Robust Algorithms for Estimating Vehicle Movement from Motion Sensors Within Smartphones

Building sustainable traffic control solutions for urban streets (e.g., eco-friendly signal control) and highways requires effective and reliable sensing capabilities for monitoring traffic flow conditions so that both the temporal and spatial extents of congestion are observed. This would enable optimal control strategies to be implemented for maximizing efficiency and for minimizing the environmental impacts of traffic. Various types of traffic detection systems, such as inductive loops, radar, and cameras have been used for these purposes. However, these systems are limited, both in scope and in time. Using GPS as an alternative method is not always viable because of problems such as urban canyons, battery depletion, and precision errors. In this research, a novel approach has been taken, in which smartphone low energy sensors (such as the accelerometer) are exploited. The ubiquitous use of smartphones in everyday life, coupled with the fact that they can collect, store, compute, and transmit data, makes them a feasible and inexpensive alternative to the mainstream methods. Machine learning techniques have been used to develop models that are able to classify vehicle movement and to detect the stop and start points during a trip. Classifiers such as logistic regression, discriminant analysis, classification trees, support vector machines, neural networks, and Hidden Markov models have been tested. Hidden Markov models substantially outperformed all the other methods. The feature quality plays a key role in the success of a model. It was found that, the features which exploited the variance of the data were the most effective. In order to assist in quantifying the performance of the machine learning models, a performance metric called Change Point Detection Performance Metric (CPDPM) was developed. CPDPM proved to be very useful in model evaluation in which the goal was to find the change points in time series data with high accuracy and precision. The integration of accelerometer data, even in the motion direction, yielded an estimated speed with a steady slope, because of factors such as phone sensor bias, vibration, gravity, and other white noise. A calibration method was developed that makes use of the predicted stop and start points and the slope of integrated accelerometer data, which achieves great accuracy in estimating speed. The developed models can serve as the basis for many applications. One such field is fuel consumption and CO2 emission estimation, in which speed is the main input. Transportation mode detection can be improved by integrating speed information. By integrating Vehicle (Phone) to Infrastructure systems (V2I), the model outputs, such as the stop and start instances, average speed along a corridor, and queue length at an intersection, can provide useful information for traffic engineers, planners, and decision makers

Key Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Reidentification of Trucks over Long Distances Based on Axle Measurement Data

Vehicle reidentification methods can be used to anonymously match vehicles crossing two locations based on vehicle attribute data. This paper investigates key factors that affect the accuracy of vehicle reidentification algorithms. The analyses are performed with reidentification algorithms to match commercial vehicles that cross upstream and down-stream pairs of weigh-in-motion (WIM) sites that are separated by long distances, ranging from 70 to 214 mi. The data to support this research come from 17 fixed WIM sites in Oregon. Data from 14 pairs of WIM sites are used to evaluate how various factors affect matching accuracy; factors include the distance between two sites, travel time variability, truck volumes, and sensor accuracy or consistency of measurements. After the vehicle reidentification algorithm is run for each of these 14 pairs of sites, the matching error rates are reported. The results from the testing data sets show a large variation in terms of accuracy. Sensor accuracy and volumes have the greatest impacts on matching accuracy; distance alone does not have a significant effect

Lipid Profiling of Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Highlights Enrichment in Glycerol(phospho)lipid, and Sphingolipid Metabolism

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is reported to be closely linked with abnormal lipid metabolism. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of what causes AD and its subsequent development, we profiled the lipidome of postmortem (PM) human brains (neocortex) of people with a range of AD pathology (Braak 0–6). Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, we employed a semi-targeted, fully quantitative lipidomics profiling method (Lipidyzer) to compare the biochemical profiles of brain tissues from persons with mild AD (n = 15) and severe AD (AD; n = 16), and compared them with age-matched, cognitively normal controls (n = 16). Univariate analysis revealed that the concentrations of 420 lipid metabolites significantly (p p p-18:0/18:1), phosphatidylserine (PS) (18:1/18:2), and PS (14:0/22:6) differed the most (p p-18:0/18:1), DAG (14:0/14:0), and PS (18:1/20:4) were identified as the most significantly perturbed lipids when AD and mild AD brains were compared (p < 0.05). Our analysis provides the most extensive lipid profiling yet undertaken in AD brain tissue and reveals the cumulative perturbation of several lipid pathways with progressive disease pathology. Lipidomics has considerable potential for studying AD etiology and identifying early diagnostic biomarkers