Amputees with lower limb loss need special care during daily life activities to make the movement natural as before amputation. No such work exists covering the main aspects from causes of amputation to the psycho-social impact of the amputees after using the prosthetic device. This review presents for lower limb prosthesis; the study of lower limb amputation, design & development, control strategies & machine learning algorithms, the psycho-social impact of prosthetic users, and design trends in patents. Research articles, review papers, magazines, letters, study reports, surveys, and patents, etc. have been used as sources for this review. Traumatic injuries and different diseases have been found as common causes of amputation. Design & development section illustrates design mechanisms, the categories of passive, active, & semi-active prostheses, an overview of a subset of commercially available prosthetic devices, and 3D printing of the accessories. The control section provides information about control techniques, sensors used, machine learning algorithms, and their key outcomes. Quality of life, phantom limb pain, and psycho-social impact of prosthetic users have been summarized for different countries that are believed to attract the interest of the readers. We have also developed an open-source database “FAKH-50” for patents to emphasize the design trends and advancements in lower limb prostheses from 1970 to 2020. Overall trend analysis determined is in the descending order as the knee (48%) > ankle (28%) > foot (22%) > hip (2%) patents in the current version of our database. The forthcoming section highlights the challenges and prospects of the domain. A mutual observation demands the design of a bio-compatible, lightweight, and economic prosthesis to track the normal human gait by eliminating phantom limb pain. This will empower the amputees to live a quality life in society. This work may be beneficial for researchers, technicians, clinicians, and amputees.

The exponential growth in road accidents has led to a need for a continuous driver monitoring to enhance road safety. Existing techniques rely on vehicle sensor-based, and behavior analysis-based approaches, where the behavior analysis-based approaches are generally considered more desirable as they enable reliable detection of a more elaborate set of driver behaviors. They are categorized as intrusive and non-intrusive approaches. Unlike intrusive approaches that generally rely on a constant direct human contact with sensors (physiological signals) and are sensitive to artifacts, non-intrusive approaches offer a more effective behavior monitoring using computer vision-based techniques. This paper proposes an end-to-end non-intrusive IoT-based automated framework to monitor driver behaviors, designed specifically for logistic and public transport applications. The framework consists of an embedded system, an edge computing module, a cloud computing module, and a mobile phone application, in an attempt to provide a holistic unified solution for drowsiness detection, monitoring, as well as evaluation (analysis of drowsiness history) of drivers. Drowsiness detection is based on detecting sleeping, yawning, and distraction behaviors using an image processing-based technique. To minimize the effects of latency, throughput, and packet losses, edge computing has been performed using commercial off-the-shelf embedded boards. Moreover, a cloud-hosted real-time database for remote monitoring on interactive Android mobile application has been set up, where admin can add multiple drivers to get drowsiness notifications along with other useful related information for driver evaluation. An extensive experimental testing has been performed, obtaining encouraging results in terms of performance accuracy, robustness, portability, and usability.

Weeds affects crops health as it shares water and nutrients from the soil, as a result it decreases crop yield. Manual weedicide spray through bag-pack is hazardous to human health. Localized autonomous weedicide spray through aerial spraying units can help save water, weedicide chemical and effect less on human health. Such systems require multi-spectral cues to classify crop, weed, and soil surface. Our focus in this paper is on the detection of weeds in the sugar beet crop, using air-borne multispectral camera sensors, which is considered as an alternative crop to sugarcane to obtain sugar in Pakistan. We developed a new framework for weed identification; a patch-based classification approach as appose to semantic segmentation that is more realistic for real-time intelligent aerial spraying systems. Our approach converts 3-class pixel classification problem into a 2-class crop-weed patch classification problem which in turns improves crop and weed classification accuracy. For classification, we developed a new VGG-Beet convolutional neural network (CNN), which is based on generic VGG16 (visual graphics group) CNN model with 11 convolutional layers. For experiments, we captured a sugar beet dataset with 3-channel multispectral sensor with a ground sampling distance (GSD) of 0.2 cm/pixel and a height of 4 meters. For better comparison, we used two publicly available sugar beet crop aerial imagery datasets, captured using a 5-channel multispectral sensor and a 4-Channel multispectral sensor with a ground sampling distance of 1cm and a height of 10 meters. We observed that patch-based method is more robust to different lighting conditions. To produce low cost weed detection system usage of Agrocam sensor is recommended, for higher accuracy Red Edge and Sequoia multispectral sensors with more channels should be deployed. We observed higher crop-weed accuracy and lower testing time for our patch-based approach as compared to U-Net and Deeplab based semantic segmentation networks.

Vision‐based human activity recognition (HAR) finds its application in many fields such as video surveillance, robot navigation, telecare and ambient intelligence. Most of the latest researches in the field of automated HAR based on skeleton data use depth devices such as Kinect to obtain three‐dimensional (3D) skeleton information directly from the camera. Although these researches achieve high accuracy but are strictly device dependent and cannot be used for videos other than from specific cameras. Current work focuses on the use of only 2D skeletal data, extracted from videos obtained through any standard camera, for activity recognition. Appearance and motion features were extracted using 2D positions of human skeletal joints through OpenPose library. The approach was trained and tested on publically available datasets. Supervised machine learning was implemented for recognising four activity classes including sit, stand, walk and fall. Performance of five techniques including K ‐nearest neighbours (KNNs), support vector machine, Naive Bayes, linear discriminant and feed‐forward back‐propagation neural network was compared to find the best classifier for the proposed method. All techniques performed well with best results obtained through the KNN classifier.

Robotics and artificial intelligence have played a significant role in developing assistive technologies for people with motor disabilities. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a communication system that allows humans to communicate with their environment by detecting and quantifying control signals produced from different modalities and translating them into voluntary commands for actuating an external device. For that purpose, classification the brain signals with a very high accuracy and minimization of the errors is of profound importance to the researchers. So in this study, a novel framework has been proposed to classify the binary-class electroencephalogram (EEG) data. The proposed framework is tested on BCI Competition IV dataset 1 and BCI Competition III dataset 4a. Artifact removal from EEG data is done through preprocessing, followed by feature extraction for recognizing discriminative information in the recorded brain signals. Signal preprocessing involves the application of independent component analysis (ICA) on raw EEG data, accompanied by the employment of common spatial pattern (CSP) and log-variance for extracting useful features. Six different classification algorithms, namely support vector machine, linear discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbor, naïve Bayes, decision trees, and logistic regression, have been compared to classify the EEG data accurately. The proposed framework achieved the best classification accuracies with logistic regression classifier for both datasets. Average classification accuracy of 90.42% has been attained on BCI Competition IV dataset 1 for seven different subjects, while for BCI Competition III dataset 4a, an average accuracy of 95.42% has been attained on five subjects. This indicates that the model can be used in real time BCI systems and provide extra-ordinary results for 2-class Motor Imagery (MI) signals classification applications and with some modifications this framework can also be made compatible for multi-class classification in the future.

Several efforts have been made to develop effective and robust vision-based solutions for human action recognition in aerial videos. Generally, the existing methods rely on the extraction of either spatial features (patch-based methods) or skeletal key points (pose-based methods) that are fed to a classifier. Unlike the patch-based methods, the pose-based methods are generally regarded to be more robust to background changes and computationally efficient. Moreover, at the classification stage, the use of deep networks has generated significant interest within the community; however, the need remains to develop accurate and computationally effective deep learning-based solutions. To this end, this paper proposes a lightweight Transformer network-based method for human action recognition in aerial videos using the skeletal keypoints extracted using YOLOv8. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown on a well-known public dataset containing 13 action classes, achieving very encouraging performance in terms of accuracy and computational cost as compared to several existing related methods.