Development of an intelligent system based on metaverse learning for students with disabilities

Due to the coronavirus-2019 pandemic, people have had to work and study using the Internet such that the strengthened metaverse has become a part of the lives of people worldwide. The advent of technology linking the real and virtual worlds has facilitated the transmission of spatial audio and haptics to allow the metaverse to offer multisensory experiences in diverse fields, especially in teaching. The main idea of the proposed project is the development of a simple intelligent system for meta-learning. The suggested system should be self-configurable according to the different users of the metaverse. We aimed to design and create a virtual learning environment using Open Simulator based on a 3D virtual environment and simulation of the real-world environment. We then connected this environment to a learning management system (Moodle) through technology for 3D virtual environments (Sloodle) to allow the management of students, especially those with different abilities, and followed up on their activities, tests, and exams. This environment also has the advantage of storing educational content. We evaluated the performance of the Open Simulator in both standalone and grid modes based on the login times. The result showed times the standalone and grid modes of 12 s and 16 s, which demonstrated the robustness of the proposed platform. We also tested the system on 50 disabled learners, according to the t-test of independent samples. A test was conducted in the mathematics course, in which the students were divided into two equal groups (n = 25 each) to take the test traditionally and using the chair test tool, which is one of the most important tools of the Sloodle technology. According to the results, the null hypothesis was rejected, and we accepted the alternative hypothesis that demonstrated a difference in achievement between the two groups

Balancer genetic algorithm-a novel task scheduling optimization approach in cloud computing

Task scheduling is one of the core issues in cloud computing. Tasks are heterogeneous, and they have intensive computational requirements. Tasks need to be scheduled on Virtual Machines (VMs), which are resources in a cloud environment. Due to the immensity of search space for possible mappings of tasks to VMs, meta-heuristics are introduced for task scheduling. In scheduling makespan and load balancing, Quality of Service (QoS) parameters are crucial. This research contributes a novel load balancing scheduler, namely Balancer Genetic Algorithm (BGA), which is presented to improve makespan and load balancing. Insufficient load balancing can cause an overhead of utilization of resources, as some of the resources remain idle. BGA inculcates a load balancing mechanism, where the actual load in terms of million instructions assigned to VMs is considered. A need to opt for multi-objective optimization for improvement in load balancing and makespan is also emphasized. Skewed, normal and uniform distributions of workload and different batch sizes are used in experimentation. BGA has exhibited significant improvement compared with various state-of-the-art approaches for makespan, throughput and load balancing

Heartbeat classification and arrhythmia detection using a multi-model deep-learning technique

Cardiac arrhythmias pose a significant danger to human life; therefore, it is of utmost importance to be able to efficiently diagnose these arrhythmias promptly. There exist many techniques for the detection of arrhythmias; however, the most widely adopted method is the use of an Electrocardiogram (ECG). The manual analysis of ECGs by medical experts is often inefficient. Therefore, the detection and recognition of ECG characteristics via machine-learning techniques have become prevalent. There are two major drawbacks of existing machine-learning approaches: (a) they require extensive training time; and (b) they require manual feature selection. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel deep-learning framework that integrates various networks by stacking similar layers in each network to produce a single robust model. The proposed framework has been tested on two publicly available datasets for the recognition of five micro-classes of arrhythmias. The overall classification sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and accuracy of the proposed approach are 98.37%, 99.59%, 98.41%, and 99.35%, respectively. The results are compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed approach outperformed the existing approaches in terms of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, accuracy and computational cost

Portable UWB RADAR Sensing System for Transforming Subtle Chest Movement into Actionable Micro-Doppler Signatures to Extract Respiratory Rate Exploiting ResNet Algorithm

Contactless or non-invasive technology for the monitoring of anomalies in an inconspicuous and distant environment has immense significance in health-related applications, in particular COVID-19 symptoms detection, diagnosis, and monitoring. Contactless methods are crucial specifically during the COVID-19 epidemic as they require the least amount of involvement from infected individuals as well as healthcare personnel. According to recent medical research studies regarding coronavirus, individuals infected with novel COVID-19-Delta variant undergo elevated respiratory rates due to extensive infection in the lungs. This appalling situation demands constant real-time monitoring of respiratory patterns, which can help in avoiding any pernicious circumstances. In this paper, an Ultra-Wideband RADAR sensor “XeThru X4M200” is exploited to capture vital respiratory patterns. In the low and high frequency band, X4M200 operates within the 6.0-8.5 GHz and 7.25-10.20 GHz band, respectively. The experimentation is conducted on six distinct individuals to replicate a realistic scenario of irregular respiratory rates. The data is obtained in the form of spectrograms by carrying out normal (eupnea) and abnormal (tachypnea) respiratory. The collected spectrogram data is trained, validated, and tested using a cutting-edge deep learning technique called Residual Neural Network or ResNet. The trained ResNet model’s performance is assessed using the confusion matrix, precision, recall, F1-score, and classification accuracy. The unordinary skip connection process of the deep ResNet algorithm significantly reduces the underfitting and overfitting problem, resulting in a classification accuracy rate of up to 90%

Bio-inspired circular polarized UHF RFID tag design using characteristic mode analysis

This paper presents a bio-inspired circularly polarized ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tag antenna for metallic and low-permittivity substances. This tag design is based on a leaf-shaped radiator, two shorting stubs and slots etched on F4B substrate. Initially, the tag antenna is designed using characteristics mode analysis (CMA) by analyzing the first six CM modes and characteristic angles. The width of orthogonal slots is varied to get the resonance of CM modes in the required US RFID band. Moreover, the edges are blended to get orthogonal current distribution, which is necessary for circular polarization. Additionally, the proposed tag design is optimized further using CST Microwave studio and an RFID chip is exploited as a capacitive coupling element (CCE) to run CM modes with the orthogonal current pattern. This tag can also be tunable to European RFID (EU) band (866 – 868 MHz) by changing the length of shorter diagonal slot. The tag design offers a read range of 7 m and 4.5 m on 100 × 100 mm 2 metals plate and low-permittivity substrates, respectively (for 902 – 928 MHz band). In EU band, the corresponding read ranges are 5.7 m and 3.5 m above metal and low-permittivity objects, respectively. This circularly polarized tag antenna is advantageous in terms of cost, circular polarization feature, and ease of fabrication due to the absence of vias, shorting pins, and matching circuits. Therefore, this tag design is suitable for labeling various low-permittivity objects, industrial conveyer belt applications, baggage handling systems, and IoT applications

Software-defined radio based contactless localization for diverse human activity recognition

This paper presents a study on contactless localization for activity recognition based on radio-frequency sensing. The focus of this study is on the quantitative analysis of the collected data, which is in the form of channel state information (CSI). The proposed method utilizes a software-defined radio (SDR) system in combination with an ensemble learning technique to localize and identify daily living activities such as leaning, sitting, standing and walking. Specifically, SDR device, Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) models X300/X310 are utilized to collect data on the aforementioned activities. The data is collected from an empty space and a participant performing daily living activities in different territories. The acquired data is labelled based on the region, zone and performed activity. The CSI data is subsequently preprocessed and fed into an ensemble-based machine learning algorithm for classification. Furthermore, the stability analysis of the proposed method is performed to evaluate its reliability and robustness. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using various metrics, including a confusion matrix, accuracy, cross-validation score and training time. The results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble-based approach achieves a high accuracy of up to 90% in activity recognition, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed method in contactless localization for activity recognition

Discrete Human Activity Recognition and Fall Detection by Combining FMCW RADAR Data of Heterogeneous Environments for Independent Assistive Living

Human activity monitoring is essential for a variety of applications in many fields, particularly healthcare. The goal of this research work is to develop a system that can effectively detect fall/collapse and classify other discrete daily living activities such as sitting, standing, walking, drinking, and bending. For this paper, a publicly accessible dataset is employed, which is captured at various geographical locations using a 5.8 GHz Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) RADAR. A total of ninety-nine participants, including young and elderly individuals, took part in the experimental campaign. During data acquisition, each aforementioned activity was recorded for 5–10 s. Through the obtained data, we generated the micro-doppler signatures using short-time Fourier transform by exploiting MATLAB tools. Subsequently, the micro-doppler signatures are validated, trained, and tested using a state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm called Residual Neural Network or ResNet. The ResNet classifier is developed in Python, which is utilised to classify six distinct human activities in this study. Furthermore, the metrics used to analyse the trained model’s performance are precision, recall, F1-score, classification accuracy, and confusion matrix. To test the resilience of the proposed method, two separate experiments are carried out. The trained ResNet models are put to the test by subject-independent scenarios and unseen data of the above-mentioned human activities at diverse geographical spaces. The experimental results showed that ResNet detected the falling and rest of the daily living human activities with decent accuracy

Contactless Small-Scale Movement Monitoring System Using Software Defined Radio for Early Diagnosis of COVID-19

The exponential growth of the novel coronavirus disease (N-COVID-19) has affected millions of people already and it is obvious that this crisis is global. This situation has enforced scientific researchers to gather their efforts to contain the virus. In this pandemic situation, health monitoring and human movements are getting significant consideration in the field of healthcare and as a result, it has emerged as a key area of interest in recent times. This requires a contactless sensing platform for detection of COVID-19 symptoms along with containment of virus spread by limiting and monitoring human movements. In this paper, a platform is proposed for the detection of COVID-19 symptoms like irregular breathing and coughing in addition to monitoring human movements using Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology. This platform uses Channel Frequency Response (CFR) to record the minute changes in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers due to any human motion over the wireless channel. In this initial research, the capabilities of the platform are analyzed by detecting hand movement, coughing, and breathing. This platform faithfully captures normal, slow, and fast breathing at a rate of 20, 10, and 28 breaths per minute respectively using different methods such as zero-cross detection, peak detection, and Fourier transformation. The results show that all three methods successfully record breathing rate. The proposed platform is portable, flexible, and has multifunctional capabilities. This platform can be exploited for other human body movements and health abnormalities by further classification using artificial intelligence

Multiple Participants’ Discrete Activity Recognition in a Well-Controlled Environment Using Universal Software Radio Peripheral Wireless Sensing

Wireless sensing is the utmost cutting-edge way of monitoring different health-related activities and, concurrently, preserving most of the privacy of individuals. To meet future needs, multi-subject activity monitoring is in demand, whether it is for smart care centres or homes. In this paper, a smart monitoring system for different human activities is proposed based on radio-frequency sensing integrated with ensemble machine learning models. The ensemble technique can recognise a wide range of activity based on alterations in the wireless signal’s Channel State Information (CSI). The proposed system operates at 3.75 GHz, and up to four subjects participated in the experimental study in order to acquire data on sixteen distinct daily living activities: sitting, standing, and walking. The proposed methodology merges subject count and performed activities, resulting in occupancy count and activity performed being recognised at the same time. To capture alterations owing to concurrent multi-subject motions, the CSI amplitudes collected from 51 subcarriers of the wireless signals were processed and merged. To distinguish multi-subject activity, a machine learning model based on an ensemble learning technique was designed and trained using the acquired CSI data. For maximum activity classes, the proposed approach attained a high average accuracy of up to 98%. The presented system has the ability to fulfil prospective health activity monitoring demands and is a viable solution towards well-being tracking