Vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) can be measured by force plates or instrumented treadmills, but their application is limited to indoor environments. Insoles remove this restriction but suffer from low durability (several hundred hours). Therefore, interest in the indirect estimation of vGRF using inertial measurement units and machine learning techniques has increased. This paper presents a methodology for indirectly estimating vGRF and other features used in gait analysis from measurements of a wearable GPS-aided inertial navigation system (INS/GPS) device. A set of 27 features was extracted from the INS/GPS data. Feature analysis showed that six of these features suffice to provide precise estimates of 11 different gait parameters. Bagged ensembles of regression trees were then trained and used for predicting gait parameters for a dataset from the test subject from whom the training data were collected and for a dataset from a subject for whom no training data were available. The prediction accuracies for the latter were significantly worse than for the first subject but still sufficiently good. K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks were then used for predicting vGRF and ground contact times. The KNN yielded a lower normalized root mean square error than the neural network for vGRF predictions but cannot detect new patterns in force curves.

Localization accuracy of trilateration methods in long term evolution (LTE) cellular networks, which are based on time-of-arrival, may be highly degraded due to multipath and non-line of sight conditions in urban and indoor environments. Multipath mitigation techniques usually involve a high computational burden and require wideband signals to be effective, which limit their adoption in certain low-cost and low-power mobile applications using narrow-band signals. As an alternative to these conventional techniques, this paper analyzes an expectation maximization (EM) localization algorithm that considers the skewness introduced by multipath in the LTE ranging error distribution. The EM algorithm is extensively studied with realistic emulated LTE signals of 1.4-MHz bandwidth. The EM method is compared with a standard nonlinear least squares (NLS) algorithm under ideal simulated conditions and using realistic outdoor measurements from a laboratory testbed. The EM method outperforms the NLS method when the ranging errors in the training and test stages have similar distributions.

Oxygen uptake ($\dot{\mathrm{V}}\mathrm{O}$${}_2$) is an important metric in any exercise test including walking and running. It can be measured using portable spirometers or metabolic analyzers. Those devices are, however, not suitable for constant use by consumers due to their costs, difficulty of operation and their intervening in the physical integrity of their users. Therefore, it is important to develop approaches for the indirect estimation of $\dot{\mathrm{V}}\mathrm{O}$${}_2$-based measurements of motion parameters, heart rate data and application-specific measurements from consumer-grade sensors. Typically, these approaches are based on linear regression models or neural networks. This study investigates how motion data contribute to $\dot{\mathrm{V}}\mathrm{O}$${}_2$ estimation accuracy during unconstrained running and walking. The results suggest that a long short term memory (LSTM) neural network can predict oxygen consumption with an accuracy of 2.49 mL/min/kg (95% limits of agreement) based only on speed, speed change, cadence and vertical oscillation measurements from an inertial navigation system combined with a Global Positioning System (INS/GPS) device developed by our group, worn on the torso. Combining motion data and heart rate data can significantly improve the $\dot{\mathrm{V}}\mathrm{O}$${}_2$ estimation resulting in approximately 1.7–1.9 times smaller prediction errors than using only motion or heart rate data.

For ion-mobility spectrometry (IMS)-based electronic noses (eNose) samples of scents are markedly time-dependent, with a transient phase and a highly volatile stable phase in certain conditions. At the same time, the samples depend on various environmental factors, such as temperature and humidity. This makes fast classification of scents challenging. The present aim was to develop and test an algorithm for online scent classification that mitigates these dependencies by using both baseline measurements and sequences of samples for classification. A classifier based on the K nearest neighbors approach was derived. The classifier is able to use measurements from both transient and stable phase, yields a label for the analyzed scent, and information on the trustworthiness of the returned label. In order to avoid the classifier being fooled by irrelevant features and to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space, principal component analysis was applied to the data. The classifier was tested with four food scents, each presented in two different ways to the IMS. By using baseline measurements, the misclassification rate was reduced from 20.0 to 13.3%. A second experiment showed that the used IMS type experiences device heterogeneity.