In this paper, we present DREAMER, a multimodal database consisting of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals recorded during affect elicitation by means of audio-visual stimuli. Signals from 23 participants were recorded along with the participants self-assessment of their affective state after each stimuli, in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. All the signals were captured using portable, wearable, wireless, low-cost, and off-the-shelf equipment that has the potential to allow the use of affective computing methods in everyday applications. A baseline for participant-wise affect recognition using EEG and ECG-based features, as well as their fusion, was established through supervised classification experiments using support vector machines (SVMs). The self-assessment of the participants was evaluated through comparison with the self-assessments from another study using the same audio-visual stimuli. Classification results for valence, arousal, and dominance of the proposed database are comparable to the ones achieved for other databases that use nonportable, expensive, medical grade devices. These results indicate the prospects of using low-cost devices for affect recognition applications. The proposed database will be made publicly available in order to allow researchers to achieve a more thorough evaluation of the suitability of these capturing devices for affect recognition applications.

Healthcare is a field that is rapidly developing in technology and services. A recent development in this area is remote monitoring of patients which has many advantages in a fast aging world population with increasing health complications. With relatively simple applications to monitor patients inside hospital rooms, the technology has developed to the extent that the patient can be allowed normal daily activities at home while still being monitored with the use of modern communication and sensor technologies. Sensors for monitoring essential vital signs such as electrocardiogram reading, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, temperature, blood glucose levels and neural system activity are available today. Range of remote healthcare varies from monitoring chronically ill patients, elders, premature children to victims of accidents. These new technologies can monitor patients based on the illness or based on the situation. The technology varies from sensors attached to body to ambient sensors attached to the environment and new breakthroughs show contactless monitoring which requires only the patient to be present within a few meters from the sensor. Fall detection systems and applications to monitor chronical ill patients have already become familiar to many. This study provides a review of the recent advances in remote healthcare and monitoring in both with-contact and contactless methods. With the review, the authors discuss some issues available in most systems. The paper also includes some directions for future research.

The evolution of intelligent manufacturing has had a profound and lasting effect on the future of global manufacturing. Industry 4.0 based smart factories merge physical and cyber technologies, making the involved technologies more intricate and accurate; improving the performance, quality, controllability, management, and transparency of manufacturing processes in the era of the internet-of-things (IoT). Advanced low-cost sensor technologies are essential for gathering data and utilizing it for effective performance by manufacturing companies and supply chains. Different types of low power/low cost sensors allow for greatly expanded data collection on different devices across the manufacturing processes. While a lot of research has been carried out with a focus on analyzing the performance, processes, and implementation of smart factories, most firms still lack in-depth insight into the difference between traditional and smart factory systems, as well as the wide set of different sensor technologies associated with Industry 4.0. This paper identifies the different available sensor technologies of Industry 4.0, and identifies the differences between traditional and smart factories. In addition, this paper reviews existing research that has been done on the smart factory; and therefore provides a broad overview of the extant literature on smart factories, summarizes the variations between traditional and smart factories, outlines different types of sensors used in a smart factory, and creates an agenda for future research that encompasses the vigorous evolution of Industry 4.0 based smart factories.

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard (ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2) has been developed with the main goal of providing significantly improved video compression compared with its predecessors. In order to evaluate this goal, verification tests were conducted by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding of ITU-T SG 16 WP 3 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. This paper presents the subjective and objective results of a verification test in which the performance of the new standard is compared with its highly successful predecessor, the Advanced Video Coding (AVC) video compression standard (ITU-T H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10). The test used video sequences with resolutions ranging from 480p up to ultra-high definition, encoded at various quality levels using the HEVC Main profile and the AVC High profile. In order to provide a clear evaluation, this paper also discusses various aspects for the analysis of the test results. The tests showed that bit rate savings of 59% on average can be achieved by HEVC for the same perceived video quality, which is higher than a bit rate saving of 44% demonstrated with the PSNR objective quality metric. However, it has been shown that the bit rates required to achieve good quality of compressed content, as well as the bit rate savings relative to AVC, are highly dependent on the characteristics of the tested content.