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Elderly and individuals with disabilities can greatly benefit from human activity recognition (HAR) systems, which have recently advanced significantly due to the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). The blending of IoT and AI methodologies into HAR systems has the potential to enable these populations to lead more autonomous and comfortable lives. HAR systems are equipped with various sensors, including motion capture sensors, microcontrollers, and transceivers, which supply data to assorted AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms for subsequent analyses. Despite the substantial advantages of this integration, current frameworks encounter significant challenges related to computational overhead, which arises from the complexity of AI and ML algorithms. This article introduces a novel ensemble of gated recurrent networks (GRN) and deep extreme feedforward neural networks (DEFNN), with hyperparameters optimized through the artificial water drop optimization (AWDO) algorithm. This framework leverages GRN for effective feature extraction, subsequently utilized by DEFNN for accurately classifying HAR data. Additionally, AWDO is employed within DEFNN to adjust hyperparameters, thereby mitigating computational overhead and enhancing detection efficiency. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the proposed methodology using real-time datasets gathered from IoT testbeds, which employ NodeMCU units interfaced with Wi-Fi transceivers. The framework's efficiency was assessed using several metrics: accuracy at 99.5%, precision at 98%, recall at 97%, specificity at 98%, and F1-score of 98.2%. These results then were benchmarked against other contemporary deep learning (DL)-based HAR systems. The experimental outcomes indicate that our model achieves near-perfect accuracy, surpassing alternative learning-based HAR systems. Moreover, our model demonstrates reduced computational demands compared to preceding algorithms, suggesting that the proposed framework may offer superior efficacy and compatibility for deployment in HAR systems designed for elderly or individuals with disabilities.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a serious eye condition that occurs due to high blood sugar levels in patients with Diabetes Mellitus. If left untreated, DR can potentially result in blindness. Using automated neural network-based methods to grade DR shows potential for early detection. However, the uneven and non-quadrilateral forms of DR lesions provide difficulties for traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based architectures. To address this challenge and explore a novel algorithm architecture, this work delves into the usage of contrasting cluster assignments in retinal fundus images with the Swapping Assignments between multiple Views (SwAV) algorithm for DR grading. An ablation study was made where SwAV outperformed other CNN and Transformer-based models, independently and in ensemble configurations with an accuracy of 87.00% despite having fewer parameters and layers. The proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models regarding classification metrics, complexity, and prediction time. The findings offer great potential for medical practitioners, allowing for more accurate diagnosis of DR and earlier treatments to avoid visual loss.

A novel technique for electronic control unit (ECU) identification is proposed in this study to address security vulnerabilities of the controller area network (CAN) protocol. The reliable ECU identification has the potential to prevent spoofing attacks launched over the CAN due to the lack of message authentication. In this regard, we model the ECU-specific random distortion caused by the imperfections in the digital-to-analog converter and semiconductor impurities in the transmitting ECU for fingerprinting. Afterward, a 4-layered artificial neural network (ANN) is trained on the feature set to identify the transmitting ECU and the corresponding ECU pin. The ECU-pin identification is also a novel contribution of this study and can be used to prevent voltage-based attacks. We have evaluated our method using ANNs over a dataset generated from 7 ECUs with 6 pins, each having 185 records, and 40 records for each pin. The performance evaluation against state-of-the-art methods revealed that the proposed method achieved 99.4% accuracy for ECU identification and 96.7% accuracy for pin identification, which signifies the reliability of the proposed approach.

With recent advances in the field of sensing, it has become possible to build better assistive technologies. This enables the strengthening of eldercare with regard to daily routines and the provision of personalised care to users. For instance, it is possible to detect a person’s behaviour based on wearable or ambient sensors; however, it is difficult for users to wear devices 24/7, as they would have to be recharged regularly because of their energy consumption. Similarly, although cameras have been widely used as ambient sensors, they carry the risk of breaching users’ privacy. This paper presents a novel sensing approach based on deep learning for human activity recognition using a non-wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) radar sensor. UWB sensors protect privacy better than RGB cameras because they do not collect visual data. In this study, UWB sensors were mounted on a mobile robot to monitor and observe subjects from a specific distance (namely, 1.5–2.0 m). Initially, data were collected in a lab environment for five different human activities. Subsequently, the data were used to train a model using the state-of-the-art deep learning approach, namely long short-term memory (LSTM). Conventional training approaches were also tested to validate the superiority of LSTM. As a UWB sensor collects many data points in a single frame, enhanced discriminant analysis was used to reduce the dimensions of the features through application of principal component analysis to the raw dataset, followed by linear discriminant analysis. The enhanced discriminant features were fed into the LSTMs. Finally, the trained model was tested using new inputs. The proposed LSTM-based activity recognition approach performed better than conventional approaches, with an accuracy of 99.6%. We applied 5-fold cross-validation to test our approach. We also validated our approach on publically available dataset. The proposed method can be applied in many prominent fields, including human–robot interaction for various practical applications, such as mobile robots for eldercare.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a comparatively new noninvasive, portable, and easy-to-use brain imaging modality. However, complicated dexterous tasks such as individual finger-tapping, particularly using one hand, have been not investigated using fNIRS technology. Twenty-four healthy volunteers participated in the individual finger-tapping experiment. Data were acquired from the motor cortex using sixteen sources and sixteen detectors. In this preliminary study, we applied standard fNIRS data processing pipeline, i.e., optical densities conversation, signal processing, feature extraction, and classification algorithm implementation. Physiological and non-physiological noise is removed using 4th order band-pass Butter-worth and 3rd order Savitzky–Golay filters. Eight spatial statistical features were selected: signal-mean, peak, minimum, Skewness, Kurtosis, variance, median, and peak-to-peak form data of oxygenated haemoglobin changes. Sophisticated machine learning algorithms were applied, such as support vector machine (SVM), random forests (RF), decision trees (DT), AdaBoost, quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), Artificial neural networks (ANN), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). The average classification accuracies achieved were 0.75±0.04, 0.75±0.05, and 0.77±0.06 using k-nearest neighbors (kNN), Random forest (RF) and XGBoost, respectively. KNN, RF and XGBoost classifiers performed exceptionally well on such a high-class problem. The results need to be further investigated. In the future, a more in-depth analysis of the signal in both temporal and spatial domains will be conducted to investigate the underlying facts. The accuracies achieved are promising results and could open up a new research direction leading to enrichment of control commands generation for fNIRS-based brain-computer interface applications.

This paper summarizes the information technology-related research findings after 5 years with the INTROducing Mental health through Adaptive Technology project. The aim was to improve mental healthcare by introducing new technologies for adaptive interventions in mental healthcare through interdisciplinary research and development. We focus on the challenges related to internet-delivered psychological treatments, emphasising artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. We present the main research findings, the developed artefacts, and lessons learned from the project before outlining directions for future research. The main findings from this project are encapsulated in a reference architecture that is used for establishing an infrastructure for adaptive internet-delivered psychological treatment systems in clinical contexts. The infrastructure is developed by introducing an interdisciplinary design and development process inspired by domain-driven design, user-centred design, and the person based approach for intervention design. The process aligns the software development with the intervention design and illustrates their mutual dependencies. Finally, we present software artefacts produced within the project and discuss how they are related to the proposed reference architecture. Our results indicate that the proposed development process, the reference architecture and the produced software can be practical means of designing adaptive mental health care treatments in correspondence with the patients’ needs and preferences. In summary, we have created the initial version of an information technology infrastructure to support the development and deployment of Internet-delivered mental health interventions with inherent support for data sharing, data analysis, reusability of treatment content, and adaptation of intervention based on user needs and preferences.