Agent-Based Medical Health Monitoring SystemHumayun, Mamoona;Jhanjhi, Noor Z.;Almotilag, Abdullah;Almufareh, Maram Fahhad
doi: 10.3390/s22082820pmid: 35458805
One of the leading healthcare concerns worldwide is the aging population. Aged patients require more significant healthcare resources because they are more likely to have chronic diseases that result in higher healthcare expenses. The design and implementation of e-health solutions, which offer patients mobile services to assist and enhance their treatment based on monitoring specific physiological data, is one of the key achievements in medical information technology. In the last few decades, there have been tremendous advancements in healthcare technology regarding mobility, size, speed, and communication. However, the critical drawback of today’s e-Health monitoring systems is that patients are confined to smart rooms and beds with monitoring gadgets. Such tracking is not widespread due to chronic patients’ mobility, privacy, and flexibility issues. Further, health monitoring devices that are fastened to a patient’s body do not give any analysis or advice. To improve the health monitoring process, a multi-agent-based system for health monitoring is provided in this study, which entails a group of intelligent agents that gather patient data, reason together, and propose actions to patients and medical professionals in a mobile context. A multi-agent-based framework presented in this study is evaluated through a case study. The results show that the proposed system provides an efficient health monitoring system for chronic, aged, and remote patients. Further, the proposed approach outperforms the existing mHealth system, allowing for timely health facilities for remote patients using 5G technology.
Data Twin-Driven Cyber-Physical Factory for Smart ManufacturingJwo, Jung-Sing;Lee, Cheng-Hsiung;Lin, Ching-Sheng
doi: 10.3390/s22082821pmid: 35458806
Because of the complex production processes and technology-intensive operations that take place in the aerospace and defense industry, introducing Industry 4.0 into the manufacturing processes of aircraft composite materials is inevitable. Digital Twin and Cyber-Physical Systems in Industry 4.0 are key techniques to develop digital manufacturing. Since it is very difficult to create high-fidelity virtual models, the development of digital manufacturing for aircraft manufacturers is challenging. In this study, we provide a view from a data simulation perspective and adopt machine learning approaches to simplify the high-fidelity virtual models in Digital Twin. The novel concept is called Data Twin, and the deployable service to support the simulation is known as the Data Twin Service (DTS). Relying on the DTS, we also propose a microservice software architecture, Cyber-Physical Factory (CPF), to simulate the shop floor environment. Additionally, there are two war rooms in the CPF that can be used to establish a collaborative platform: one is the Physical War Room, used to integrate real data, and the other is the Cyber War Room for handling simulation data and the results of the CPF.
Review on Monitoring, Operation and Maintenance of Smart Offshore Wind FarmsKou, Lei;Li, Yang;Zhang, Fangfang;Gong, Xiaodong;Hu, Yinghong;Yuan, Quande;Ke, Wende
doi: 10.3390/s22082822pmid: 35458807
In recent years, with the development of wind energy, the number and scale of wind farms have been developing rapidly. Since offshore wind farms have the advantages of stable wind speed, being clean, renewable, non-polluting, and the non-occupation of cultivated land, they have gradually become a new trend in the wind power industry all over the world. The operation and maintenance of offshore wind power has been developing in the direction of digitization and intelligence. It is of great significance to carry out research on the monitoring, operation, and maintenance of offshore wind farms, which will be of benefit for the reduction of the operation and maintenance costs, the improvement of the power generation efficiency, improvement of the stability of offshore wind farm systems, and the building of smart offshore wind farms. This paper will mainly summarize the monitoring, operation, and maintenance of offshore wind farms, with particular focus on the following points: monitoring of “offshore wind power engineering and biological and environment”, the monitoring of power equipment, and the operation and maintenance of smart offshore wind farms. Finally, the future research challenges in relation to the monitoring, operation, and maintenance of smart offshore wind farms are proposed, and the future research directions in this field are explored, especially in marine environment monitoring, weather and climate prediction, intelligent monitoring of power equipment, and digital platforms.
LoRa Based IoT Platform for Remote Monitoring of Large-Scale Agriculture Farms in ChileAhmed, Mohamed A.;Gallardo, Jose Luis;Zuniga, Marcos D.;Pedraza, Manuel A.;Carvajal, Gonzalo;Jara, Nicolás;Carvajal, Rodrigo
doi: 10.3390/s22082824pmid: 35458808
Nowadays, conventional agriculture farms lack high-level automated management due to the limited number of installed sensor nodes and measuring devices. Recent progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will play an essential role in future smart farming by enabling automated operations with minimum human intervention. The main objective of this work is to design and implement a flexible IoT-based platform for remote monitoring of agriculture farms of different scales, enabling continuous data collection from various IoT devices (sensors, actuators, meteorological masts, and drones). Such data will be available for end-users to improve decision-making and for training and validating advanced prediction algorithms. Unlike related works that concentrate on specific applications or evaluate technical aspects of specific layers of the IoT stack, this work considers a versatile approach and technical aspects at four layers: farm perception layer, sensors and actuators layer, communication layer, and application layer. The proposed solutions have been designed, implemented, and assessed for remote monitoring of plants, soil, and environmental conditions based on LoRaWAN technology. Results collected through both simulation and experimental validation show that the platform can be used to obtain valuable analytics of real-time monitoring that enable decisions and actions such as, for example, controlling the irrigation system or generating alarms. The contribution of this article relies on proposing a flexible hardware and software platform oriented on monitoring agriculture farms of different scales, based on LoRaWAN technology. Even though previous work can be found using similar technologies, they focus on specific applications or evaluate technical aspects of specific layers of the IoT stack.
Detection of Human Gait Phases Using Textile Pressure Sensors: A Low Cost and Pervasive ApproachMilovic, Matko;Farías, Gonzalo;Fingerhuth, Sebastián;Pizarro, Francisco;Hermosilla, Gabriel;Yunge, Daniel
doi: 10.3390/s22082825pmid: 35458810
Human gait analysis is a standard method used for detecting and diagnosing diseases associated with gait disorders. Wearable technologies, due to their low costs and high portability, are increasingly being used in gait and other medical analyses. This paper evaluates the use of low-cost homemade textile pressure sensors to recognize gait phases. Ten sensors were integrated into stretch pants, achieving an inexpensive and pervasive solution. Nevertheless, such a simple fabrication process leads to significant sensitivity variability among sensors, hindering their adoption in precision-demanding medical applications. To tackle this issue, we evaluated the textile sensors for the classification of gait phases over three machine learning algorithms for time-series signals, namely, random forest (RF), time series forest (TSF), and multi-representation sequence learner (Mr-SEQL). Training and testing signals were generated from participants wearing the sensing pants in a test run under laboratory conditions and from an inertial sensor attached to the same pants for comparison purposes. Moreover, a new annotation method to facilitate the creation of such datasets using an ordinary webcam and a pose detection model is presented, which uses predefined rules for label generation. The results show that textile sensors successfully detect the gait phases with an average precision of 91.2% and 90.5% for RF and TSF, respectively, only 0.8% and 2.3% lower than the same values obtained from the IMU. This situation changes for Mr-SEQL, which achieved a precision of 79% for the textile sensors and 36.8% for the IMU. The overall results show the feasibility of using textile pressure sensors for human gait recognition.
A Pilot Study Comparing the Effects of Concurrent and Terminal Visual Feedback on Standing Balance in Older AdultsFerris, Jamie;Barone, Vincent J.;Perkins, Noel C.;Sienko, Kathleen H.
doi: 10.3390/s22082826pmid: 35458811
While balance training with concurrent feedback has been shown to improve real-time balance in older adults, terminal feedback may simplify implementation outside of clinical settings. Similarly, visual feedback is particularly well-suited for use outside the clinic as it is relatively easily understood and accessible via ubiquitous mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) with little additional peripheral equipment. However, differences in the effects of concurrent and terminal visual feedback are not yet well understood. We therefore performed a pilot study that directly compared the immediate effects of concurrent and terminal visual feedback as a first and necessary step in the future design of visual feedback technologies for balance training outside of clinical settings. Nineteen healthy older adults participated in a single balance training session during which they performed 38 trials of a single balance exercise including trials with concurrent, terminal or no visual feedback. Analysis of trunk angular position and velocity features recorded via an inertial measurement unit indicated that sway angles decreased with training regardless of feedback type, but sway velocity increased with concurrent feedback and decreased with terminal feedback. After removing feedback, training with either feedback type yielded decreased mean velocity, but only terminal feedback yielded decreased sway angles. Consequently, this study suggests that, for older adults, terminal visual feedback may be a viable alternative to concurrent visual feedback for short duration single-task balance training. Terminal feedback provided using ubiquitous devices should be further explored for balance training outside of clinical settings.
Experimental Study on Bottom-Up Detection of Underwater Targets Based on Polarization ImagingPan, Tianfeng;He, Xianqiang;Zhang, Xuan;Liu, Jia;Bai, Yan;Gong, Fang;Li, Teng
doi: 10.3390/s22082827pmid: 35458812
Previous studies on the polarization imaging of underwater targets mainly focused on top-down detection; however, the capacities of bottom-up detection were poorly known. Based on in situ experiments, the capability of bottom-up detection of underwater targets using polarization imaging was investigated. First, to realize the objective of bottom-up polarization imaging, a SALSA polarization camera was integrated into our Underwater Polarization Imaging System (UPIS), which was integrated with an attitude sensor. At Qiandao Lake, where the water is relatively clear, experiments were conducted to examine the capacity of the UPIS to detect objects from the bottom up. Simultaneously, entropy, clarity, and contrast were adopted to compare the imaging performance with different radiation parameters. The results show that among all the used imaging parameters, the angle of polarization is the optimal parameter for bottom-up detection of underwater targets based on polarization imaging, which may result from the different diffused reflectance of the target surface to the linear polarization components of the Stokes vector.
LIPSHOK: LIARA Portable Smart Home KitChapron, Kévin;Thullier, Florentin;Lapointe, Patrick;Maître, Julien;Bouchard, Kévin;Gaboury, Sébastien
doi: 10.3390/s22082829pmid: 35458814
Several smart home architecture implementations have been proposed in the last decade. These architectures are mostly deployed in laboratories or inside real habitations built for research purposes to enable the use of ambient intelligence using a wide variety of sensors, actuators and machine learning algorithms. However, the major issues for most related smart home architectures are their price, proprietary hardware requirements and the need for highly specialized personnel to deploy such systems. To tackle these challenges, lighter forms of smart home architectures known as smart homes in a box (SHiB) have been proposed. While SHiB remain an encouraging first step towards lightweight yet affordable solutions, they still suffer from few drawbacks. Indeed, some of these kits lack hardware support for some technologies, and others do not include enough sensors and actuators to cover most smart homes’ requirements. Thus, this paper introduces the LIARA Portable Smart Home Kit (LIPSHOK). It has been designed to provide an affordable SHiB solution that anyone is able to install in an existing home. Moreover, LIPSHOK is a generic kit that includes a total of four specialized sensor modules that were introduced independently, as our laboratory has been working on their development over the last few years. This paper first provides a summary of each of these modules and their respective benefits within a smart home context. Then, it mainly focus on the introduction of the LIPSHOK architecture that provides a framework to unify the use of the proposed sensors thanks to a common modular infrastructure capable of managing heterogeneous technologies. Finally, we compare our work to the existing SHiB kit solutions and outline that it offers a more affordable, extensible and scalable solution whose resources are distributed under an open-source license.