Human falls are a global public health issue resulting in over 37.3 million severe injuries and 646,000 deaths yearly. Falls result in direct financial cost to health systems and indirectly to society productivity. Unsurprisingly, human fall detection and prevention are a major focus of health research. In this article, we consider deep learning for fall detection in an IoT and fog computing environment. We propose a Convolutional Neural Network composed of three convolutional layers, two maxpool, and three fully-connected layers as our deep learning model. We evaluate its performance using three open data sets and against extant research. Our approach for resolving dimensionality and modelling simplicity issues is outlined. Accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient are used to evaluate performance. The best results are achieved when using data augmentation during the training process. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges and future directions for research in this domain.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) currently represent the best candidate to be adopted as the communication solution for the last mile connection in process control and monitoring applications in industrial environments. Most of these applications have stringent dependability (reliability and availability) requirements, as a system failure may result in economic losses, put people in danger or lead to environmental damages. Among the different type of faults that can lead to a system failure, permanent faults on network devices have a major impact. They can hamper communications over long periods of time and consequently disturb, or even disable, control algorithms. The lack of a structured approach enabling the evaluation of permanent faults, prevents system designers to optimize decisions that minimize these occurrences. In this work we propose a methodology based on an automatic generation of a fault tree to evaluate the reliability and availability of Wireless Sensor Networks, when permanent faults occur on network devices. The proposal supports any topology, different levels of redundancy, network reconfigurations, criticality of devices and arbitrary failure conditions. The proposed methodology is particularly suitable for the design and validation of Wireless Sensor Networks when trying to optimize its reliability and availability requirements.

Predicting school dropout rates is an important issue for the smooth execution of an educational system. This problem is solved by classifying students into two classes using educational activities related statistical datasets. One of the classes must identify the students who have the tendency to persist. The other class must identify the students who have the tendency to dropout. This problem often encounters a phenomenon that masks out the obtained results. This study delves into this phenomenon and provides a reliable educational data mining technique that accurately predicts the dropout rates. In particular, the three data classifying techniques, namely, decision tree, neural networks and Balanced Bagging, are used. The performances of these classifies are tested with and without the use of a downsample, SMOTE and ADASYN data balancing. It is found that among other parameters geometric mean and UAR provides reliable results while predicting the dropout rates using Balanced Bagging classifying techniques.

Currently, the applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) generate a large amount of sensor data at a very high pace, making it a challenge to collect and store the data. This scenario brings about the need for effective data compression algorithms to make the data manageable among tiny and battery-powered devices and, more importantly, shareable across the network. Additionally, considering that, very often, wireless communications (e.g., low-power wide-area networks) are adopted to connect field devices, user payload compression can also provide benefits derived from better spectrum usage, which in turn can result in advantages for high-density application scenarios. As a result of this increase in the number of connected devices, a new concept has emerged, called TinyML. It enables the use of machine learning on tiny, computationally restrained devices. This allows intelligent devices to analyze and interpret data locally and in real time. Therefore, this work presents a new data compression solution (algorithm) for the IoT that leverages the TinyML perspective. The new approach is called the Tiny Anomaly Compressor (TAC) and is based on data eccentricity. TAC does not require previously established mathematical models or any assumptions about the underlying data distribution. In order to test the effectiveness of the proposed solution and validate it, a comparative analysis was performed on two real-world datasets with two other algorithms from the literature (namely Swing Door Trending (SDT) and the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)). It was found that the TAC algorithm showed promising results, achieving a maximum compression rate of 98.33%. Additionally, it also surpassed the two other models regarding the compression error and peak signal-to-noise ratio in all cases.