Personal State and Emotion Monitoring by Wearable Computing and Machine Learning

One of the major scientific undertakings over the past few years has been exploring the interaction between humans and machines in mobile environments. Wearable computers, embedded in clothing or seamlessly integrated into everyday devices, have an incredible advantage to become the main gateway to personal health management. Current state of the art devices are capable in monitoring basic physical or physiological parameters. Traditional health systems procedures depend on the physical presence of the patient and a medical specialist that not only is a reason of overall costs but also reduces the quality of patients' lives, particularly elderly patients. Usually, patients have to go through the following steps for the traditional procedure: Firstly, patients need to visit the clinic, get registered at reception, wait for the turn, go to the lab for the physiological measurement, wait for the medical experts call, to finally receive feedback from the medical expert. In this work, we examined how to utilize existing technology in order to develop an e-health monitoring system especially for heart patients. This system should support the interaction between the patient and the physician even when the patient is not in the clinic. The supporting wearable health monitoring system WHMS should recognize physical activities, emotional states and transmit this information to the physician along with relevant physiological data; in this way patients do not need to visit the clinic every time for the physician's feed-back. After the discussion with medical experts, we identified relevant physical activities, emotional states and physiological data needed for the patients' examinations. A prototype of this concept for a health monitoring system of the proposed solution was implemented taking into account physical activities, emotional states and physiological data

Vehicle Combustion Quality Monitoring:A scene visibility-level based non-invasive approach

Pollutants interfere with light, restrict its reflection and so impair visibility. Scene visibility level is therefore used as a measure of air quality and pollution. Treating emission efflux as "some additional noise causing visibility impairment," this work examines if the extracted visibility index from a thermal infrared (TIR) image can help in qualitative assessment of combustion efficiency. The thin-film regime like two dimensional TIR images of unleaded-petroleum run vehicles' exhaust-plumes were first accommodated for time and space related compositional effects. The estimated ratios of visibility indices obtained from two sequential TIR images of the same exhaust plume were compared with their respective electrochemically sensed levels of oxides of nitrogen and combustibles. Initial results suggest that visibility indices extracted from TIR images of emission efflux would help in distinguishing low from high levels of emissions. TIR images can therefore assist in qualitative assessment of engine combustion efficiency

Analysis of Profits and Break Even Point of Jamnapari Goat Farming

This study discusses profits and break even point of jamnapari goat farming.  Goat and sheep husbandry offers an excellent image that may demonstrate how it might promote a wide range of economic activity. Goats are simple to breed, need little initial capital, require little animal feed, and are easily adapted to their surroundings. The goat is a kind of animal that provides many advantages to the society. Goats are an alternate source of revenue for goat farming businesses looking to expand their operations. The Jamnapari Crossbred goat is a kind of indigenous goat that has strong development potential and may help to boost the income of the surrounding area's farmers. Diversification (multi-commodity farming) is an alternative to carrying out business efficiency on relatively fixed land areas while increasing productivity

Environment, Agriculture, and Land Use Pattern

This study aimed at the environment, agriculture, and land use pattern and in the arid region of Pakistan. Physiography and location of the study area with respect to coastal region are the key factors that control the climate. There are a number of factors that have their influence on the cropping pattern in the area apart from climate. They include the type of soils, availability of irrigation water, government policies, socioeconomic condition, advance technologies, market value, human demand, etc. The soil of irrigated plain in lower Punjab and Sind is more suitable for the agriculture than other parts, where the water is insufficient for cultivation

Efficacy of Biophysiological Measurements at FTFPs for Facial Expression Classification: A Validation

Recent works suggest that thermal intensity values (TIVs) measured around the facial thermal feature points (FTFPs) can help in distinguishing between the facial expression of affective states. This work investigates if the average pixel grey-levels, instead of TIVs, measured in sub-image masks around the FTFPs allow classifying facial expressions. Thermal infrared images from the IEEE OTCBVS database were used to distinguish between facial expressions. The pixel grey-levels measured in sub-image masks were used to measure, for each individual, the Euclidean distance between images of different facial expressions. Linear discriminant analysis was performed to obtain hyper-planes for separating the clusters of sample images. Significant pixel grey-level differences were observed at FTFPs between three facial expressions; neutral, happy, and angry. More than 96 of the original images in a three-expression Gaussian mixture model were separable and clustered around distant centroids in a discriminant space

Portable Tongue-Supported Human Computer Interaction System Design and Implementation

Tongue supported human-computer interaction (TSHCI) systems can help critically ill patients interact with both computers and people. These systems can be particularly useful for patients suffering injuries above C7 on their spinal vertebrae. Despite recent successes in their application, several limitations restrict performance of existing TSHCI systems and discourage their use in real life situations. This paper proposes a low-cost, less-intrusive, portable and easy to use design for implementing a TSHCI system. Two applications of the proposed system are reported. Design considerations and performance of the proposed system are also presented

A Tongue-Activated Emergency Beacon for Immobile Patients

This paper reports the design and implementation of an infrared signal transmitting tongue activated emergency beacon. This low-cost, simple and reliable device can help immobile patients communicate with the medical staff in the event of an emergency without interfering with other equipment. The physical dimensions of this device were minimized to provide flexibility and suit the most vulnerable and impaired patients. The presented sensor-microcontroller configuration results in a robust and intelligent functionality that would allow this device to outperform many of the commercially available systems used in similar environments

Exhaust Plume Flow Visualization for Qualitative Analysis of Engine Combustion Performance

This work explores use of Thermal Infrared Image based Flow Visualization (TIIFV) for qualitative analysis of gasoline engine combustion performance. It proposes determining engine combustion performance through analysis of the exhaust plume turbulence and radiation extinction patterns. The employed methodology requires estimating the point spread function (PSF) prevailing in a LWIR image and using the PSF estimates for enhancing the engine exhaust plume LWIR images. Influence of exhaust plume composition on the plume flow characteristics, made evident by the turbulence and radiation extinction patterns, is then ascertained. The observed plume flow characteristics and underlying flow patterns are used to qualitatively determine the engine combustion performance. Results suggest that engine exhaust flow visualization can help in qualitative analysis of combustion performance from a distance and our reliance on photochemical-based analysis of gasoline engine combustion efficiency can be reduced. Thus a time consuming and untidy process, difficult to be carried out in real life situations, may be replaced with a swift and cleaner one