A. Balaji Ganesh

Real-Time Remote Monitoring of Human Vital Signs Using Internet of Things (IoT) and GSM Connectivity

The next generation of technology is connecting to internet from a standalone device. The background of Internet of Things (IoT), which covers various areas like ubiquitous positioning, biometrics, energy harvesting technologies, and machine vision, makes researches to make deep study in these individual technologies. The paper presents human vital sign monitoring system which includes measurement of pulse rate and body temperature of patients from remote locations. Standalone device connectivity with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server can be achieved by implementing a TCP/IP stack and Ethernet interface in a MSP430 controller. An IoT enabled network processor CC3100 and Computational processor MSP430 is interfaced with sensory components and made to communicate emergency signals through Global System for Mobile (GSM) and SMTP server. The sensors are pre-calibrated and the wireless system showed good response in sending messages and email. The physiological signals can be analyzed and data logged to identify history of ailments of particular user/patient. The system possesses the characteristics, such as less intrusiveness to the users and helps the caretakers as well as physicians with comfort in taking care of patients.

Minimally invasive fluorescence sensing system for real-time monitoring of bacterial cell cultivation

ABSTRACT This article reports a portable optoelectronic instrumentation system for real-time monitoring of Escherichia coli cultivation. The minimally invasive sensor offers continuous measurement of the pH, dissolved oxygen, optical density, and auto-fluorescence. The analytical figures of merit, including the stability, response time, reproducibility, and long-term sensitivity, were evaluated before application for monitoring bacterial cell cultivation. The results were compared with values obtained with commercially-available instrumentation and were similar and comparable. The absolute error was between ±0.30 pH units and mg/L for dissolved oxygen. This minimally invasive, simple, and inexpensive optical system is suitable for monitoring online bacterial cell growth in a single transparent container.

PIC18LF4620 based customizable wireless sensor node to detect hazardous gas pipeline leakage

The paper describes the performance and functional characteristics of PIC18LF4620 based wireless sensor node in monitoring the parameters such as CO 2 , Oxygen, temperature, humidity and light around the pipeline structure. The system is deployed to monitor any deviations in these parameters with the standard atmospheric values eventually alert the user even to a remote location. The proposed system is a battery operated wireless sensor node which is interfaced with the external sensors to measure the parameters listed above. The distance range between sensor node and coordinator node is also tested. The signal conditioning module associated with detailed calibration procedure for the individual sensor is also described. Zigbee protocol stack is implemented to enable wireless transmission and performance of the same is evaluated.The paper describes the performance and functional characteristics of PIC18LF4620 based wireless sensor node in monitoring the parameters such as CO2, Oxygen, temperature, humidity and light around the pipeline structure. The system is deployed to monitor any deviations in these parameters with the standard atmospheric values eventually alert the user even to a remote location. The proposed system is a battery operated wireless sensor node which is interfaced with the external sensors to measure the parameters listed above. The distance range between sensor node and coordinator node is also tested. The signal conditioning module associated with detailed calibration procedure for the individual sensor is also described. Zigbee protocol stack is implemented to enable wireless transmission and performance of the same is evaluated.

Real-Time Remote Monitoring of Indoor Air Quality Using Internet of Things (IoT) and GSM Connectivity

The paper presents an indoor air quality monitoring system which comprises of real-time sensing unit that enables remote monitoring of environmental carbon-di-oxide, temperature, and relative humidity. The simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP)-based remote monitoring system employs an Internet of Things (IoT) signal processor (CC3100) interfaced on top of a low-power microcontroller (MSP430F5529). The system is also packed with a short messaging service (SMS)-based emergency alerting mechanism on the mobile network through SIM900 GSM module. The whole system when integrated with pre-calibrated non-dispersive infrared (COZIR) sensing unit showed good response in communicating the alert messages and E-mail. The information from sensing unit can be analyzed and logged for any period of time.

Real time implementation on moving object tracking and recognisation using Matlab

This paper implements a method to track and recognize the object in a surveillance area. We analyze usual pixel-approach. Camera system (webcam) acts as a sensor to track the object in an surveillance area. Edge detection is an image segmentation process is implemented to have clear knowledge on real edges of real time video. Background separation algorithm provides clear knowledge about foreground and background. Video preprocessing such as frame separation, thresholding, binary operation, histogram equalization and edge detection of traffic video is done to track multiple objects and recognize it. Stepper motor may be used to orient the camera to any position to track and recognize object in surveillance. Contourlet transform is used for feature extraction to recognize the object in a surveillance area and pattern matching also play an important role to recognize different objects in a video.

Network Coded Cooperative Communication in a Real-Time Wireless Hospital Sensor Network

The paper presents a network coded cooperative communication (NC-CC) enabled wireless hospital sensor network architecture for monitoring health as well as postural activities of a patient. A wearable device, referred as a smartband is interfaced with pulse rate, body temperature sensors and an accelerometer along with wireless protocol services, such as Bluetooth and Radio-Frequency transceiver and Wi-Fi. The energy efficiency of wearable device is improved by embedding a linear acceleration based transmission duty cycling algorithm (NC-DRDC). The real-time demonstration is carried-out in a hospital environment to evaluate the performance characteristics, such as power spectral density, energy consumption, signal to noise ratio, packet delivery ratio and transmission offset. The resource sharing and energy efficiency features of network coding technique are improved by proposing an algorithm referred as network coding based dynamic retransmit/rebroadcast decision control (LA-TDC). From the experimental results, it is observed that the proposed LA-TDC algorithm reduces network traffic and end-to-end delay by an average of 27.8% and 21.6%, respectively than traditional network coded wireless transmission. The wireless architecture is deployed in a hospital environment and results are then successfully validated.

Unsupervised Auditory Saliency Enabled Binaural Scene Analyzer for Speaker Localization and Recognition

The paper presents an unsupervised binaural scene analyzer that is capable of performing simultaneous operations, such as localization, detection and recognition of target speaker amidst in a reverberant and noise inferential environment. The proposed technique includes three main stages: sound source localization, speaker recognition and auditory saliency-based indexing system. The stage one involves the localization of target speaker by incorporating the binaural cues into Azimuth dependant GMM-EM classifier. During the second stage, the study proposes a Gabor-Hilbert Envelope Coefficient (GHEC) based spectro-temporal extractor as an efficient speaker recognition method which shows better robustness with minimum computational complexity. The Hilbert Envelope provides relevant acoustic information and also it improvises the performance of speaker identification process in different reverberant environments and SNR values. Later in the third stage, the auditory saliency based diarization is proposed as a process of indexing the speech contents based on the image identity of the target speaker. The proposed system may be used to catalogue the entire speech content with the corresponding image of the target speaker that finds wide range of applications, including teleconference, hands-free communication and meeting hall content localization and fast audio retrieval in a repository.

Video Surveillance Based Tracking System

The paper presents video surveillance-based tracking system for the outdoor environment. The video processing has been done using both LabVIEW and MATLAB, and the comparisons are illustrated. In LabVIEW, self-learning and real-time moving object tracking are implemented for the surveillance of environment. In a two-dimensional color pattern matching, a self-learned template has to be located on real-time video, regardless of the template’s position, color, and shape. It is done by organizing a set of feature vectors that encompass all the variations in the self-learned template. Matching is then done by determining the best similarity between the feature vectors extracted from the video image and the self-learned template set. Template learning time and elapsed time are taken as parameters for the comparison. In MATLAB, tracking is achieved using Camshift algorithm. The feature vectors include position, orientation, and size of the object to be tracked.

Internet of Things (IoT) Enabled Wireless Sensor Network for Physiological Data Acquisition

Wearable Health Monitoring System (WHMS) plays a major role in telemedicine research. The study explores Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wearable medical device that handles physiological signals, such as pulse rate and core body temperature along with activity monitoring. The indigenously developed nodes, such as sensor node, destination and relay nodes are successfully deployed in indoor environments. The cooperative wireless network is established and eventually empowered with IoT architecture. The hybrid wireless protocols, such as Radio-Frequency (RF), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are made to collaborate with each other efficiently and performance characteristics are analyzed. It is strongly envisaged that efficiency of existing wireless sensor network can be improved by integrating IoT architecture which is subsequently proved with the results obtained.

QR Code-Based Highly Secure ECG Steganography

In concepts such as connected health, patient data needs to be protected when they are transmitted over the internet to the caregiver. The current letter proposes embedding the QR code of patient data into discrete wavelet transform coefficients of the cover ECG Signal. The imperceptibility of hidden data is estimated by performance metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio, percentage residual difference, and Kullback–Leibler distance. The proposed approach is demonstrated on MIT-BIH database. Watermarking in the low coefficient values deteriorate the signal less and results in lower bit errors. It is shown that larger watermarks can be accommodated with a larger version of QR code for more or less the same imperceptibility. It is found that QR code version 40 allows embedding of maximum 2632 bytes of patient data with zero bit errors. Since QR code has an inbuilt error correction code, it provides additional layer of security to patient data and the proposed approach can be used for secure transfer of patient data.