained on the project website: http://ls40.pef.czu.cz/.