Multimodal integration of micro-Doppler sonar and auditory signals for behavior classification with convolutional networks

Using Artificial Intelligence to Achieve Auxiliary Training of Table Tennis Based on Inertial Perception Data

Compared with optical sensors, wearable inertial sensors have many advantages such as low cost, small size, more comprehensive application range, no space restrictions and occlusion, better protection of user privacy, and more suitable for sports applications. This article aims to solve irregular actions that table tennis enthusiasts do not know in actual situations. We use wearable inertial sensors to obtain human table tennis action data of professional table tennis players and non-professional table tennis players, and extract the features from them. Finally, we propose a new method based on multi-dimensional feature fusion convolutional neural network and fine-grained evaluation of human table tennis actions. Realize ping-pong action recognition and evaluation, and then achieve the purpose of auxiliary training. The experimental results prove that our proposed multi-dimensional feature fusion convolutional neural network has an average recognition rate that is 0.17 and 0.16 higher than that of CNN and Inception-CNN on the nine-axis non-professional test set, which proves that we can better distinguish different human table tennis actions and have a more robust generalization performance. Therefore, on this basis, we have better realized the enthusiast of table tennis the purpose of the action for auxiliary training.

A Radar-Based Smart Sensor for Unobtrusive Elderly Monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living Applications

Continuous in-home monitoring of older adults living alone aims to improve their quality of life and independence, by detecting early signs of illness and functional decline or emergency conditions. To meet requirements for technology acceptance by seniors (unobtrusiveness, non-intrusiveness, and privacy-preservation), this study presents and discusses a new smart sensor system for the detection of abnormalities during daily activities, based on ultra-wideband radar providing rich, not privacy-sensitive, information useful for sensing both cardiorespiratory and body movements, regardless of ambient lighting conditions and physical obstructions (through-wall sensing). The radar sensing is a very promising technology, enabling the measurement of vital signs and body movements at a distance, and thus meeting both requirements of unobtrusiveness and accuracy. In particular, impulse-radio ultra-wideband radar has attracted considerable attention in recent years thanks to many properties that make it useful for assisted living purposes. The proposed sensing system, evaluated in meaningful assisted living scenarios by involving 30 participants, exhibited the ability to detect vital signs, to discriminate among dangerous situations and activities of daily living, and to accommodate individual physical characteristics and habits. The reported results show that vital signs can be detected also while carrying out daily activities or after a fall event (post-fall phase), with accuracy varying according to the level of movements, reaching up to 95% and 91% in detecting respiration and heart rates, respectively. Similarly, good results were achieved in fall detection by using the micro-motion signature and unsupervised learning, with sensitivity and specificity greater than 97% and 90%, respectively.

Towards Artificial Speech Therapy: A Neural System for Impaired Speech Segmentation

This paper presents a neural system-based technique for segmenting short impaired speech utterances into silent, unvoiced, and voiced sections. Moreover, the proposed technique identifies those points of the (voiced) speech where the spectrum becomes steady. The resulting technique thus aims at detecting that limited section of the speech which contains the information about the potential impairment of the speech. This section is of interest to the speech therapist as it corresponds to the possibly incorrect movements of speech organs (lower lip and tongue with respect to the vocal tract). Two segmentation models to detect and identify the various sections of the disordered (impaired) speech signals have been developed and compared. The first makes use of a combination of four artificial neural networks. The second is based on a support vector machine (SVM). The SVM has been trained by means of an ad hoc nested algorithm whose outer layer is a metaheuristic while the inner layer is a convex optimization algorithm. Several metaheuristics have been tested and compared leading to the conclusion that some variants of the compact differential evolution (CDE) algorithm appears to be well-suited to address this problem. Numerical results show that the SVM model with a radial basis function is capable of effective detection of the portion of speech that is of interest to a therapist. The best performance has been achieved when the system is trained by the nested algorithm whose outer layer is hybrid-population-based/CDE. A population-based approach displays the best performance for the isolation of silence/noise sections, and the detection of unvoiced sections. On the other hand, a compact approach appears to be clearly well-suited to detect the beginning of the steady state of the voiced signal. Both the proposed segmentation models display outperformed two modern segmentation techniques based on Gaussian mixture model and deep learning.