The present study deals with human awareness, which is a very important aspect of human–robot interaction. This feature is particularly essential in agricultural environments, owing to the information-rich setup that they provide. The objective of this investigation was to recognize human activities associated with an envisioned synergistic task. In order to attain this goal, a data collection field experiment was designed that derived data from twenty healthy participants using five wearable sensors (embedded with tri-axial accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers) attached to them. The above task involved several sub-activities, which were carried out by agricultural workers in real field conditions, concerning load lifting and carrying. Subsequently, the obtained signals from on-body sensors were processed for noise-removal purposes and fed into a Long Short-Term Memory neural network, which is widely used in deep learning for feature recognition in time-dependent data sequences. The proposed methodology demonstrated considerable efficacy in predicting the defined sub-activities with an average accuracy of 85.6%. Moreover, the trained model properly classified the defined sub-activities in a range of 74.1–90.4% for precision and 71.0–96.9% for recall. It can be inferred that the combination of all sensors can achieve the highest accuracy in human activity recognition, as concluded from a comparative analysis for each sensor’s impact on the model’s performance. These results confirm the applicability of the proposed methodology for human awareness purposes in agricultural environments, while the dataset was made publicly available for future research.

(1) Background: Bone metastasis is one of the most frequent diseases in breast, lung and prostate cancer; bone scintigraphy is the primary imaging method of screening that offers the highest sensitivity (95%) regarding metastases. To address the considerable problem of bone metastasis diagnosis, focused on breast cancer patients, artificial intelligence methods devoted to deep-learning algorithms for medical image analysis are investigated in this research work; (2) Methods: Deep learning is a powerful algorithm for automatic classification and diagnosis of medical images whereas its implementation is achieved by the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The purpose of this study is to build a robust CNN model that will be able to classify images of whole-body scans in patients suffering from breast cancer, depending on whether or not they are infected by metastasis of breast cancer; (3) Results: A robust CNN architecture is selected based on CNN exploration performance for bone metastasis diagnosis using whole-body scan images, achieving a high classification accuracy of 92.50%. The best-performing CNN method is compared with other popular and well-known CNN architectures for medical imaging like ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNet, and DenseNet, reported in the literature, providing superior classification accuracy; and (4) Conclusions: Prediction results show the efficacy of the proposed deep learning approach in bone metastasis diagnosis for breast cancer patients in nuclear medicine.

As projections highlight that half of the global population will be living in regions facing severe water scarcity by 2050, sustainable water management policies and practices are more imperative than ever. Following the Sustainable Development Goals for equitable water access and prudent use of natural resources, emerging digital technologies may foster efficient monitoring, control, optimization, and forecasting of freshwater consumption and pollution. Indicatively, the use of sensors, Internet of Things, machine learning, and big data analytics has been catalyzing smart water management. With two-thirds of the global population to be living in urban areas by 2050, this research focuses on the impact of digitization on sustainable urban water management. More specifically, existing scientific literature studies were explored for providing meaningful insights on smart water technologies implemented in urban contexts, emphasizing supply and distribution networks. The review analysis outcomes were classified according to three main pillars identified: (i) level of analysis (i.e., municipal or residential/industrial); (ii) technology used (e.g., sensors, algorithms); and (iii) research scope/focus (e.g., monitoring, optimization), with the use of a systematic approach. Overall, this study is expected to act as a methodological tool and guiding map of the most pertinent state-of-the-art research efforts to integrate digitalization in the field of water stewardship and improve urban sustainability.

Anthracnose is a fungal disease that infects a large number of trees worldwide, damages intensively the canopy, and spreads with ease to neighboring trees, resulting in the potential destruction of whole crops. Even though it can be treated relatively easily with good sanitation, proper pruning and copper spraying, the main issue is the early detection for the prevention of spreading. Machine learning algorithms can offer the tools for the on-site classification of healthy and affected leaves, as an initial step towards managing such diseases. The purpose of this study was to build a robust convolutional neural network (CNN) model that is able to classify images of leaves, depending on whether or not these are infected by anthracnose, and therefore determine whether a tree is infected. A set of images were used both in grayscale and RGB mode, a fast Fourier transform was implemented for feature extraction, and a CNN architecture was selected based on its performance. Finally, the best performing method was compared with state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures.

(1) Background: Bone metastasis is among diseases that frequently appear in breast, lung and prostate cancer; the most popular imaging method of screening in metastasis is bone scintigraphy and presents very high sensitivity (95%). In the context of image recognition, this work investigates convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are an efficient type of deep neural networks, to sort out the diagnosis problem of bone metastasis on prostate cancer patients; (2) Methods: As a deep learning model, CNN is able to extract the feature of an image and use this feature to classify images. It is widely applied in medical image classification. This study is devoted to developing a robust CNN model that efficiently and fast classifies bone scintigraphy images of patients suffering from prostate cancer, by determining whether or not they develop metastasis of prostate cancer. The retrospective study included 778 sequential male patients who underwent whole-body bone scans. A nuclear medicine physician classified all the cases into three categories: (a) benign, (b) malignant and (c) degenerative, which were used as gold standard; (3) Results: An efficient and fast CNN architecture was built, based on CNN exploration performance, using whole body scintigraphy images for bone metastasis diagnosis, achieving a high prediction accuracy. The results showed that the method is sufficiently precise when it comes to differentiate a bone metastasis case from other either degenerative changes or normal tissue cases (overall classification accuracy = 91.61% ± 2.46%). The accuracy of prostate patient cases identification regarding normal, malignant and degenerative changes was 91.3%, 94.7% and 88.6%, respectively. To strengthen the outcomes of this study the authors further compared the best performing CNN method to other popular CNN architectures for medical imaging, like ResNet50, VGG16, GoogleNet and MobileNet, as clearly reported in the literature; and (4) Conclusions: The remarkable outcome of this study is the ability of the method for an easier and more precise interpretation of whole-body images, with effects on the diagnosis accuracy and decision making on the treatment to be applied.

Incorporating hand gesture recognition in human–robot interaction has the potential to provide a natural way of communication, thus contributing to a more fluid collaboration toward optimizing the efficiency of the application at hand and overcoming possible challenges. A very promising field of interest is agriculture, owing to its complex and dynamic environments. The aim of this study was twofold: (a) to develop a real-time skeleton-based recognition system for five hand gestures using a depth camera and machine learning, and (b) to enable a real-time human–robot interaction framework and test it in different scenarios. For this purpose, six machine learning classifiers were tested, while the Robot Operating System (ROS) software was utilized for “translating” the gestures into five commands to be executed by the robot. Furthermore, the developed system was successfully tested in outdoor experimental sessions that included either one or two persons. In the last case, the robot, based on the recognized gesture, could distinguish which of the two workers required help, follow the “locked” person, stop, return to a target location, or “unlock” them. For the sake of safety, the robot navigated with a preset socially accepted speed while keeping a safe distance in all interactions.