Over the last few decades, the development in the field of navigation and routing devices has become a hindering task for the researchers to develop smart and intelligent guiding mechanism at indoor and outdoor locations for blind and visually impaired people (BVIPs). The existing research need to be analysed from a historical perception including early research on the first electronic travel aids to the use of modern artificial vision models for the navigation of BVIPs. Diverse approaches such as: e-cane or guide dog, infrared-based cane, laser based walker and many others are proposed for the navigation of BVIPs. But most of these techniques have limitations such as: infrared and ultrasonic based assistance has short range capacities for object detection. While laser based assistance can harm other people if it directly hit them on their eyes or any other part of the body. These trade-offs are critical to bring this technology in practice.To systematically assess, analyze, and identify the primary studies in this specialized field and provide an overview of the trends and empirical evidence in the proposed field. This systematic research work is performed by defining a set of relevant keywords, formulating four research questions, defining selection criteria for the articles, and synthesizing the empirical evidence in this area. Our pool of studies include 191 most relevant articles to the proposed field reported between 2011 and 2020 (a portion of 2020 is included). This systematic mapping will help the researchers, engineers, and practitioners to make more authentic decisions for finding gaps in the available navigation assistants and suggest a new and enhanced smart assistant application accordingly to ensure safety and accurate guidance of the BVIPs. This research work have several implications in particular the impact of reducing fatalities and major injuries of BVIPs.

Analysis of Navigation Assistants for Blind and Visually Impaired People: A Systematic Review

Currently, several outdoor navigation and orientation electronic traveling aid (ETA) solutions for visually impaired (VI) people are commercially available or in active development. This paper's survey of blind experts has shown that after outdoor navigation, the second most important ETA feature for VI persons is indoor navigation and orientation (in public institutions, supermarkets, office buildings, homes, etc.). VI persons need ETA for orientation and navigation in unfamiliar indoor environments with embedded features for the detection and recognition of obstacles (not only on the ground but also at head level) and desired destinations such as rooms, staircases, and elevators. The development of such indoor navigation systems, which do not have Global Positioning System (GPS) locational references, is challenging and requires an overview and evaluation of existing systems with different navigation technologies. This paper presents an evaluation and comparison of state-of-the-art indoor navigation solutions, and the research implications provide a summary of the critical observations, some insights, and directions for further developments. The paper maps VI needs in relation to research and development (R&D) trends using the evaluation criteria deemed most important by blind experts.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/3/636/pdf

Indoor Navigation Systems for Visually Impaired Persons: Mapping the Features of Existing Technologies to User Needs.

This paper presents an intelligent system designed to increase the treatment adherence of hypertensive patients. The architecture was developed to allow communication among patients, physicians, and families to determine each patient’s medication intake and self-monitoring of blood pressure rates. Concerning the medication schedule, the system is designed to follow a predefined prescription, adapting itself to undesired events, such as mistakenly taking medication or forgetting to take medication on time. When covering the blood pressure measurement, it incorporates best medical practices, registering the actual values in recommended frequency and form, trying to avoid the known “white-coat effect.” We assume that taking medicine precisely and measuring blood pressure correctly may lead to good adherence to the treatment. The system uses commercial consumer electronic devices and can be replicated in any home equipped with a standard personal computer and Internet access. The resulting architecture has four layers. The first is responsible for adding electronic devices that typically exist in today’s homes to the system. The second is a preprocessing layer that filters the data generated from the patient’s behavior. The third is a reasoning layer that decides how to act based on the patient’s activities observed. Finally, the fourth layer creates messages that should drive the reactions of all involved actors. The reasoning layer takes into consideration the patient’s schedule and medication-taking activity data and uses implicit algorithms based on the J48, RepTree, and RandomTree decision tree models to infer the adherence. The algorithms were first adjusted using one academic machine learning and data mining tool. The system communicates with users through smartphones (anytime and anywhere) and smart TVs (in the patient’s home) by using the 3G/4G and WiFi infrastructure. It interacts automatically through social networks with doctors and relatives when changes or mistakes in medication intake and blood pressure mean values are detected. By associating the blood pressure data with the history of medication intake, our system can indicate the treatment adherence and help patients to achieve better treatment results. Comparisons with similar research were made, highlighting our findings.

Commercial Devices-Based System Designed to Improve the Treatment Adherence of Hypertensive Patients.

The first formal attempt to standardize the test and evaluation of localization systems was the ISO/IEC 18305 standard. As reviewed in this paper, the ISO/IEC 18305 provides guidelines to evaluate an indoor localization system as a black box. Such evaluation is useful for end users, but not fully useful for either developers or researchers. As a result, both developers and researchers use their own evaluation methodologies, which have a set of weaknesses. Our objective is to compare the standard to the evaluation methodologies implemented by developers. We focus on pedestrian localization systems because they are the most numerous. In this work, we survey both competitions and individual works, between 2008–2018, with the ISO/IEC 18305 standard as a guideline. That is, we have reviewed the evaluation methodologies regarding the different aspects defined in the standard. We finalize with a summary of the shortcomings of the evaluation methodologies implemented by the developers, as well as the shortcomings of the standard. Our article ends with a summary of open issues that need to be addressed in order to foster the development of evaluation methodologies of localization systems. The main conclusion of our work is that the developers of localization systems are in need of guidelines to design evaluation methodologies, especially for the evaluation of system components. The standard fails to satisfy such requirement by proposing an evaluation strategy that focuses more on the end user than the developer.

A Survey on Test and Evaluation Methodologies of Pedestrian Localization Systems

Abstract Greenhouse farming is essential in increasing domestic crop production in countries with limited resources and a harsh climate like Qatar. Smart greenhouse development is even more important to overcome these limitations and achieve high levels of food security. While the main aim of greenhouses is to offer an appropriate environment for high-yield production while protecting crops from adverse climate conditions, smart greenhouses provide precise regulation and control of the microclimate variables by utilizing the latest control techniques, advanced metering and communication infrastructures, and smart management systems thus providing the optimal environment for crop development. However, due to the development of information technology, greenhouses are undergoing a big transformation. In fact, the new generation of greenhouses has gone from simple constructions to sophisticated factories that drive agricultural production at the minimum possible cost. The main objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive understanding framework of the actual greenhouse development in Qatar, so as to be able to support the transition to sustainable precision agriculture. Qatar’s greenhouse market is a dynamic sector, and it is expected to mark double-digit growth by 2025. Thus, this study may offer effective supporting information to decision and policy makers, professionals, and end-users in introducing new technologies and taking advantage of monitoring techniques, artificial intelligence, and communication infrastructure in the agriculture sector by adopting smart greenhouses, consequently enhancing the Food-Energy-Water Nexus resilience and sustainable development. Furthermore, an analysis of the actual agriculture situation in Qatar is provided by examining its potential development regarding the existing drivers and barriers. Finally, the study presents the policy measures already implemented in Qatar and analyses the future development of the local greenhouse sector in terms of sustainability and resource-saving perspective and its penetration into Qatar’s economy. 

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Smart greenhouses as the path towards precision agriculture in the food-energy and water nexus: case study of Qatar

This paper presents an indoor navigation system built in a wearable device. The system allows visually impaired users to perform guided audio navigation safe, fast and has a low computational complexity. The methodological approach chosen divides the process into two phases: offline and online. In offline phase, the indoor mapping is done by data fusing of radio frequency and visual markers, constructing a unique and consistent representation. In the online phase navigation and recognition of each of the internal positions are performed through the fusion representation or only by the wi-fi or visual signals when one of the sensors is strongly affected by noises or other interferences. The results showed that the recognition levels of wi-fi, visual and fusion markers were 87.59%, 90.92%, and 92.03%, respectively. The error margin after the data fusion application was 0.8 m, with an average time of 0.62 ms.

A Guidance System for Blind and Visually Impaired People via Hybrid Data Fusion

The automation of computational systems is currently presenting itself as a facilitator in several segments of society, among them is the agricultural sector. As far as irrigation methods are concerned, information technology, especially in embedded systems, can be applied to a large extent on crops and rural properties, offering alternatives to meet the needs of the farmer, such as adequate water supply for the plantations and the dosage of nutrients. The objective of this work is to automate the greenhouse irrigation through the Arduino platform in order to control the flow of water to reduce financial costs. As a result, we obtained a prototype of an automated greenhouse irrigation system that was tested for efficiency and performance. From the results of the tests, it was $^{verified}$that the developed system met the operating needs for irrigation of the greenhouse and was characterized as a good alternative for the cultivation of the plantations.

Luciano M. da Silva

Papers

A Guidance System for Blind and Visually Impaired People via Hybrid Data Fusion

Tellus – Greenhouse Irrigation Automation System