This paper presents an energy-efficient fast independent component analysis (FastICA) implementation with an early determination scheme for eight-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signal separation. The main contributions are as follows: 1) energy-efficient FastICA using the proposed early determination scheme and the corresponding architecture; 2) cost-effective FastICA using the proposed preprocessing unit architecture with one coordinate rotation digital computer-based eigenvalue decomposition processor and the proposed one-unit architecture with the hardware reuse scheme; and 3) low-computation-time FastICA using the four parallel one-units architecture. The resulting power dissipation of the FastICA implementation for eight-channel EEG signal separation is 16.35 mW at 100 MHz at 1.0 V. Compared with the design without early determination, the proposed FastICA architecture implemented in united microelectronics corporation 90 nm 1P9M complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process with a core area of 1.221 × 1.218 mm² can achieve average energy reduction by 47.63%. From the post-layout simulation results, the maximum computation time is 0.29 s.

In this paper, we propose an energy-saving elevator scheduling algorithm to reduce the car moving steps to achieve motor energy saving and green wireless communications. The proposed algorithm consisting of six procedures can attain fewer Internet of Things (IoT) message exchanges (i.e. communication transmissions) between the Scheduler subsystem and the Car subsystem via the core function AssignCar(r). The function AssignCar(r) is capable of assigning a request to the nearest car through car search globally. From the emulation results for four cars, this work shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous work named as aggressive car scheduling with initial car distribution (ACSICD) algorithm with energy consumption reductions by 49.43%, 47.68%, 37.89%, and 47.65% for up-peak, inter-floor, down-peak, and all-day request patterns, respectively.

This paper proposes ElevatorTalk, an elevator development and management system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) approach called IoTtalk. This system modularizes the software into elevator components so that we can develop flexible and scalable car scheduling algorithms. ElevatorTalk consists of three subsystems: cars, scheduler, and the elevator car operating (ECO) panel. The first two subsystems are used to develop the elevator systems, and the third subsystem is used to receive requests issued by the passengers. These three subsystems work in parallel, and communicate with each other through sending and receiving messages. ElevatorTalk can connect to a real elevator system to serve as the elevator management center. It can also emulate the existing elevator systems with different car scheduling algorithms. We propose an intelligent aggressive car scheduling with initial car distribution (ACSICD) algorithm in ElevatorTalk. Our paper indicates that ACSICD has better waiting/travel/journey time performance and/or accuracy than the previous proposed algorithms. We also show that in our approach, the car scheduling decision can be quickly made with 0.2010 ms, and therefore good performance in the time complexity is achieved.

This paper proposes an IoT-based intelligent hydroponic plant factory solution called PlantTalk. The novelty of our approach is that the PlantTalk intelligence can be built through an arbitrary smartphone. We show that PlantTalk can flexibly configure the connections of various plant sensors and actuators through a smartphone. One can also conveniently write Python programs for plant-care intelligence through the smart phone. The developed plant-care intelligence includes automatic LED lighting, water spray, water pump and so on. As an example, we show that the PlantTalk intelligence effectively lowers the CO₂ concentration, and the reduction speed is 53% faster than a traditional plant system. PlantTalk has been extended for a plant factory called AgriTalk.

Drones have been applied to a wide range of security and surveillance applications recently. With drones, Internet of Things are extending to 3D space. An interesting question is: Can we conduct person identification (PID) in a drone view? Traditional PID technologies such as RFID and fingerprint/iris/face recognition have their limitations or require close contact to specific devices. Hence, these traditional technologies can not be easily deployed to drones due to dynamic change of view angle and height. In this work, we demonstrate how to retrieve IoT data from users’ wearables and correctly tag them on the human objects captured by a drone camera to identify and track ground human objects. First, we retrieve human objects from videos and conduct coordination transformation to handle the change of drone positions. Second, a fusion algorithm is applied to measure the correlation of video data and inertial data based on the extracted human motion features. Finally, we can couple human objects with their wearable IoT devices, achieving our goal of tagging wearable device data (such as personal profiles) on human objects in a drone view. Our experimental evaluation shows a recognition rate of 99.5% for varying walking paths, and 98.6% when the drone’s camera angle is within 37°. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work integrating videos from drone cameras and IoT data from inertial sensors.