Driver drowsiness is a major cause of fatal accidents, injury, and property damage, and has become an area of substantial research attention in recent years. The present study proposes a method to detect drowsiness in drivers which integrates features of electrocardiography (ECG) and electroencephalography (EEG) to improve detection performance. The study measures differences between the alert and drowsy states from physiological data collected from 22 healthy subjects in a driving simulator-based study. A monotonous driving environment is used to induce drowsiness in the participants. Various time and frequency domain feature were extracted from EEG including time domain statistical descriptors, complexity measures and power spectral measures. Features extracted from the ECG signal included heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), including low frequency (LF), high frequency (HF) and LF/HF ratio. Furthermore, subjective sleepiness scale is also assessed to study its relationship with drowsiness. We used paired t-tests to select only statistically significant features (p < 0.05), that can differentiate between the alert and drowsy states effectively. Significant features of both modalities (EEG and ECG) are then combined to investigate the improvement in performance using support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The other main contribution of this paper is the study on channel reduction and its impact to the performance of detection. The proposed method demonstrated that combining EEG and ECG has improved the system’s performance in discriminating between alert and drowsy states, instead of using them alone. Our channel reduction analysis revealed that an acceptable level of accuracy (80%) could be achieved by combining just two electrodes (one EEG and one ECG), indicating the feasibility of a system with improved wearability compared with existing systems involving many electrodes. Overall, our results demonstrate that the proposed method can be a viable solution for a practical driver drowsiness system that is both accurate and comfortable to wear.

The ability to track vehicles is useful in many applications including security of personal vehicles, public transportation systems, fleet management and others. Furthermore, the number of vehicles on the road globally is also expected to increase rapidly. Therefore, the development of vehicle tracking system using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) modem is undertaken with the aim of enabling users to locate their vehicles with ease and in a convenient manner. The system will provide users with the capability to track vehicle remotely through the mobile network. This paper presents the development of the vehicle tracking system's hardware prototype. Specifically, the system will utilize GPS to obtain a vehicle's coordinate and transmit it using GSM modem to the user's phone through the mobile network. The main hardware components of the system are u-blox NEO-6Q GPS receiver module, u-blox LEON-G100 GSM module and Arduino Uno microcontroller. The developed vehicle tracking system demonstrates the feasibility of near real-time tracking of vehicles and improved customizability, global operability and cost when compared to existing solutions.

Developing a reliable and accurate indoor localization system is a crucial step for creating a seamless and interactive user-device experience in nearly all intelligent internet of things (IIoTs) and smart applications. Indoor localization systems based on WiFi fingerprinting have been considered as a promising alternative to model-based approaches owing to their accuracy, low cost, availability, and ease of configuration. However, recent studies have revealed that in complex environments, WiFi fingerprinting techniques are faced with a lot of challenges as the coverage area increases. These challenges include fingerprint spatial uncertainty, instability in the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and discrepancy in fingerprint distribution. Furthermore, there is frequent need for database upgrades or even recreation whenever there is a change in the architecture of the location. These challenges have questioned the robustness and efficiency of most of the existing schemes. In this paper, we present an indoor localization architecture for complex multi-building multi-floor location prediction and subsequently propose SALLoc (SAE-ALSTM Localization), a WiFi fingerprinting indoor localization scheme based on Stacked Autoencoder (SAE) and Attention-based Long Short-Time Memory (ALSTM) framework. Firstly, stratified sampling technique is used to separate validation set from the entire uneven RSSI training set which ensures that the same proportion of RSSI samples are present in both sets. Secondly, SAE is utilized to select core features and decrease the dimensions of the RSSI samples. Finally, ALSTM is trained to focus on these features to achieve robust location prediction. Extensive investigations were conducted using UJIIndoorLoc, Tampere and UTSIndoorLoc datasets, and the results obtained demonstrated the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of prediction accuracy, robustness, and generalizations when compared to state-of-the-art methods. The mean localization error (MLE) on UJIIndoorLoc, Tampere and UTSIndoorLoc datasets are 8.28 m, 9.52 m, and 6.48 m respectively. Consequently, it can be concluded that the proposed scheme is accurate and well-suited for large-scale indoor environment location prediction.

The fabrication of lightweight, ultra-thin, low power and intelligent body-borne sensors leads to novel advances in wireless body area networks (WBANs). Depending on the placement of the nodes, it is characterized as in/on body WBAN; thus, the channel is largely affected by body posture, clothing, muscle movement, body temperature and climatic conditions. The energy resources are limited and it is not feasible to replace the sensor’s battery frequently. In order to keep the sensor in working condition, the channel resources should be reserved. The lifetime of the sensor is very crucial and it highly depends on transmission among sensor nodes and energy consumption. The reliability and energy efficiency in WBAN applications play a vital role. In this paper, the analytical expressions for energy efficiency (EE) and packet error rate (PER) are formulated for two-way relay cooperative communication. The results depict better reliability and efficiency compared to direct and one-way relay communication. The effective performance range of direct vs. cooperative communication is separated by a threshold distance. Based on EE calculations, an optimal packet size is observed that provides maximum efficiency over a certain link length. A smart and energy efficient system is articulated that utilizes all three communication modes, namely direct, one-way relay and two-way relay, as the direct link performs better for a certain range, but the cooperative communication gives better results for increased distance in terms of EE. The efficacy of the proposed hybrid scheme is also demonstrated over a practical quasi-static channel. Furthermore, link length extension and diversity is achieved by joint network-channel (JNC) coding the cooperative link.

Driver drowsiness is considered to be a very critical issue causing many fatal accidents, injuries and property damages. Therefore, it has been an area of intensive research in recent years. In this paper, a driving simulator based study was conducted to observe the significant changes that occur in the EEG power spectrum during monotonous driving. Nine healthy university students voluntarily participated in the experiment. The absolute band power of the EEG signal was computed by taking the FFT of the time series signal and then the power spectral density was computed using Welch method. Our findings conclude that alpha and theta band powers increase significantly (p<;0.05) when a subject moves from alert state to drowsy state. These changes are more dominant in the occipital and parietal regions when compared to the other regions. The findings of this study provide a promising drowsiness indicator which can be used to prevent road accidents caused by driver drowsiness.