Multimodal approach for emotion recognition based on simulated flight experiments

The present work tries to fill part of the gap regarding the pilots' emotions and their bio-reactions during some flight procedures such as, takeoff, climbing, cruising, descent, initial approach, final approach and landing. A sensing architecture and a set of experiments were developed, associating it to several simulated flights ( N f l i g h t s = 13 ) using the Microsoft Flight Simulator Steam Edition (FSX-SE). The approach was carried out with eight beginner users on the flight simulator ( N p i l o t s = 8 ). It is shown that it is possible to recognize emotions from different pilots in flight, combining their present and previous emotions. The cardiac system based on Heart Rate (HR), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and Electroencephalography (EEG), were used to extract emotions, as well as the intensities of emotions detected from the pilot face. We also considered five main emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprise and scared. The emotion recognition is based on Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning techniques. The Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) were the main methods used to measure the quality of the regression output models. The tests of the produced output models showed that the lowest recognition errors were reached when all data were considered or when the GSR datasets were omitted from the model training. It also showed that the emotion surprised was the easiest to recognize, having a mean RMSE of 0.13 and mean MAE of 0.01; while the emotion sad was the hardest to recognize, having a mean RMSE of 0.82 and mean MAE of 0.08. When we considered only the higher emotion intensities by time, the most matches accuracies were between 55% and 100%.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

IoT-based systems for soil nutrients assessment in horticulture

Soil nutrients assessment has great importance in horticulture. Implementation of an information system for horticulture faces many challenges: (i) great spatial variability within farms (e.g., hilly topography); (ii) different soil properties (e.g., different water holding capacity, different content in sand, sit, clay, and soil organic matter, different pH, and different permeability) for different cultivated plants; (iii) different soil nutrient uptake by different cultivated plants; (iv) small size of monoculture; and (v) great variety of farm components, agroecological zone, and socio-economic factors. Advances in information and communication technologies enable creation of low cost, efficient information systems that would improve resources management and increase productivity and sustainability of horticultural farms. We present an information system based on different sensing capability, Internet of Things, and mobile application for horticultural farms. An overview on different techniques and technologies for soil fertility evaluation is also presented. The results obtained in a botanical garden that simulates the diversity of environment and plant diversity of a horticultural farm are discussed considering the challenges identified in the literature and field research. The study provides a theoretical basis and technical support for the development of technologies that enable horticultural farmers to improve resources management.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

β-band analysis from simulated flight experiments

Several safety-related improvements are applied every year to try to minimize the total number of civil aviation accidents. Fortunately, these improvements work well, reducing the number of accident occurrences. However, while the number of accidents due to mechanical failures has decreased, the number of accidents due to human errors seems to grow. On that basis, this work presents a contribution regarding the brain’s β-band activities for different levels of volunteers’ expertise on flight simulator, i.e., experienced, mid-level and beginner, in which they acted as pilots in command during several simulated flights. Spectrogram analysis and statistical measurements of each volunteer’s brain’s β-band were carried out. These were based on seven flight tasks: takeoff, climb, cruise flight, descent, approach, final approach and landing. The results of the proposed experiment showed that the takeoff, approach and landing corresponded to the highest brain activities, i.e., close to 37.06–67.33% more than the brain activity of the other flight tasks: when some accidents were about to occur, the intensities of the brain activity were similar to those of the final approach task. When the volunteers’ expertise and confidence on flight simulation were considered, it was shown that the highest brain magnitudes and oscillations observed of more experienced and confident volunteers were on average close to 68.44% less, compared to less experienced and less confident volunteers. Moreover, more experienced and confident volunteers in general presented different patterns of brain activities compared to volunteers with less expertise or less familiarity with fight simulations and/or electronic games.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Transducer electronic data sheets: anywhere, anytime, anyway

Transducer electronic data sheets (TEDS) are a key element of smart transducers because they support core features such as plug and play, self-calibration, and self-diagnostics. The ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-4 standard defines templates to describe the most common types of transducers and suggests the use of one-wire memories to store the corresponding data. In this paper we explore new ways to store and access TEDS tables, including near field communication (NFC) tags and QR codes. We also present a mobile TEDS parser, compatible with Android, that is capable of reading TEDS data from all supported mediums (one-wire memories, NFC tags, and QR codes) and decoding them as human-readable text. The idea is to make TEDS available in the easiest way possible. We also underline the need to extend the 21451-4 standard by adding support for frequency-time sensors. A new TEDS template is proposed, and filling examples are presented. The main novelties of the paper are (i) the proposal of new ways to store 21451-4 TEDS tables using NFC tags and QR codes; (ii) the release of new tools to access TEDS tables including a mobile parser; and (iii) the definition of a new TEDS template for frequency-time sensors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Increasing the Productive Potential of Permanent Grasslands From the Forest Steppe Area of Romania

In Romania permanent grasslands represent 32 % of the total agricultural area, stretching over 4,872 million hectares, out of which 340,000 ha are located in the forest steppe area, on less productive soils, which explains their inadequate botanical composition and low quality and yields (Vintu, 2003). One of the main measures taken to increase the productivity of grasslands is through fertilisation (Birch, 1999). This paper presents the results obtained during 2000-2004 on the effect of organic fertiliser on degraded grasslands made up of Festuca valesiaca L

A multi-sensing physical therapy assessment for children with cerebral palsy

This work presents the development of a multi-sensing interface called Palsy Thera Sense, to provide information data obtained during physical therapy of the children with cerebral palsy. It allows the monitoring the children's motor skills, and provide metrics that can be later used for proper and effective training. This interface is based on distributed force measurement system characterized by two different load cells. The signals from signals from the load cells distributed on the level of a force platform and at the level of child's body support ropes that are tied on the cerebral palsy spider cage are acquired and wireless transmitted to a client computation platform. Thus different tests can be carried out including, center of forces measurements and gait simulations. These tests can be study of children balance during different activities such as serious game playing for upper limb rehabilitation. The interface shown to be an important tool that provide support to cerebral palsy rehabilitation process, and for objective evaluation of the patients during the rehabilitation period. Several experimental results are included in the paper highlighting the capabilities of the designed and implemented multi-sensing system.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Influence of Harvest Period and Fertilisation on the Yield of Some Mixed Grass and Leguminous Species Under the Forest Steppe Conditions of North-East Romania

In the forest steppe area of North-east Romania, temporary grasslands represent an important source of high quality fodder but they have a short period of exploitation, associated with some changes in the floristic composition (Vintu, 2003). Fertiliser application and harvest period have an important role in maintaining high productivity (Hopkins, 1991). The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of harvest period and fertilization on the yield of some grass and leguminous species in the forest steppe conditions of North-east Romania

Emotions Assessment on Simulated Flights

Trabalho apresentado em 14th edition of IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurement and Applications (MeMeA'19), junho 2019, Istanbul, TurquiaN/

Study of latencies in ThingSpeak

IoT platforms play an important role on modern measurement systems because they allow the ingestion and processing of huge amounts of data (big data). Given the increasing use of these platforms, it is important to characterize their performance and robustness in real application scenarios. The paper analyzes the ThingSpeak platform by measuring the latencies associated to data packets sent to cloud and replied back, and by checking the consistency of the returned data. Several experiments were done considering different ways to access the platform: REST API, MQTT API, and MQTT broker alone. For each experiment, the methodology is explained, results are presented, and conclusions are extracted. The REST and MQTT APIs have similar performances, with roundtrip times between 1 s and 3 s. The MQTT broker alone is more agile, with roundtrip times below 250 ms. In all cases, the up and down links are far from being symmetric, with the uplink delay showing higher variance than the downlink delay. The obtained results can serve as a reference for other IoT platforms and provide guidelines for application development.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Design of an artificial neural network and feature extraction to identify arrhythmias from ECG

This paper presents a design of an artificial neural network (ANN) and feature extraction methods to identify two types of arrhythmias in datasets obtained through electrocardiography (ECG) signals, namely arrhythmia dataset (AD) and supraventricular arrhythmia dataset (SAD). No special ANN toolkit was used; instead, each neuron and necessary calculus were modeled and individually programmed. Thus, four temporal-based features are used: heart rate (HR), R-peaks root mean square (R-RMS), RR-peaks variance (RR-VAR), and QSR-complex standard deviation (QSR-SD). The network architecture presents four neurons in the input layer, eight in hidden layer and an output layer with two neurons. The proposed classification method uses the MIT-BIH Dataset (Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital) for training, validation and execution or test phases. Preliminary results show the high efficiency of the proposed ANN design and its classification method, reaching accuracies between 98.76% and 98.91%, when in the identification of NSRD and arrhythmic ECG; and accuracies of 86.37% (AD) and 76.35% (SAD), when analyzing only classifications between both arrhythmias.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio