4,555 research outputs found
Hierarchical sensor placement using joint entropy and the effect of modeling error
Good prediction of the behavior of wind around buildings improves designs for natural ventilation in warm climates. However wind modeling is complex, predictions are often inaccurate due to the large uncertainties in parameter values. The goal of this work is to enhance wind prediction around buildings using measurements through implementing a multiple-model system-identification approach. The success of system-identification approaches depends directly upon the location and number of sensors. Therefore, this research proposes a methodology for optimal sensor configuration based on hierarchical sensor placement involving calculations of prediction-value joint entropy. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models are generated to create a discrete population of possible wind-flow predictions, which are then used to identify optimal sensor locations. Optimal sensor configurations are revealed using the proposed methodology and considering the effect of systematic and spatially distributed modeling errors, as well as the common information between sensor locations. The methodology is applied to a full-scale case study and optimum configurations are evaluated for their ability to falsify models and improve predictions at locations where no measurements have been taken. It is concluded that a sensor placement strategy using joint entropy is able to lead to predictions of wind characteristics around buildings and capture short-term wind variability more effectively than sequential strategies, which maximize entropy
OPTIMAL SENSOR PLACEMENT FOR PREDICTION OF WIND ENVIRONMENT AROUND BUILDINGS
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Studies of Sensor Data Interpretation for Asset Management of the Built Environment
Sensing in the built environment has the potential to reduce asset management expenditure and contribute to extending useful service life. In the built environment, measurements are usually performed indirectly; effects are measured remote from their causes. Modelling approximations from many sources, such as boundary conditions, geometrical simplifications and numerical assumptions result in important systematic uncertainties that modify correlation values between measurement points. In addition, conservative behavior models that were employed - justifiably during the design stage, prior to construction - are generally inadequate when explaining measurements of real behavior. This paper summarizes the special context of sensor data interpretation for asset management in the built environment. Nearly twenty years of research results from several doctoral thesis and fourteen full-scale case studies in four countries are summarized. Originally inspired from research into model based diagnosis, work on multiple model identification evolved into a methodology for probabilistic model falsification. Throughout the research, parallel studies developed strategies for measurement system design. Recent comparisons with Bayesian model updating have shown that while traditional applications Bayesian methods are precise and accurate when all is known, they are not robust in the presence of approximate models. Finally, details of the full-scale case studies that have been used to develop model falsification are briefly described. The model-falsification strategy for data interpretation provides engineers with an easy-to-understand tool that is compatible with the context of the built environment
Optimal multi-type sensor placement for structural identification by static-load testing
Assessing ageing infrastructure is a critical challenge for civil engineers due to the difficulty in the estimation and integration of uncertainties in structural models. Field measurements are increasingly used to improve knowledge of the real behavior of a structure; this activity is called structural identification. Error-domain model falsification (EDMF) is an easy-to-use model-based structural-identification methodology which robustly accommodates systematic uncertainties originating from sources such as boundary conditions, numerical modelling and model fidelity, as well as aleatory uncertainties from sources such as measurement error and material parameter-value estimations. In most practical applications of structural identification, sensors are placed using engineering judgment and experience. However, since sensor placement is fundamental to the success of structural identification, a more rational and systematic method is justified. This study presents a measurement system design methodology to identify the best sensor locations and sensor types using information from static-load tests. More specifically, three static-load tests were studied for the sensor system design using three types of sensors for a performance evaluation of a full-scale bridge in Singapore. Several sensor placement strategies are compared using joint entropy as an information-gain metric. A modified version of the hierarchical algorithm for sensor placement is proposed to take into account mutual information between load tests. It is shown that a carefully-configured measurement strategy that includes multiple sensor types and several load tests maximizes information gain
Leveraging Activity Recognition to Enable Protective Behavior Detection in Continuous Data
Protective behavior exhibited by people with chronic pain (CP) during
physical activities is the key to understanding their physical and emotional
states. Existing automatic protective behavior detection (PBD) methods rely on
pre-segmentation of activities predefined by users. However, in real life,
people perform activities casually. Therefore, where those activities present
difficulties for people with chronic pain, technology-enabled support should be
delivered continuously and automatically adapted to activity type and
occurrence of protective behavior. Hence, to facilitate ubiquitous CP
management, it becomes critical to enable accurate PBD over continuous data. In
this paper, we propose to integrate human activity recognition (HAR) with PBD
via a novel hierarchical HAR-PBD architecture comprising graph-convolution and
long short-term memory (GC-LSTM) networks, and alleviate class imbalances using
a class-balanced focal categorical-cross-entropy (CFCC) loss. Through in-depth
evaluation of the approach using a CP patients' dataset, we show that the
leveraging of HAR, GC-LSTM networks, and CFCC loss leads to clear increase in
PBD performance against the baseline (macro F1 score of 0.81 vs. 0.66 and
precision-recall area-under-the-curve (PR-AUC) of 0.60 vs. 0.44). We conclude
by discussing possible use cases of the hierarchical architecture in CP
management and beyond. We also discuss current limitations and ways forward.Comment: Submitted to PACM IMWU
Adaptive sampling for spatial prediction in environmental monitoring using wireless sensor networks: A review
© 2018 IEEE. The paper presents a review of the spatial prediction problem in the environmental monitoring applications by utilizing stationary and mobile robotic wireless sensor networks. First, the problem of selecting the best subset of stationary wireless sensors monitoring environmental phenomena in terms of sensing quality is surveyed. Then, predictive inference approaches and sampling algorithms for mobile sensing agents to optimally observe spatially physical processes in the existing works are analysed
Markov modelling on human activity recognition
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a research topic with a relevant interest
in the machine learning community. Understanding the activities that a person
is performing and the context where they perform them has a huge importance
in multiple applications, including medical research, security or patient monitoring.
The improvement of the smart-phones and inertial sensors technologies has
lead to the implementation of activity recognition systems based on these devices,
either by themselves or combining their information with other sensors. Since
humans perform their daily activities sequentially in a specific order, there exist
some temporal information in the physical activities that characterize the different
human behaviour patterns. However, the most popular approach in HAR is to assume
that the data is conditionally independent, segmenting the data in different
windows and extracting the most relevant features from each segment.
In this thesis we employ the temporal information explicitly, where the raw data
provided by the wearable sensors is fed to the training models. Thus, we study
how to perform a Markov modelling implementation of a long-term monitoring
HAR system with wearable sensors, and we address the existing open problems
arising while processing and training the data, combining different sensors and
performing the long-term monitoring with battery powered devices.
Employing directly the signals from the sensors to perform the recognition can
lead to problems due to misplacements of the sensors on the body. We propose an
orientation correction algorithm based on quaternions to process the signals and
find a common frame reference for all of them independently on the position of the
sensors or their orientation. This algorithm allows for a better activity recognition
when feed to the classification algorithm when compared with similar approaches,
and the quaternion transformations allow for a faster implementation.
One of the most popular algorithms to model time series data are Hidden
Markov Models (HMMs) and the training of the parameters of the model is performed
using the Baum-Welch algorithm. However, this algorithm converges to
local maxima and the multiple initializations needed to avoid them makes it computationally expensive for large datasets. We propose employing the theory of
spectral learning to develop a discriminative HMM that avoids the problems of
the Baum-Welch algorithm, outperforming it in both complexity and computational
cost.
When we implement a HAR system with several sensors, we need to consider
how to perform the combination of the information provided by them. Data fusion
can be performed either at signal level or at classification level. When performed
at classification level, the usual approach is to combine the decisions of multiple
classifiers on the body to obtain the performed activities. However, in the simple
case with two classifiers, which can be a practical implementation of a HAR
system, the combination reduces to selecting the most discriminative sensor, and
no performance improvement is obtained against the single sensor implementation.
In this thesis, we propose to employ the soft-outputs of the classifiers in
the combination and we develop a method that considers the Markovian structure
of the ground truth to capture the dynamics of the activities. We will show
that this method improves the recognition of the activities with respect to other
combination methods and with respect to the signal fusion case.
Finally, in long-term monitoring HAR systems with wearable sensors we need
to address the energy efficiency problem that is inherent to battery powered devices.
The most common approach to improve the energy efficiency of such devices
is to reduce the amount of data acquired by the wearable sensors. In that sense,
we introduce a general framework for the energy efficiency of a system with multiple
sensors under several energy restrictions. We propose a sensing strategy to
optimize the temporal data acquisition based on computing the uncertainty of
the activities given the data and adapt the acquisition actively. Furthermore, we
develop a sensor selection algorithm based on Bayesian Experimental Design to
obtain the best configuration of sensors that performs the activity recognition accurately, allowing for a further improvement on the energy efficiency by limiting
the number of sensors employed in the acquisition.El reconocimiento de actividades humanas (HAR) es un tema de investigación
con una gran relevancia para la comunidad de aprendizaje máquina. Comprender
las actividades que una persona está realizando y el contexto en el que las
realiza es de gran importancia en multitud de aplicaciones, entre las que se incluyen
investigación médica, seguridad o monitorización de pacientes. La mejora
en los smart-phones y en las tecnologÃas de sensores inerciales han dado lugar a
la implementación de sistemas de reconocimiento de actividades basado en dichos
dispositivos, ya sea por si mismos o combinándolos con otro tipo de sensores. Ya
que los seres humanos realizan sus actividades diarias de manera secuencial en un
orden especÃfico, existe una cierta información temporal en las actividades fÃsicas
que caracterizan los diferentes patrones de comportamiento, Sin embargo, los algoritmos
más comunes asumen que los datos son condicionalmente independientes,
segmentándolos en diferentes ventanas y extrayendo las caracterÃsticas más relevantes
de cada segmento.
En esta tesis utilizamos la información temporal de manera explÃcita, usando
los datos crudos de los sensores como entrada de los modelos de entrenamiento. Por
ello, analizamos como implementar modelos Markovianos para el reconocimiento
de actividades en monitorizaciones de larga duración con sensores wearable, y
tratamos los problemas existentes al procesar y entrenar los datos, al combinar
diferentes sensores y al realizar adquisiciones de larga duración con dispositivos
alimentados por baterÃas.
Emplear directamente las señales de los sensores para realizar el reconocimiento
de actividades puede dar lugar a problemas debido a la incorrecta colocación de
los sensores en el cuerpo. Proponemos un algoritmo de corrección de la orientación
basado en quaterniones para procesar las señales y encontrar un marco de referencia
común independiente de la posición de los sensores y su orientación. Este
algoritmo permite obtener un mejor reconocimiento de actividades al emplearlo
en conjunto con un algoritmo de clasificación, cuando se compara con modelos similares. Además, la transformación de la orientación basada en quaterniones da
lugar a una implementación más rápida.
Uno de los algoritmos más populares para modelar series temporales son los
modelos ocultos de Markov, donde los parámetros del modelo se entrenan usando
el algoritmo de Baum-Welch. Sin embargo, este algoritmo converge en general
a máximos locales, y las múltiples inicializaciones que se necesitan en su implementación lo convierten en un algoritmo de gran carga computacional cuando se
emplea con bases de datos de un volumen considerable. Proponemos emplear la
teorÃa de aprendizaje espectral para desarrollar un HMM discriminativo que evita
los problemas del algoritmo de Baum-Welch, superándolo tanto en complejidad
como en coste computacional. Cuando se implementa un sistema de reconocimiento de actividades con múltiples
sensores, necesitamos considerar cómo realizar la combinación de la información que proporcionan. La fusión de los datos, se puede realizar tanto a nivel
de señal como a nivel de clasificación. Cuando se realiza a nivel de clasificación, lo
normal es combinar las decisiones de múltiples clasificadores colocados en el cuerpo
para obtener las actividades que se están realizando. Sin embargo, en un caso simple
donde únicamente se emplean dos sensores, que podrÃa ser una implantación
habitual de un sistema de reconocimiento de actividades, la combinación se reduce
a seleccionar el sensor más discriminativo, y no se obtiene mejora con respecto a
emplear un único sensor. En esta tesis proponemos emplear salidas blandas de
los clasificadores para la combinación, desarrollando un modelo que considera la
estructura Markoviana de los datos reales para capturar la dinámica de las actividades.
Mostraremos como este método mejora el reconocimiento de actividades
con respecto a otros métodos de combinación de clasificadores y con respecto a la
fusión de los datos a nivel de señal.
Por último, abordamos el problema de la eficiencia energética de dispositivos
alimentados por baterÃas en sistemas de reconocimiento de actividades de larga
duración. La aproximación más habitual para mejorar la eficiencia energética consiste
en reducir el volumen de datos que adquieren los sensores. En ese sentido, introducimos un marco general para tratar el problema de la eficiencia energética
en un sistema con múltiples sensores bajo ciertas restricciones de energética. Proponemos
una estrategia de adquisición activa para optimizar el sistema temporal
de recogida de datos, basándonos en la incertidumbre de las actividades dados los
datos que conocemos. Además, desarrollamos un algoritmo de selección de sensores
basado diseño experimental Bayesiano y asà obtener la mejor configuración
para realizar el reconocimiento de actividades limitando el número de sensores
empleados y al mismo tiempo reduciendo su consumo energético.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Luis Ignacio SantamarÃa Caballero.- Secretario: Pablo MartÃnez Olmos.- Vocal: Alberto Suárez Gonzále
Protective Behavior Detection in Chronic Pain Rehabilitation: From Data Preprocessing to Learning Model
Chronic pain (CP) rehabilitation extends beyond physiotherapist-directed clinical sessions and primarily functions in people's everyday lives. Unfortunately, self-directed rehabilitation is difficult because patients need to deal with both their pain and the mental barriers that pain imposes on routine functional activities. Physiotherapists adjust patients' exercise plans and advice in clinical sessions based on the amount of protective behavior (i.e., a sign of anxiety about movement) displayed by the patient. The goal of such modifications is to assist patients in overcoming their fears and maintaining physical functioning. Unfortunately, physiotherapists' support is absent during self-directed rehabilitation or also called self-management that people conduct in their daily life.
To be effective, technology for chronic-pain self-management should be able to detect protective behavior to facilitate personalized support. Thereon, this thesis addresses the key challenges of ubiquitous automatic protective behavior detection (PBD). Our investigation takes advantage of an available dataset (EmoPain) containing movement and muscle activity data of healthy people and people with CP engaged in typical everyday activities. To begin, we examine the data augmentation methods and segmentation parameters using various vanilla neural networks in order to enable activity-independent PBD within pre-segmented activity instances. Second, by incorporating temporal and bodily attention mechanisms, we improve PBD performance and support theoretical/clinical understanding of protective behavior that the attention of a person with CP shifts between body parts perceived as risky during feared movements. Third, we use human activity recognition (HAR) to improve continuous PBD in data of various activity types. The approaches proposed above are validated against the ground truth established by majority voting from expert annotators. Unfortunately, using such majority-voted ground truth causes information loss, whereas direct learning from all annotators is vulnerable to noise from disagreements. As the final study, we improve the learning from multiple annotators by leveraging the agreement information for regularization
Sparse Signal Recovery Based on Compressive Sensing and Exploration Using Multiple Mobile Sensors
The work in this dissertation is focused on two areas within the general discipline of statistical signal processing. First, several new algorithms are developed and exhaustively tested for solving the inverse problem of compressive sensing (CS). CS is a recently developed sub-sampling technique for signal acquisition and reconstruction which is more efficient than the traditional Nyquist sampling method. It provides the possibility of compressed data acquisition approaches to directly acquire just the important information of the signal of interest. Many natural signals are sparse or compressible in some domain such as pixel domain of images, time, frequency and so forth. The notion of compressibility or sparsity here means that many coefficients of the signal of interest are either zero or of low amplitude, in some domain, whereas some are dominating coefficients. Therefore, we may not need to take many direct or indirect samples from the signal or phenomenon to be able to capture the important information of the signal. As a simple example, one can think of a system of linear equations with N unknowns. Traditional methods suggest solving N linearly independent equations to solve for the unknowns. However, if many of the variables are known to be zero or of low amplitude, then intuitively speaking, there will be no need to have N equations. Unfortunately, in many real-world problems, the number of non-zero (effective) variables are unknown. In these cases, CS is capable of solving for the unknowns in an efficient way. In other words, it enables us to collect the important information of the sparse signal with low number of measurements. Then, considering the fact that the signal is sparse, extracting the important information of the signal is the challenge that needs to be addressed. Since most of the existing recovery algorithms in this area need some prior knowledge or parameter tuning, their application to real-world problems to achieve a good performance is difficult. In this dissertation, several new CS algorithms are proposed for the recovery of sparse signals. The proposed algorithms mostly do not require any prior knowledge on the signal or its structure. In fact, these algorithms can learn the underlying structure of the signal based on the collected measurements and successfully reconstruct the signal, with high probability. The other merit of the proposed algorithms is that they are generally flexible in incorporating any prior knowledge on the noise, sparisty level, and so on.
The second part of this study is devoted to deployment of mobile sensors in circumstances that the number of sensors to sample the entire region is inadequate. Therefore, where to deploy the sensors, to both explore new regions while refining knowledge in aleady visited areas is of high importance. Here, a new framework is proposed to decide on the trajectories of sensors as they collect the measurements. The proposed framework has two main stages. The first stage performs interpolation/extrapolation to estimate the phenomenon of interest at unseen loactions, and the second stage decides on the informative trajectory based on the collected and estimated data. This framework can be applied to various problems such as tuning the constellation of sensor-bearing satellites, robotics, or any type of adaptive sensor placement/configuration problem. Depending on the problem, some modifications on the constraints in the framework may be needed. As an application side of this work, the proposed framework is applied to a surrogate problem related to the constellation adjustment of sensor-bearing satellites
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