Wearable Technologies and AI at the Far Edge for Chronic Heart Failure Prevention and Management: A Systematic Review and Prospects.

Smart wearable devices enable personalized at-home healthcare by unobtrusively collecting patient health data and facilitating the development of intelligent platforms to support patient care and management. The accurate analysis of data obtained from wearable devices is crucial for interpreting and contextualizing health data and facilitating the reliable diagnosis and management of critical and chronic diseases. The combination of edge computing and artificial intelligence has provided real-time, time-critical, and privacy-preserving data analysis solutions. However, based on the envisioned service, evaluating the additive value of edge intelligence to the overall architecture is essential before implementation. This article aims to comprehensively analyze the current state of the art on smart health infrastructures implementing wearable and AI technologies at the far edge to support patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). In particular, we highlight the contribution of edge intelligence in supporting the integration of wearable devices into IoT-aware technology infrastructures that provide services for patient diagnosis and management. We also offer an in-depth analysis of open challenges and provide potential solutions to facilitate the integration of wearable devices with edge AI solutions to provide innovative technological infrastructures and interactive services for patients and doctors.

Leveraging IoT-Aware Technologies and AI Techniques for Real-Time Critical Healthcare Applications.

Personalised healthcare has seen significant improvements due to the introduction of health monitoring technologies that allow wearable devices to unintrusively monitor physiological parameters such as heart health, blood pressure, sleep patterns, and blood glucose levels, among others. Additionally, utilising advanced sensing technologies based on flexible and innovative biocompatible materials in wearable devices allows high accuracy and precision measurement of biological signals. Furthermore, applying real-time Machine Learning algorithms to highly accurate physiological parameters allows precise identification of unusual patterns in the data to provide health event predictions and warnings for timely intervention. However, in the predominantly adopted architectures, health event predictions based on Machine Learning are typically obtained by leveraging Cloud infrastructures characterised by shortcomings such as delayed response times and privacy issues. Fortunately, recent works highlight that a new paradigm based on Edge Computing technologies and on-device Artificial Intelligence significantly improve the latency and privacy issues. Applying this new paradigm to personalised healthcare architectures can significantly improve their efficiency and efficacy. Therefore, this paper reviews existing IoT healthcare architectures that utilise wearable devices and subsequently presents a scalable and modular system architecture to leverage emerging technologies to solve identified shortcomings. The defined architecture includes ultrathin, skin-compatible, flexible, high precision piezoelectric sensors, low-cost communication technologies, on-device intelligence, Edge Intelligence, and Edge Computing technologies. To provide development guidelines and define a consistent reference architecture for improved scalable wearable IoT-based critical healthcare architectures, this manuscript outlines the essential functional and non-functional requirements based on deductions from existing architectures and emerging technology trends. The presented system architecture can be applied to many scenarios, including ambient assisted living, where continuous surveillance and issuance of timely warnings can afford independence to the elderly and chronically ill. We conclude that the distribution and modularity of architecture layers, local AI-based elaboration, and data packaging consistency are the more essential functional requirements for critical healthcare application use cases. We also identify fast response time, utility, comfort, and low cost as the essential non-functional requirements for the defined system architecture.

An IoT-Aware Solution to Support Governments in Air Pollution Monitoring Based on the Combination of Real-Time Data and Citizen Feedback.

One of the main concerns of the last century is regarding the air pollution and its effects caused on human health. Its impact is particularly evident in cities and urban areas where governments are trying to mitigate its effects. Although different solutions have been already proposed, citizens continue to report bad conditions in the areas in which they live. This paper proposes a solution to support governments in monitoring the city pollution through the combination of user feedbacks/reports and real-time data acquired through dedicated mobile IoT sensors dynamically re-located by government officials to verify the reported conditions of specific areas. The mobile devices leverage on dedicated sensors to monitor the air quality and capture main roads traffic conditions through machine learning techniques. The system exposes a mobile application and a website to support the collection of citizens' reports and show gathered data to both institutions and end-users. A proof-of-concept of the proposed solution has been prototyped in a medium-sized university campus. Both the performance and functional validation have demonstrated the feasibility and the effectiveness of the system and allowed the definition of some lessons learned, as well as future works.

Behavior Modeling for a Beacon-Based Indoor Location System.

In this work we performed a comparison between two different approaches to track a person in indoor environments using a locating system based on BLE technology with a smartphone and a smartwatch as monitoring devices. To do so, we provide the system architecture we designed and describe how the different elements of the proposed system interact with each other. Moreover, we have evaluated the system's performance by computing the mean percentage error in the detection of the indoor position. Finally, we present a novel location prediction system based on neural embeddings, and a soft-attention mechanism, which is able to predict user's next location with 67% accuracy.

A Smart and Secure Logistics System Based on IoT and Cloud Technologies.

Recently, one of the hottest topics in the logistics sector has been the traceability of goods and the monitoring of their condition during transportation. Perishable goods, such as fresh goods, have specifically attracted attention of the researchers that have already proposed different solutions to guarantee quality and freshness of food through the whole cold chain. In this regard, the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabling technologies and its specific branch called edge computing is bringing different enhancements thereby achieving easy remote and real-time monitoring of transported goods. Due to the fast changes of the requirements and the difficulties that researchers can encounter in proposing new solutions, the fast prototype approach could contribute to rapidly enhance both the research and the commercial sector. In order to make easy the fast prototyping of solutions, different platforms and tools have been proposed in the last years, however it is difficult to guarantee end-to-end security at all the levels through such platforms. For this reason, based on the experiments reported in literature and aiming at providing support for fast-prototyping, end-to-end security in the logistics sector, the current work presents a solution that demonstrates how the advantages offered by the Azure Sphere platform, a dedicated hardware (i.e., microcontroller unit, the MT3620) device and Azure Sphere Security Service can be used to realize a fast prototype to trace fresh food conditions through its transportation. The proposed solution guarantees end-to-end security and can be exploited by future similar works also in other sectors.

An Innovative AAL System Based on IoT Technologies for Patients with Sarcopenia.

Sarcopenia is a highly prevalent, age-related muscle disorder associated with adverse outcomes. It is very important from a medical point of view to periodically monitor patients at risk of developing sarcopenia in order to early detect its onset or progression through objective and specific indicators. Today, the emerging Internet of Things (IoT)-enabling technologies allow us to create innovative, wearable, and non-invasive systems that can offer useful clinical support in this area. This work is focused on the use of combined hardware and software technologies, enabling the IoT, in order to monitor people suffering from sarcopenia by offering a high value-added service in the field of the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). In addition to the description of the proposed system architecture, a validation of the entire system is also included, from both a performance and a functional point of view. Test beds have been carried out by using the independent replications method, and all measurements related to the identified sarcopenia parameters are characterized by a 95% confidence interval with a 5% maximum relative error. The implementation of these technologies as a supporting clinical tool used in a specific setting could significantly impact the life and independence of the sarcopenic frail elderly population.

Appraisal-driven facial actions as building blocks for emotion inference.

Although research on facial emotion recognition abounds, there has been little attention on the nature of the underlying mechanisms. In this article, using a "reverse engineering" approach, we suggest that emotion inference from facial expression mirrors the expression process. As a strong case can be made for an appraisal theory account of emotional expression, which holds that appraisal results directly determine the nature of facial muscle actions, we claim that observers first detect specific appraisals from different facial muscle actions and then use implicit inference rules to categorize and name specific emotions. We report three experiments in which, guided by theoretical predictions and past empirical evidence, we systematically manipulated specific facial action units individually and in different configurations via synthesized avatar expressions. Large, diverse groups of participants judged the resulting videos for the underlying appraisals and/or the ensuing emotions. The results confirm that participants can infer targeted appraisals and emotions from synthesized facial actions based on appraisal predictions. We also report evidence that the ability to correctly interpret the synthesized stimuli is highly correlated with emotion recognition ability as part of emotional competence. We conclude by highlighting the importance of adopting a theory-based experimental approach in future research, focusing on the dynamic unfolding of facial expressions of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record

An animal tracking system for behavior analysis using radio frequency identification.

Evaluating the behavior of mice and rats has substantially contributed to the progress of research in many scientific fields. Researchers commonly observe recorded video of animal behavior and manually record their observations for later analysis, but this approach has several limitations. The authors developed an automated system for tracking and analyzing the behavior of rodents that is based on radio frequency identification (RFID) in an ultra-high-frequency bandwidth. They provide an overview of the system's hardware and software components as well as describe their technique for surgically implanting passive RFID tags in mice. Finally, the authors present the findings of two validation studies to compare the accuracy of the RFID system versus commonly used approaches for evaluating the locomotor activity and object exploration of mice.