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.

The widespread adoption of green energy resources worldwide, such as photovoltaic (PV) systems to generate green and renewable power, has prompted safety and reliability concerns. One of these concerns is fault diagnostics, which is needed to manage the reliability and output of PV systems. Severe PV faults make detecting faults challenging because of drastic weather circumstances. This research article presents a novel deep stack-based ensemble learning (DSEL) approach for diagnosing PV array faults. The DSEL approach compromises three deep-learning models, namely, deep neural network, long short-term memory, and Bi-directional long short-term memory, as base learners for diagnosing PV faults. To better analyze PV arrays, we use multinomial logistic regression as a meta-learner to combine the predictions of base learners. This study considers open circuits, short circuits, partial shading, bridge, degradation faults, and incorporation of the MPPT algorithm. The DSEL algorithm offers reliable, precise, and accurate PV-fault diagnostics for noiseless and noisy data. The proposed DSEL approach is quantitatively examined and compared to eight prior machine-learning and deep-learning-based PV-fault classification methodologies by using a simulated dataset. The findings show that the proposed approach outperforms other techniques, achieving 98.62% accuracy for fault detection with noiseless data and 94.87% accuracy with noisy data. The study revealed that the DSEL algorithm retains a strong generalization potential for detecting PV faults while enhancing prediction accuracy. Hence, the proposed DSEL algorithm detects and categorizes PV array faults more efficiently, reliably, and accurately.

Photovoltaic (PV) industries are susceptible to manufacturing defects within their solar cells. To accurately evaluate the efficacy of solar PV modules, the identification of manufacturing defects is imperative. Conventional industrial defect inspections predominantly rely on highly skilled inspectors conducting manual defect assessments, leading to sporadic and subjective identification outcomes. Deep-learning-based fault detection in PV or solar cells has emerged as a primary research area due to its superior efficiency and applicability. Hence, this study introduces a SegFormer-based fault detection framework to automate the visual defect inspection process in PV modules, complete with defect pseudocolorization. The proposed SegFormer-based framework effectively classifies defects into five categories: crack defects, front grid defects, interconnect defects, contact corrosion defects, and bright disconnect. Moreover, a comparative analysis is performed between the SegFormer model and the state-of-the-art fault detection algorithms, such as Deeplab v3, UNET, Deeplab v3+, PAN, PSPNet, and feature pyramid network (FPN). The experimental results reveal that the proposed SegFormer-based framework achieves highly encouraging performance, with a pixelwise accuracy of 96.24%, a weighted F1-score of 96.22%, an unweighted F1-score of 81.96%, and a mean intersection over union of 56.54%, outperforming other existing methods.

DC series arc fault detection is essential for improving the productivity of photovoltaic (PV) stations. The DC series arc fault also poses severe fire hazards to the solar equipment and surrounding building. DC series arc faults must be detected early to provide reliable and safe power delivery while preventing fire hazards. However, it is challenging to detect DC series arc faults using conventional overcurrent and current differential methods because these faults produce only minor current variations. Furthermore, it is hard to define their characteristics for detection due to the randomness of DC arc faults and other arc-like transients. This paper focuses on investigating a novel method to extract arc characteristics for reliably detecting DC series arc faults in PV systems. This methodology first uses an adaptive local mean decomposition (ALMD) algorithm to decompose the current samples into production functions (PFs) representing information from different frequency bands, then selects the PFs that best characterize the arc fault, and then calculates its multiscale fuzzy entropies (MFEs). Eventually, MFE values are inputted to the trained SVM algorithm to identify the series arc fault accurately. Furthermore, the proposed technique is compared to the logistic regression algorithm and naive Bayes algorithm in terms of several metrics assessing algorithms’ validity for detecting arc faults in PV systems. Arc fault data acquired from a PV arc-generating experiment platform are utilized to authenticate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. The experimental results indicated that the proposed technique could efficiently classify the arc fault data and normal data and detect the DC series arc faults in less than 1 ms with an accuracy rate of 98.75%.

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and medical devices in healthcare is termed the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). This advancement holds promise for numerous applications aimed at mitigating the risk of loss of life through physiological signal monitoring. As the number of road accidents is rapidly increasing, a substantial number of car crashes occur due to medical conditions. Therefore, the need remains to develop an effective solution to enable the prevention of such accidents for enhanced road safety. Unlike existing approaches, this paper proposes a holistic IoMT‐based non‐invasive driver health monitoring system (DHMS) to monitor important vital signs for detecting abnormal health conditions. The proposed system consists of an embedded system, edge computing, cloud computing, and a mobile application with an alert system, to offer an end‐to‐end unified solution for driver physiological signal monitoring to detect abnormal health conditions that might lead to a road accident. The system is particularly suited to aid (elderly) people with medical conditions and can also be used for public transport to ensure passenger safety. A detailed experimental evaluation of the proposed system has been performed and its performance accuracy compared with standard medical devices, along with quality factors including usability, portability, and effective sensor placement.