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The recent development of the IoT (Internet of Things), which has enabled new types of sensors that can be easily interconnected to the Internet, will also have a significant impact in the near future on the management of natural disasters (mainly earthquakes and floods) with the aim of improving effectiveness in research, identification, and recovery of missing persons, and therefore increasing the possibility of saving lives. In this paper, more specifically, an innovative technique is proposed for the search and identification of missing persons in natural disaster scenarios by employing a drone-femtocell system and devising an algorithm capable of locating any mobile terminal in a given monitoring area. In particular, through a series of power measurements based on the reference signal received power (RSRP), the algorithm allows for the classification of the terminal inside or outside the monitoring area and subsequently identify the position with an accuracy of about 1 m, even in the presence of obstacles that act in such a way as to make the propagation of the radio signal non-isotropic.

In this paper a novel training technique is proposed to offer an efficient solution for neural network training in non-trivial and critical applications such as the diagnosis of health threatening illness. The presented technique aims to enhance the generalization capability of a neural network while preserving its sensitivity and precision. The implemented method has been devised in order to slowly increase, during training, the generalization capabilities of a Radial Basis Probabilistic Neural Network classifier, as well as preventing it from over-generalization and the consequent lack of resulting classification performances. The developed method was tested on Electrocardiograms. These latter are generally considered non-trivial both due to the difficulty to recognize some anomalous heart activities, and due to the intermittent nature of abnormal beat occurrences. The implemented training method obtained satisfactory performances, sensitivity and precision while showing high generalization capabilities., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The paper proposes a new approach to heart activity diagnosis based on Gram polynomials and probabilistic neural networks (PNN). Heart disease recognition is based on the analysis of phonocardiogram (PCG) digital sequences. The PNN provides a powerful tool for proper classification of the input data set. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in a powerful feature extraction based on Gram polynomials and the Fourier transform. The proposed system presents good performance obtaining overall sensitivity of 93%, specificity of 91% and accuracy of 94%, using a public database of over 3000 heart beat sound recordings, classified as normal and abnormal heart sounds. Thus, it can be concluded that Gram polynomials and PNN prove to be a very efficient technique using the PCG signal for characterizing heart diseases., Competing Interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.This paper does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. On this matter we would also like to point out that our experiments, concerning data analysis and classification, has not directly been performed on human beings, but were concerning the off-line analysis of the signals obtained by a public database (see https://physionet.org/challenge/2016/) in order to grant more transparency and to use a safe data source also in terms of ethical approval.