Globally, 1.2 million people die and 50 million people are injured annually due to traffic accidents. These traffic accidents cost $500 billion dollars. Drunk drivers are found in 40% of the traffic crashes. Existing drunk driving detection (DDD) systems do not provide accurate detection and pre-warning concurrently. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a proven biosignal that accurately and simultaneously reflects human’s biological status. In this letter, a classifier for DDD based on ECG is investigated in an attempt to reduce traffic accidents caused by drunk drivers. At this point, it appears that there is no known research or literature found on ECG classifier for DDD. To identify drunk syndromes, the ECG signals from drunk drivers are studied and analyzed. As such, a precise ECG-based DDD (ECG-DDD) using a weighted kernel is developed. From the measurements, 10 key features of ECG signals were identified. To incorporate the important features, the feature vectors are weighted in the customization of kernel functions. Four commonly adopted kernel functions are studied. Results reveal that weighted feature vectors improve the accuracy by 11% compared to the computation using the prime kernel. Evaluation shows that ECG-DDD improved the accuracy by 8% to 18% compared to prevailing methods.

A high fuel efficiency management scheme for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) has been developed. In order to achieve fuel consumption reduction, an adaptive genetic algorithm scheme has been designed to adaptively manage the energy resource usage. The objective function of the genetic algorithm is implemented by designing a fuzzy logic controller which closely monitors and resembles the driving conditions and environment of PHEVs, thus trading off between petrol versus electricity for optimal driving efficiency. Comparison between calculated results and publicized data shows that the achieved efficiency of the fuzzified genetic algorithm is better by 10% than existing schemes. The developed scheme, if fully adopted, would help reduce over 600 tons of CO₂ emissions worldwide every day.

Improperly grown trees may cause huge hazards to the environment and to humans, through e.g., climate change, soil erosion, etc. A proximity environmental feature-based tree health assessment (PTA) scheme is proposed to prevent these hazards by providing guidance for early warning methods of potential poor tree health. In PTA development, tree health is defined and evaluated based on proximity environmental features (PEFs). The PEF takes into consideration the seven surrounding ambient features that strongly impact tree health. The PEFs were measured by the deployed smart sensors surrounding trees. A database composed of tree health and relative PEFs was established for further analysis. An adaptive data identifying (ADI) algorithm is applied to exclude the influence of interference factors in the database. Finally, the radial basis function (RBF) neural network (NN), a machine leaning algorithm, has been identified as the appropriate tool with which to correlate tree health and PEFs to establish the PTA algorithm. One of the salient features of PTA is that the algorithm can evaluate, and thus monitor, tree health remotely and automatically from smart sensor data by taking advantage of the well-established internet of things (IoT) network and machine learning algorithm.

Each year, some 30 percent of global deaths are caused by cardiovascular diseases. This figure is worsening due to both the increasing elderly population and severe shortages of medical personnel. The development of a cardiovascular diseases classifier (CDC) for auto-diagnosis will help address solve the problem. Former CDCs did not achieve quick evaluation of cardiovascular diseases. In this letter, a new CDC to achieve speedy detection is investigated. This investigation incorporates the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to develop feature vectors using a Support Vector Machine. The MCDA facilitates the efficient assignment of appropriate weightings to potential patients, thus scaling down the number of features. Since the new CDC will only adopt the most meaningful features for discrimination between healthy persons versus cardiovascular disease patients, a speedy detection of cardiovascular diseases has been successfully implemented.