Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) is an emerging class of a generalized Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) having constraints of energy consumption, coverage, connectivity, and security. However, security and privacy is one of the major challenges in IWSN as the nodes are connected to Internet and usually located in an unattended environment with minimum human interventions. In IWSN, there is a fundamental requirement for a user to access the real-time information directly from the designated sensor nodes. This task demands to have a user authentication protocol. To satisfy this requirement, this article proposes a lightweight and privacy-preserving mutual user authentication protocol in which only the user with a trusted device has the right to access the IWSN. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we considered the physical layer security of the sensor nodes. We show that the proposed scheme ensures security even if a sensor node is captured by an adversary. The proposed protocol uses the lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one way cryptographic hash function, Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and bitwise exclusive (XOR) operations. Security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure, and is efficient for the resource-constrained sensing devices in IWSN.

Social distancing in public spaces plays a crucial role in controlling or slowing down the spread of coronavirus during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Visual Social Distancing (VSD) offers an opportunity for real-time measuring and analysing the physical distance between pedestrians using surveillance videos in public spaces. It potentially provides new evidence for implementing effective prevention measures of the pandemic. The existing VSD methods developed in the literature are primarily based on frame-by-frame pedestrian detection, addressing the VSD problem from a static and local perspective. In this paper, we propose a new online multi-pedestrian tracking approach for spatio-temporal trajectory and its application to multi-scale social distancing measuring and analysis. Firstly, an online multi-pedestrian tracking method is proposed to obtain the trajectories of pedestrians in public spaces, based on hierarchical data association. Then, a new VSD method based on sptatio-temporal trajectories is proposed. The proposed method not only considers the Euclidean distance between tracking objects frame-by-frame but also takes into account the discrete Fréchet distance between trajectories, hence forms a comprehensive solution from both static and dynamic, local and holistic perspectives. We evaluated the performance of the proposed tracking method using the public dataset MOT16 benchmark. We also collected our own pedestrian dataset “SCU-VSD” and designed a multi-scale VSD analysis scheme for benchmarking the performance of the social distancing monitoring in the crowd. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method achieved outstanding performance on the analysis of social distancing.

As a widely known chronic disease, diabetes mellitus is called a silent killer. It makes the body produce less insulin and causes increased blood sugar, which leads to many complications and affects the normal functioning of various organs, such as eyes, kidneys, and nerves. Although diabetes has attracted high attention in research, due to the existence of missing values and class imbalance in the data, the overall performance of diabetes classification using machine learning is relatively low. In this paper, we propose an effective Prediction algorithm for Diabetes Mellitus classification on Imbalanced data with Missing values (DMP_MI). First, the missing values are compensated by the Naïve Bayes (NB) method for data normalization. Then, an adaptive synthetic sampling method (ADASYN) is adopted to reduce the influence of class imbalance on the prediction performance. Finally, a random forest (RF) classifier is used to generate predictions and evaluated using comprehensive set of evaluation indicators. Experiments performed on Pima Indians diabetes dataset from the University of California at Irvine, Irvine (UCI) Repository, have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DMP_MI.

Recent research has reported the application of image fusion technologies in medical images in a wide range of aspects, such as in the diagnosis of brain diseases, the detection of glioma and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. In our study, a new fusion method based on the combination of the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) and the pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is proposed for the fusion of SPECT and CT images to improve the quality of fused brain images. First, the intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) of a SPECT and CT image are decomposed using a non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) independently, where both low-frequency and high-frequency images, using NSCT, are obtained. We then used the combined SFLA and PCNN to fuse the high-frequency sub-band images and low-frequency images. The SFLA is considered to optimize the PCNN network parameters. Finally, the fused image was produced from the reversed NSCT and reversed IHS transforms. We evaluated our algorithms against standard deviation (SD), mean gradient (Ḡ), spatial frequency (SF) and information entropy (E) using three different sets of brain images. The experimental results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed fusion method to enhance both precision and spatial resolution significantly.

Diseases related to issues with blood pressure are becoming a major threat to human health. With the development of telemedicine monitoring applications, a growing number of corresponding devices are being marketed, such as the use of remote monitoring for the purposes of increasing the autonomy of the elderly and thus encouraging a healthier and longer health span. Using machine learning algorithms to measure blood pressure at a continuous rate is a feasible way to provide models and analysis for telemedicine monitoring data and predicting blood pressure. For this paper, we applied the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) while predicting blood pressure rates based on the human physiological data collected by the EIMO device. EIMO equipment-specific signal acquisition includes ECG and PPG. In order to avoid over-fitting, the optimal parameters are selected via the cross-validation method. Consequently, our method has displayed a higher accuracy rate and better performance in calculating the mean absolute error evaluation index than methods, such as the traditional least squares method, ridge regression, lasso regression, ElasticNet, SVR, and KNN algorithm. When predicting the blood pressure of a single individual, calculating the systolic pressure displays an accuracy rate of above 70% and above 64% for calculating the diastolic pressure with GBDT, with the prediction time being less than 0.1 s. In conclusion, applying the GBDT is the best method for predicting the blood pressure of multiple individuals: with the inclusion of data such as age, body fat, ratio, and height, algorithm accuracy improves, which in turn indicates that the inclusion of new features aids prediction performance. INDEX TERMS GBDT, pruning, blood pressure prediction, health monitoring.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal-based emotion recognition has attracted wide interests in recent years and has been broadly adopted in medical, affective computing, and other relevant fields. However, the majority of the research reported in this field tends to focus on the accuracy of classification whilst neglecting the interpretability of emotion progression. In this paper, we propose a new interpretable emotion recognition approach with the activation mechanism by using machine learning and EEG signals. This paper innovatively proposes the emotional activation curve to demonstrate the activation process of emotions. The algorithm first extracts features from EEG signals and classifies emotions using machine learning techniques, in which different parts of a trial are used to train the proposed model and assess its impact on emotion recognition results. Second, novel activation curves of emotions are constructed based on the classification results, and two emotion coefficients, i.e., the correlation coefficients and entropy coefficients. The activation curve can not only classify emotions but also reveals to a certain extent the emotional activation mechanism. Finally, a weight coefficient is obtained from the two coefficients to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition. To validate the proposed method, experiments have been carried out on the DEAP and SEED dataset. The results support the point that emotions are progressively activated throughout the experiment, and the weighting coefficients based on the correlation coefficient and the entropy coefficient can effectively improve the EEG-based emotion recognition accuracy.

In the research of flexible pressure sensors supported by three-dimensional skeleton structure, the combination of nanomaterials and skeleton structure is a difficult problem to be further solved. Herein, a piezoresistive sensor based on the graphene-PDMS @ sponge is prepared by fixing graphene on a sponge skeleton using PDMS. The as-prepared piezoresistive sensor exhibits high elasticity (strain up to 85%), high sensitivity (0.075 K Pa−1), a wide responding range (0–50 KPa) and high stability (2000 cycles pressure test). The piezoresistive sensor is used to detect blood pressure, heartbeat and human movements including finger bending, elbow movement and knee squatting, which shows good consistency and stability of the as-prepared sensor through the synergy of sponge, PDMS and graphene. The graphene-PDMS @ sponge sensor shows potential applications in medical testing and electronic skin.

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