RapIoT Toolkit: Rapid Prototyping of Collaborative Internet of Things Applications

The Internet of Things holds huge promises to enhance collaboration in multiple application domains. By bringing Internet connectivity to everyday objects and environments it promotes ubiquitous access to information and integration with third-party systems. Further, connected things can be used as physical interfaces to enable users to cooperate leveraging multiple devices via parallel and distributed actions. Yet creating prototypes of IoT systems is a complex task for non-experts because it requires dealing with multi-layered hardware and software infrastructures. We introduce RapIoT, a software toolkit that facilitates prototyping IoT systems providing an integrated set of developer tools. Our solution abstracts low-level details and communication protocols allowing developers to focus on the application logic, facilitating rapid prototyping. RapIoT supports the development of collaborative applications by enabling the definition of high-level data types primitives. RapIoT primitives act as a loosely-coupled interface between generic IoT devices and applications; simplifying the development of systems that make use of an ecology of devices distributed to multiple users and environments. We illustrate the potential of our toolkit by presenting the development process of a IoT system for crowd-sourcing of air quality data. We conclude discussing strength and limitations of our platform highlighting further possible uses for collaborative applications.