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The 5G deployment brings forth the usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to assist wireless networks by providing improved signal coverage, acting as relays or base-stations. Another technology that could help achieve 5G massive machine-type communications (mMtc) goals is the Long Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) communication protocol. This paper studied these complementary technologies, LoRa and UAV, through measurement campaigns in suburban, densely forested environments. Downlink and uplink communication at different heights and spreading factors (SF) demonstrate distinct behavior through our analysis. Moreover, a neural network was trained to predict the measured signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) behavior and results compared with SNR regression models. For the downlink scenario, the neural network results show a root mean square error (RMSE) variation between 1.2322–1.6623 dB, with an error standard deviation (SD) less than 1.6730 dB. For the uplink, the RMSE variation was between 0.8714–1.3891 dB, with an error SD less than 1.1706 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the growing public awareness of cardiovascular disease (CVD), blood pressure (BP) estimation models have been developed based on physiological parameters extracted from both electrocardiograms (ECGs) and photoplethysmograms (PPGs). Still, in order to enhance the usability as well as reduce the sensor cost, researchers endeavor to establish a generalized BP estimation model using only PPG signals. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network model capable of extracting 32 features exclusively from PPG signals for BP estimation. The effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed model was evaluated by the root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard and the British Hypertension Society (BHS) standard. Experimental results showed that the RMSEs in systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) are 4.643 mmHg and 3.307 mmHg, respectively, across 9000 subjects, with 80.63% of absolute errors among estimated SBP records lower than 5 mmHg and 90.19% of absolute errors among estimated DBP records lower than 5 mmHg. We demonstrated that our proposed model has remarkably high accuracy on the largest BP database found in the literature, which shows its effectiveness compared to some prior works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gas sweetening process removes hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in an acid gas removal unit (AGRU) to meet the gas sales' specification, known as sweet gas. Monitoring the concentration of H2S in sweet gas is crucial to avoid operational and environmental issues. This study shows the capability of artificial neural networks (ANN) to predict the concentration of H2S in sweet gas. The concentration of N-methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) and Piperazine (PZ), temperature and pressure as inputs, and the concentration of H2S in sweet gas as outputs have been used to create the ANN network. Two distinct backpropagation techniques with various transfer functions and numbers of neurons were used to train the ANN models. Multiple linear regression (MLR) was used to compare the outcomes of the ANN models. The models' performance was assessed using the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and coefficient of determination (R2). The findings demonstrate that ANN trained by the Levenberg–Marquardt technique, equipped with a logistic sigmoid (logsig) transfer function with three neurons achieved the highest R2 (0.966) and the lowest MAE (0.066) and RMSE (0.122) values. The findings suggested that ANN can be a reliable and accurate prediction method in predicting the concentration of H2S in sweet gas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water stress, which affects yield and wine quality, is often evaluated using the midday stem water potential (Ψstem). However, this measurement is acquired on a per plant basis and does not account for the assessment of vine water status spatial variability. The use of multispectral cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is capable to capture the variability of vine water stress in a whole field scenario. It has been reported that conventional multispectral indices (CMI) that use information between 500-800 nm, do not accurately predict plant water status since they are not sensitive to water content. The objective of this study was to develop artificial neural network (ANN) models derived from multispectral images to predict the Ψstem spatial variability of a drip-irrigated Carménère vineyard in Talca, Maule Region, Chile. The coefficient of determination (R2) obtained between ANN outputs and ground-truth measurements of Ψstem were between 0.56-0.87, with the best performance observed for the model that included the bands 550, 570, 670, 700 and 800 nm. Validation analysis indicated that the ANN model could estimate Ψstem with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.1 MPa, root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.12 MPa, and relative error (RE) of -9.1%. For the validation of the CMI, the MAE, RMSE and RE values were between 0.26-0.27 MPa, 0.32-0.34 MPa and -24.2-25.6%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though current remote sensing technologies, especially synthetic aperture radars (SARs), exhibit huge potential for soil moisture content (SMC) retrievals, such technologies also present several performance disadvantages. This study explored the merits of proposing a novel data fusion methodology (partly decision level and partly feature level) for SMC estimation. Initially, individual estimations were derived from three distinct methods: the inversion of an Empirically Adapted Integral Equation Model (EA-IEM) applied to SAR data, the Perpendicular Drought Index (PDI), and the Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) determined from Landsat-8 data. Subsequently, three feature level fusions were performed to produce three different novel salient feature combinations where said features were extracted from each of the previously mentioned methods to be the input of an artificial neural network (ANN). The latter underwent a modification of its performance function, more specifically from absolute error to root mean square error (RMSE). Eventually, all SMC estimations, including the feature level fusion estimation, were fused at the decision level through a novel weight-based estimation. The performance of the proposed system was analysed and validated by measurements collected from three study areas, an agricultural field in Blackwell farms, Guildford, United Kingdom, and two different agricultural fields in Sidi Rached, Tipasa, Algeria. Those measurements contained SMC levels and surface roughness profiles. The proposed SMC estimation system yielded stronger correlations and lower RMSE values than any of the considered SMC estimation methods in the order of 0.38%, 1.4%, and 1.09% for the Blackwell farms, Sidi Rached 1, and Sidi Rached 2 datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things is advancing, and the augmented role of smart navigation in automating processes is at its vanguard. Smart navigation and location tracking systems are finding increasing use in the area of the mission-critical indoor scenario, logistics, medicine, and security. A demanding emerging area is an Indoor Localization due to the increased fascination towards location-based services. Numerous inertial assessments unit-based indoor localization mechanisms have been suggested in this regard. However, these methods have many shortcomings pertaining to accuracy and consistency. In this study, we propose a novel position estimation system based on learning to the prediction model to address the above challenges. The designed system consists of two modules; learning to prediction module and position estimation using sensor fusion in an indoor environment. The prediction algorithm is attached to the learning module. Moreover, the learning module continuously controls, observes, and enhances the efficiency of the prediction algorithm by evaluating the output and taking into account the exogenous factors that may have an impact on its outcome. On top of that, we reckon a situation where the prediction algorithm can be applied to anticipate the accurate gyroscope and accelerometer reading from the noisy sensor readings. In the designed system, we consider a scenario where the learning module, based on Artificial Neural Network, and Kalman filter are used as a prediction algorithm to predict the actual accelerometer and gyroscope reading from the noisy sensor reading. Moreover, to acquire data, we use the next-generation inertial measurement unit, which contains a 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope data. Finally, for the performance and accuracy of the proposed system, we carried out numbers of experiments, and we observed that the proposed Kalman filter with learning module performed better than the traditional Kalman filter algorithm in terms of root mean square error metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to correctly predict the microclimate of a greenhouse for control and crop management purposes. Accurately forecasting temperatures in greenhouses has been a focus of research because internal temperature is one of the most important factors influencing crop growth. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a powerful tool for making forecasts. The purpose of our research was elaboration of a model that would allow to forecast changes in temperatures inside the heated foil tunnel using ANNs. Experimental research has been carried out in a heated foil tunnel situated on the property of the Agricultural University of Krakow. Obtained results have served as data for ANNs. Conducted research confirmed the usefulness of ANNs as tools for making internal temperature forecasts. From all tested networks, the best is the three-layer Perceptron type network with 10 neurons in the hidden layer. This network has 40 inputs and one output (the forecasted internal temperature). As the networks input previous historical internal temperature, external temperature, sun radiation intensity, wind speed and the hour of making a forecast were used. These ANNs had the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value for the testing data set (RMSE value = 3.7 °C). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oceanographic remote sensing, which is based on the sensitivity of reflected signals from the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), so-called GNSS-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), is very useful for the observation of ocean wind speed. Wind speed estimation over the ocean is the core factor in maritime transportation management and the study of climate change. The main concept of the GNSS-R technique is using the different times between the reflected and the direct signals to measure the wind speed and wind direction. Accordingly, this research proposes a novel technique for wind speed estimation involving the integration of an artificial neural network and the particle filter based on a theoretical model. Moreover, particle swarm optimization was applied to find the optimal weight and bias of the artificial neural network, in order to improve the accuracy of the estimation result. The observation dataset of the reflected signal information from BeiDou Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite number 4 was used as an input for the estimation model. The data consisted of two phases with I and Q components. Two periods of BeiDou data were selected, the first period was from 3 to 8 August 2013 and the second period was from 12 to 14 August 2013, which corresponded to events from the typhoon Utor. The in situ wind speed measurement collected from the buoy station was used to validate the results. A coastal experiment was conducted at the Yangjiang site located in the South China Sea. The results show the ability of the proposed technique to estimate wind speed with a root mean square error of approximately 1.9 m/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]