Photoplethysmography and its application in clinical physiological measurement

Human activity recognition systems are developed as part of a framework to enable continuous monitoring of human behaviours in the area of ambient assisted living, sports injury detection, elderly care, rehabilitation, and entertainment and surveillance in smart home environments. The extraction of relevant features is the most challenging part of the mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition pipeline. Feature extraction influences the algorithm performance and reduces computation time and complexity. However, current human activity recognition relies on handcrafted features that are incapable of handling complex activities especially with the current influx of multimodal and high dimensional sensor data. With the emergence of deep learning and increased computation powers, deep learning and artificial intelligence methods are being adopted for automatic feature learning in diverse areas like health, image classification, and recently, for feature extraction and classification of simple and complex human activity recognition in mobile and wearable sensors. Furthermore, the fusion of mobile or wearable sensors and deep learning methods for feature learning provide diversity, offers higher generalisation, and tackles challenging issues in human activity recognition. The focus of this review is to provide in-depth summaries of deep learning methods for mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition. The review presents the methods, uniqueness, advantages and their limitations. We not only categorise the studies into generative, discriminative and hybrid methods but also highlight their important advantages. Furthermore, the review presents classification and evaluation procedures and discusses publicly available datasets for mobile sensor human activity recognition. Finally, we outline and explain some challenges to open research problems that require further research and improvements.

Deep learning algorithms for human activity recognition using mobile and wearable sensor networks: State of the art and research challenges

Internet of Things (IoT) has recently received a great attention due to its potential and capacity to be integrated into any complex system. As a result of rapid development of sensing technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensors and the convergence of information technologies such as wireless communication and Internet, IoT is emerging as an important technology for monitoring systems. This paper reviews and introduces a framework for structural health monitoring (SHM) using IoT technologies on intelligent and reliable monitoring. Specifically, technologies involved in IoT and SHM system implementation as well as data routing strategy in IoT environment are presented. As the amount of data generated by sensing devices are voluminous and faster than ever, big data solutions are introduced to deal with the complex and large amount of data collected from sensors installed on structures.

Structural Health Monitoring Framework Based on Internet of Things: A Survey

Recently, the wide deployment of practical face recognition systems gives rise to the emergence of the inter-modality face recognition problem. In this problem, the face images in the database and the query images captured on spot are acquired under quite different conditions or even using different equipments. Conventional approaches either treat the samples in a uniform model or introduce an intermediate conversion stage, both of which would lead to severe performance degradation due to the great discrepancies between different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called Common Discriminant Feature Extraction specially tailored to the inter-modality problem. In the algorithm, two transforms are simultaneously learned to transform the samples in both modalities respectively to the common feature space. We formulate the learning objective by incorporating both the empirical discriminative power and tlie local smoothness of the feature transformation. By explicitly controlling the model complexity through the smoothness constraint, we can effectively reduce the risk of overfitting and enhance the generalization capability. Furthermore, to cope with the nongaussian distribution and diverse variations in the sample space, we develop two non-linear extensions of the algorithm: one is based on kernelization, while the other is a multi-mode framework. These extensions substantially improve the recognition performance in complex situation. Extensive experiments are conducted to test our algorithms in two application scenarios: optical image-infrared image recognition and photo-sketch recognition. Our algorithms show excellent performance in the experiments.

Inter-modality Face Recognition

In the last few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has proved to be an interesting and promising paradigm that aims to contribute to countless applications by connecting more physical “things” to the Internet. Although it emerged as a major enabler for many next-generation applications, it also introduced new challenges to already saturated networks. The IoT is already coming to life especially in healthcare and smart environment applications adding a large number of low-powered sensors and actuators to improve lifestyle and introduce new services to the community. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed RPL as the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) and standardized it in RFC6550 in 2012. RPL quickly gained interest, and many research papers were introduced to evaluate and improve its performance in different applications. In this paper, we present a discussion of the main aspects of RPL and the advantages and disadvantages of using it in different IoT applications. We also review the available research related to RPL in a systematic manner based on the enhancement area and the service type. In addition to that, we compare related RPL-based protocols in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, flexibility, robustness, and security. Finally, we present our conclusions and discuss the possible future directions of RPL and its applicability in the Internet of the future.

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RPL-Based Routing Protocols in IoT Applications: A Review

Designing routing protocols in Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) imposes great challenges. In emergency scenarios, the large and rapid data traffic caused by emergencies will lead to network congestion and bring about significant packet loss and delay. Routing protocol for LLNs (RPL) is the IETF standard for IPv6 routing in LLNs. The basic version of RPL uses Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as the default routing metric; it cannot solve the problem of sudden large data traffic. In this paper, we propose a congestion avoidance multipath routing protocol which uses composite routing metrics based on RPL, named CA-RPL. A routing metric for RPL that minimized the average delay towards the DAG root is proposed, and the weight of each path is computed by four metrics. The mechanism is explained and its performance is evaluated through simulation experiments based on Contiki. Simulation results show that the proposed CA-RPL reduces the average time delay by about 30% compared to original RPL when the interpacket interval is short and has almost 20% reduction in packet loss ratio. The CA-RPL can effectively alleviate the network congestion in the network with poor link quality and large data traffic and significantly improve the performance of LLNs.

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Toward Improved RPL: A Congestion Avoidance Multipath Routing Protocol with Time Factor for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new algorithm making use of kurtosis, which is a statistical parameter, to distinguish the seismic signal generated by a person's footsteps from other signals. It is adaptive to any environment and needs no machine study or training. As persons or other targets moving on the ground generate continuous signals in the form of seismic waves, we can separate different targets based on the seismic waves they generate. The parameter of kurtosis is sensitive to impulsive signals, so it's much more sensitive to the signal generated by person footsteps than other signals generated by vehicles, winds, noise, etc. The parameter of kurtosis is usually employed in the financial analysis, but rarely used in other fields. In this paper, we make use of kurtosis to distinguish person from other targets based on its different sensitivity to different signals. Simulation and application results show that this algorithm is very effective in distinguishing person from other targets.

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The Statistical Meaning of Kurtosis and Its New Application to Identification of Persons Based on Seismic Signals

This paper proposes a robust zero velocity (ZV) detector algorithm to accurately calculate stationary periods in a gait cycle. The proposed algorithm adopts an effective gait cycle segmentation method and introduces a Bayesian network (BN) model based on the measurements of inertial sensors and kinesiology knowledge to infer the ZV period. During the detected ZV period, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to estimate the error states and calibrate the position error. The experiments reveal that the removal rate of ZV false detections by the proposed method increases 80% compared with traditional method at high walking speed. Furthermore, based on the detected ZV, the Personal Inertial Navigation System (PINS) algorithm aided by EKF performs better, especially in the altitude aspect.

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A Robust Method to Detect Zero Velocity for Improved 3D Personal Navigation Using Inertial Sensors

The propagation model is an essential component in the design and deployment of a wireless sensor network (WSN). Although much attention has been given to near-ground propagation models, few studies place the transceiver directly on the ground with the height of antennas at the level of a few centimeters, which is a more realistic deployment scenario for WSNs. We measured the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) of these truly near-ground WSNs at 470 MHz under four different terrains, namely flat concrete road, flat grass and two derived scenarios, and obtained the corresponding path loss models. By comprehensive analysis of the influence of different antenna heights and terrain factors, we showed the limit of existing theoretical models and proposed a propagation model selection strategy to more accurately reflect the true characteristics of the near-ground wireless channels for WSNs. In addition, we implemented these models on Cooja simulator and showed that simplistic theoretical models would induce great inaccuracy of network connectivity estimation.

Measurement and Analysis of Near-Ground Propagation Models under Different Terrains for Wireless Sensor Networks

Vertical height estimation is critical to indoor localization technique. However, the common story height covers from 2.8m to 6.0m in multistory buildings, which make it meaningless to estimate height alone. An efficient indoor location system should provide accurate floor estimation with fuzzy story height information. This paper proposes a Bayesian Network inference method to identify pedestrian's floor level accurately in a multistory building with a waist-mounted device. The algorithm adopts an effective activities detector of stair climbing at first. With the output of the detector, the landing is counted and the height change is calculated by barometer measurements. Finally, based on the landing number and height change value, a Bayesian Network model is introduced to infer the floor change of the pedestrian. The experiments reveal that the proposed floor localization algorithm is more reliable, which achieves an accuracy of 99.36% with a total number of 1247 times floor change.

Jianming Wei

Papers

Toward Improved RPL: A Congestion Avoidance Multipath Routing Protocol with Time Factor for Wireless Sensor Networks

The Statistical Meaning of Kurtosis and Its New Application to Identification of Persons Based on Seismic Signals

A Robust Method to Detect Zero Velocity for Improved 3D Personal Navigation Using Inertial Sensors

Measurement and Analysis of Near-Ground Propagation Models under Different Terrains for Wireless Sensor Networks

A robust floor localization method using inertial and barometer measurements