Fall is a prominent issue due to its severe consequences both physically and mentally. Fall detection and prevention is a critical area of research because it can help elderly people to depend less on caregivers and allow them to live and move more independently. Using electrocardiograms (ECG) signals independently for fall detection and activity classification is a novel approach used in this paper. An algorithm has been proposed which uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks AlexNet and GoogLeNet as a classifier between the fall and no fall scenarios using electrocardiogram signals. The ECGs for both falling and no falling cases were obtained as part of the study using eight volunteers. The signals are pre-processed using an elliptical filter for signal noises such as baseline wander and power-line interface. As feature extractors, frequency-time representations (scalograms) were obtained by applying a continuous wavelet transform on the filtered ECG signals. These scalograms were used as inputs to the neural network and a significant validation accuracy of 98.08% was achieved in the first model. The trained model is able to distinguish ECGs with a fall activity from an ECG with a no fall activity with an accuracy of 98.02%. For the verification of the robustness of the proposed algorithm, our experimental dataset was augmented by adding two different publicly available datasets to it. The second model can classify fall, daily activities and no activities with an accuracy of 98.44%. These models were developed by transfer learning from the domain of real images to the medical images. In comparison to traditional deep learning approaches, the transfer learning not only avoids “reinventing the wheel,” but also presents a lightweight solution to otherwise computationally heavy problems.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a popular paradigm which has been applied to different areas such as smart cities, medicine or business processes. One of the main drawbacks of an IoT system is the amount of information it has to manage and to monitor. This information arrives as events that need to be processed in real-time in order to make correct decisions. The Event Processing Languages (EPLs) were designed to handle this information by defining event patterns which describe relevant situations to be detected and filter the information. In the majority of the relevant situations to detect, the events have a specific behaviour which must be analysed not only to define the event patterns but also to simulate them to test the IoT system. Moreover, in several situations it is quite difficult to obtain test events with specific values: adverse environment conditions, rise or fall in blood pressure, heart attack, falls, among others. In this paper we introduce a complete study of falls as relevant situations; we show an analysis of the fall-involved events of two types of falls based on an IoT prototype, the event patterns to detect the falls and their test using the IoT-TEG (IoT -Test Event Generator) tool. The fall analysis has highlighted the necessity to improve IoT-TEG with a new functionality which allows defining the desired conduct by defining behaviour rules.

Many recent studies have focused on the automatic classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals using deep learning (DL) methods. Most rely on existing complex DL methods, such as transfer learning or providing the models with carefully designed extracted features based on domain knowledge. A common assumption is that the deeper and more complex the DL model is, the better it learns. In this study, we propose two different DL models for automatic feature extraction from ECG signals for classification tasks: A CNN-LSTM hybrid model and an attention/transformer-based model with wavelet transform for the dimensional embedding. Both of the models extract the features from time series at the initial layers of the neural networks and can obtain performance at least equal to, if not greater than, many contemporary deep neural networks. To validate our hypothesis, we used three publicly available data-sets to evaluate the proposed models. Our model achieved a benchmark accuracy of 99.92% for fall detection and 99.93% for the PTB database for myocardial infarction versus normal heartbeat classification.

Falls can have serious consequences for people, leading to restrictions in mobility or, in the worst case, to traumatic-based cases of death. To provide rapid assistance, a portable fall detection system has been developed that is capable of detecting fall situations and, if necessary, alerting emergency services without any user interaction. The prototype is designed to facilitate reliable fall detection and to classify several fall types and human activities. This solution represents a life-saving service for every person that will significantly improve assistance in the case of fall events, which are a part of daily life. Additionally, this approach facilitates independent system operation, since the system does not depend on sensor or network units located within a building structure. This article also introduces fall analysis. To guarantee functional safety, a hazard analysis method named system-theoretic accident model and processes (STAMP) is applied.

One of the leading causes of early health detriment is the increasing levels of air pollution in major cities and eventually in indoor spaces. Monitoring the air quality effectively in closed spaces like educational institutes and hospitals can improve both the health and the life quality of the occupants. In this article, we propose an efficient indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring and management system, which uses a combination of cutting-edge technologies to monitor and predict major air pollutants like CO2, PM2.5, TVOCs, and other factors like temperature and humidity. The aim is to create an intelligent environment for IAQ. The data is captured and monitored using an Internet of Things network of sensors, manufactured by ourselves, in different lecture rooms at the university. The obtained data is then processed and correlated in real time using a complex event processing engine and analyzed by machine/deep learning algorithms. A long short-term memory neural network is proposed to forecast IAQ. Then a decision tree regressor is used to identify the relationships between temperature, humidity and different pollutants like CO2 and PM2.5.