Ayurveda is a traditional medicine and natural healing system in India. Nadi-Nidan (pulse-based diagnosis) is a prominent method in Ayurveda, and is known to dictate all the salient features of a human body. In this paper, we provide details of our procedure for obtaining the complete spectrum of the nadi pulses as a time series. The system Nadi Tarangini1 contains a diaphragm element equipped with strain gauge, a transmitter cum amplifier, and a digitizer for quantifying analog signal. The system acquires the data with 16-bit accuracy with practically no external electronic or interfering noise. Prior systems for obtaining the nadi pulses have been few and far between, when compared to systems such as ECG. The waveforms obtained with our system have been compared with these other similar equipment developed earlier, and is shown to contain more details. The pulse waveform is also shown to have the desirable variations with respect to age of patients, and the pressure applied at the sensing element. The system is being evaluated by Ayurvedic practitioners as a computer-aided diagnostic tool.

No abstract

The use of facial masks in public spaces has become a social obligation since the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the identification of facial masks can be imperative to ensure public safety. Detection of facial masks in video footages is a challenging task primarily due to the fact that the masks themselves behave as occlusions to face detection algorithms due to the absence of facial landmarks in the masked regions. In this work, we propose an approach for detecting facial masks in videos using deep learning. The proposed framework capitalizes on the MTCNN face detection model to identify the faces and their corresponding facial landmarks present in the video frame. These facial images and cues are then processed by a neoteric classifier that utilises the MobileNetV2 architecture as an object detector for identifying masked regions. The proposed framework was tested on a dataset which is a collection of videos capturing the movement of people in public spaces while complying with COVID-19 safety protocols. The proposed methodology demonstrated its effectiveness in detecting facial masks by achieving high precision, recall, and accuracy.

This underscores the need for further investigations to detect diabetes at an early stage and to overcome the disease burden of diabetes in future. Prevention of obesity and promotion of physical activity have to be the future plan of action which can be suggested in the form of regular exercise and diet planning for the students as part of an integrated approach.

A numerical and experimental study of heat transfer and fluid flow in a single pass counter flow plate heat exchanger with chevron plates has been presented in this paper. CFD analysis of small sized plate heat exchanger was carried out by taking the complete geometry of the heat transfer surface and more realistic hydrodynamic and thermal boundary conditions. A cold channel with two chevron plates and two halves of hot channels on either side having flat periodic boundaries was selected as the computational domain. The numerical model was validated with data from experiments and empirical correlations from literature. Heat transfer and pressure drop data were obtained experimentally with water as the working fluid, in the Reynolds number range 400–1300 and the Prandtl number range 4.4–6.3.

Ayurveda is one of the most comprehensive healing systems in the world and has classified the body system according to the theory of Tridosha to overcome ailments. Diagnosis similar to the traditional pulse-based method requires a system of clean input signals, and extensive experiments for obtaining classification features. In this paper we briefly describe our system of generating pulse waveforms and use various feature detecting methods to show that an arterial pulse contains typical physiological properties. The beat-to-beat variability is captured using a complex B-spline mother wavelet based peak detection algorithm. We also capture--to our knowledge for the first time--the self-similarity in the physiological signal, and quantifiable chaotic behavior using recurrence plot structures.

The practice of social distancing is imperative to curbing the spread of contagious diseases and has been globally adopted as a non-pharmaceutical prevention measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This work proposes a novel framework named SD-Measure for detecting social distancing from video footages. The proposed framework leverages the Mask R-CNN deep neural network to detect people in a video frame. To consistently identify whether social distancing is practiced during the interaction between people, a centroid tracking algorithm is utilised to track the subjects over the course of the footage. With the aid of authentic algorithms for approximating the distance of people from the camera and between themselves, we determine whether the social distancing guidelines are being adhered to. The framework attained a high accuracy value in conjunction with a low false alarm rate when tested on Custom Video Footage Dataset (CVFD) and Custom Personal Images Dataset (CPID), where it manifested its effectiveness in determining whether social distancing guidelines were practiced.

Heart rate variability (HRV) provides an estimate of sympathetic and parasympathetic influences on the heart rate. Although HRV has been extensively studied, sustained clinical use is still outstanding.The noninvasive, convenient, and inexpensive arterial pulse originate from heartbeats, but has not been studied in a systematic fashion except in rudimentary ways. In this paper, we present Pulse Rate Variability (PRV) as an alternative to HRV. We give evidence for the detection of disorders in patients using PRV, paving the way for future clinical use.