Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Physical activity monitoring using wearable sensors give valuable information about patient's neuro activities. Fall among ages of 60 and older in US is a leading cause for injury-related health issues and present serious concern in the public health care sector. If the emergency treatments are not on time, these injuries may result in disability, paralysis, or even death. In this work, we present an approach that early detect fall occurrences. Low power capacitive accelerometers incorporated with microcontroller processing units were utilized to early detect accurate information about fall events. Decision tree algorithms were implemented to set thresholds for data acquired from accelerometers. Data is then verified against their thresholds and the data acquisition decision unit makes the decision to save patients from fall occurrences. Daily activities are logged on an onboard memory chip with Bluetooth option to transfer the data wirelessly to mobile devices. In this work, a system prototype based on neurosignal activities was built and tested against seven different daily human activities for the sake of differentiating between fall and non-fall detection. The developed system features low power, high speed, and high reliability. Eventually, this study will lead to wearable fall detection system that serves important need within the health care sector. In this work Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) protocol is used to communicate between the accelerometers and the embedded control system. The data transfer from the Microcontroller unit to the mobile device or laptop is done using Bluetooth technology.

The undrained shear strength and preconsolidation pressure are key parameters in describing the characteristics of soft clays. The two parameters both reflect the clay’s structure and state of stress, and hence empirical correlations for undrained shear strength normalized with respect to preconsolidation pressure are widely used to assess soil behavior. The empirical correlations given in the literature are typically dependent on liquid limit, or plasticity index, but some studies have questioned the dependency and proposed correlations constant for consistency limits. Data from geotechnical projects often display a considerable scatter and deviate from established empirical correlations. In this thesis, statistical analyses are performed and evaluated qualitatively on direct simple shear, constant rate of strain and fall cone test data from 146 sampling points with a total of 596 soil samples from Stockholm, Gothenburg and Uppsala. The aim is to investigate the correlation between shear strength and the preconsolidation pressure. The thesis evaluates the normalized shear strength’s dependency on liquid limit, how the data corresponds to Hansbo’s (1957) and Swedish Geotechnical Institute’s (2007) linear empirical correlations, and the correction factor applied to shear strength measured by the fall cone test. The results of the study show that the correction factor typically reduces the shear strength from fall cone tests too much with respect to shear strength from direct simple shear tests. The normalized shear strength’s dependency on liquid limit may be rejected for the fall cone test data. The results for direct simple shear test data however, indicates a correlation with liquid limit. The data scatter is considerable, especially for fall cone test data, and the relevance of describing the normalized shear strength from fall cone test with a linear empirical correlation to liquid limit may conclusively be questioned. / Skjuvhållfasthet och förkonsolideringstryck är två viktiga jordparametrar för lösa leror. Båda parametrar reflekterar lerans struktur och spänningstillstånd, och empiriska korrelationer för odränerad skjuvhållfasthet, normaliserad mot förkonsolideringstrycket, används därför ofta för att bedöma en leras egenskaper. De empiriska korrelationerna är vanligen kopplade till flytgräns eller plasticitetsindex. Dessa korrelationer har däremot ifrågasatts av studier som i vissa fall istället föreslagit ett konstant förhållande mellan normaliserad odränerad skjuvhållfasthet och plasticitetsgränser. Mätvärden från geotekniska projekt i Sverige visar allmänt stor spridning avseende dessa parametrar och data avviker ofta från etablerade empiriska korrelationer. I examensarbetet har data från direkta skjuvförsök, ödometerförsök och fallkonförsök utvärderats statistiskt och kvalitativt. Totalt omfattar studien 596 jordprover från 146 provtagningspunkter från Stockholm, Göteborg och Uppsala. Syftet med studien är att undersöka korrelationen mellan odränerad skjuvhållfasthet och förkonsolideringstryck. Studien behandlar den normaliserade skjuvhållfashetens flytgränsberoende, Hansbos (1957) och Statens Geotekniska Instituts (2007) empiriska korrelationer, samt den korrektionsfaktor som ska tillämpas på skjuvhållfastheter från fallkonförsök. Resultatet visar att korrektionsfaktorn reducerar skjuvhållfastheten för mycket och att korrigerade skjuvhållfastheter är i sämre samstämmighet med skjuvhållfastheter från direkta skjuvförsök än okorrigerade. Data från fallkonförsök uppvisar inget tydligt flytgränsberoende, medan resultaten från direkta skjuvförsök indikerar ett beroende. Spridningen i data är dock påfallande, särskilt för fallkonförsöket. Relevansen i att tillämpa en linjär empirisk korrelation för odränerad normaliserad från fallkonförsök mot förkonsolideringstryck beroende av flytgräns bör ifrågasättas.

There is a sharp increase in the number of old people living alone throughout the world. More often than not, such people require continuous and immediate care and attention in their everyday lives, hence the need for round the clock monitoring, albeit in a respectful, dignified and non-intrusive way. For example, continuous care is required when they become frail and less active, and immediate attention is required when they fall or remain in the same position for a long time. To this extent, various monitoring technologies have been developed, yet there are major improvements still to be realised. Current technologies include indoor positioning systems (IPSs) and health monitoring systems. The former relies on defined configurations of various sensors to capture a person's position within a given space in real-time. The functionality of the sensors varies depending on receiving appropriate data using WiFi, radio frequency identification (RFIO), ultrawide band (UWB), dead reckoning (OR), infrared indoor (IR), Bluetooth (BLE), acoustic signal, visible light detection, and sound signal monitoring. The systems use various algorithms to capture proximity, location detection, time of arrival, time difference of arrival angle, and received signal strength data. Health monitoring technologies capture important health data using accelerometers and gyroscope sensors. In some studies, audio fingerprinting has been used to detect indoor environment sound variation and have largely been based on recognising TV sound and songs. This has been achieved using various staging methods, including pre-processing, framing, windowing, time/frequency domain feature extraction, and post-processing. Time/frequency domain feature extraction tools used include Fourier Transforms (FTs}, Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT}, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs), Constant Q Transform (CQT}, Local Energy centroid (LEC), and Wavelet transform. Artificial intelligence (Al) and probabilistic algorithms have also been used in IPSs to classify and predict different activities, with interesting applications in healthcare monitoring. Several tools have been applied in IPSs and audio fingerprinting. They include Radial Basis Kernel (RBF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Trees (DTs), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Na'ive Bayes (NB), Gaussian Mixture Modelling (GMM), Clustering algorithms, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and Deep Learning (DL). Despite all these attempts, there is still a major gap for a completely non-intrusive system capable of monitoring what an elderly person living alone is doing, where and for how long, and providing a quick traffic-like risk score prompting, therefore immediate action or otherwise. In this thesis, a cost-effective and completely non-intrusive indoor positioning and activity-monitoring system for elderly people living alone has been developed, tested and validated in a typical residential living space. The proposed system works based on five phases: (1)Set-up phase that defines the typical activities of daily living (TADLs). (2)Configuration phase that optimises the implementation of the required sensors in exemplar flat No.1. (3)Learning phase whereby sounds and position data of the TADLs are collected and stored in a fingerprint reference data set. (4)Listening phase whereby real-time data is collected and compared against the reference data set to provide information as to what a person is doing, when, and for how long. (5)Alert phase whereby a health frailty score varying between O unwell to 10 healthy is generated in real-time. Two typical but different residential flats (referred to here are Flats No.1 and 2) are used in the study. The system is implemented in the bathroom, living room, and bedroom of flat No.1, which includes various floor types (carpet, tiles, laminate) to distinguish between various sounds generated upon walking on such floors. The data captured during the Learning Phase yields the reference data set and includes position and sound fingerprints. The latter is generated from tests of recording a specific TADL, thus providing time and frequency-based extracted features, frequency peak magnitude (FPM), Zero Crossing Rate (ZCR), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The former is generated from distance measurement. The sampling rate of the recorded sound is 44.1kHz. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is applied on 0.1 seconds intervals of the recorded sound with minimisation of the spectral leakage using the Hamming window. The frequency peaks are detected from the spectrogram matrices to get the most appropriate FPM between the reference and sample data. The position detection of the monitored person is based on the distance between that captured from the learning and listening phases of the system in real-time. A typical furnished one-bedroom flat (flat No.2) is used to validate the system. The topologies and floorings of flats No.1 and No.2 are different. The validation is applied based on "happy" and "unusual" but typical behaviours. Happy ones include typical TADLs of a healthy elderly person living alone with a risk metric higher than 8. Unusual one's mimic acute or chronic activities (or lack thereof), for example, falling and remaining on the floor, or staying in bed for long periods, i.e., scenarios when an elderly person may be in a compromised situation which is detected by a sudden drop of the risk metric (lower than 4) in real-time. Machine learning classification algorithms are used to identify the location, activity, and time interval in real-time, with a promising early performance of 94% in detecting the right activity and the right room at the right time.

The dissertation is devoted to the problems of the perception of Muslims and the threat posed by the Ottoman by the Byzantine and East-European writers of the XV century. According to the materials of historical works analyzed the ratio of the authors to the representatives of the Islamic faith in a severe foreign situation and also domestic religious contradictions. Analysis of the works of Byzantine and Balkan writers allows us to trace the evolution of the views of historians on the matter and to reveal the extent of their bias. According to the Byzantine and East-European sources revealed the attitude of the authors of the XV century to the Turks and denoted points of contact of Christian and Muslim civilizations in the context of military confrontation, also investigated the attitude of the authors to the key events of the Turkish expansion in the XV century - Battle of Varna in 1444 and the capture of Constantinople in 1453. The dissertation also addresses the problem of mutual Christians and Muslims considered in the interpretation of the writers and the question of the possibility of cultural and religious dialogue between the warring parties. / Диссертация посвящена рассмотрению проблемы восприятия мусульман и угрозы со стороны османов византийскими и восточно-европейскими писателями XV века. По материалам их исторических произведений анализируется отношение авторов к представителям исламского вероучения в условиях тяжелой внешнеполитической ситуации и внутренних религиозных противоречий. Анализ сочинений византийских и балканских писателей позволяет проследить эволюцию взглядов историков относительно данного вопроса и выявить степень их тенденциозности. По данным византийских и восточно-европейских источников выявляется отношение авторов XV в. к туркам, обозначаются точки соприкосновения христианской и мусульманской цивилизаций в контексте военного противостояния, а также исследуется отношение авторов к ключевым событиям турецкой экспансии XV в. - битве при Варне 1444 г. и захвату Константинополя в 1453 г. В диссертации также затрагивается проблема взаимовосприятия христиан и мусульман в интерпретации рассматриваемых писателей и ставится вопрос о возможности культурного и религиозного диалога между представителями противоборствующих сторон.

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Two mm-wave frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars were combined with a recurrent neural network (RNN) to perform fall detection. The purpose was to find methods to implement a multi-radar setup for healthcare monitoring and to study the resulting models’ resilience to interference and other obstacles, such as re-arranging the radars in the room. Single-board computers (SBCs) controlled the radars to record and transfer data over Ethernet to a PC. The Ethernet connection also allowed synchronization with the network time protocol (NTP), which was necessary to put the data from the two sensors in correspondence. The proposed RNN used two bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) layers with L2-regularization and dropout layers. It had an overall accuracy of 95.15% and 98.11% recall with a test set. Performance in live testing varied with different arrangements, with an accuracy of 98% with the radars along the same wall, 94% with the radars diagonally, and 90% with an alternative arrangement that the RNN model had not seen during training. However, the latter arrangement resulted in a recall of 95.7%, with false alarms reducing the overall performance. In conclusion, the model performed adequately for fall detection, even with different radar arrangements but could still be sensitive to interference. / Två millimetervågs-radarsystem av typen frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) kombinerades för att med hjälp av ett recurrent neural network (RNN) utföra falldetektering. Syftet var att finna metoder för att implementera en multiradarplatform för hälsoövervakning samt att studera de resulterande modellernas tolerans mot interferens och andra hinder så som att radarsystemen placeras på olika sätt i rummet. Enkortsdatorer kontrollerade radarsystemen för att kunna spela in och överföra data över Ethernet till en PC. Ethernetanslutningen möjliggjorde även synkronisering över network time protocol (NTP), vilket var nödvändigt för att sammanlänka datan från de båda sensorerna. Det föreslagna RNN:et använde två dubbelriktade (bidirectional) long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) lager med L2-regularisering och dropout-lager. Det hade en total noggrannhet på 95.15% och 98.11% recall med ett test-set. Prestandan vid testning i drift varierade beroende på olika uppställningar av radarmodulerna, med en noggrannhet på 98% då de placerades längs samma vägg, 94% då de placerades diagonalt och 90% vid en alternativ uppställning som RNN-modellen inte hade sett när den tränades. Det senare resulterade dock i 95.7% recall, där falsklarm var den främsta felkällan. Sammanfattningsvis presterade modellen bra för falldetektering, även med olika uppställningar, men den verkar fortfarande vara känslig för interferens.

Formal System Design (ForSyDe) aims to bring the design of multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) to a higher level of abstraction and bridge the abstraction gap by transformational design refinement. The current research is focused on a correct-by-construction design flow, which requires design space exploration including formal models of computation and timepredictable platforms. The latter is widely used for hard real-time systems. In order to make a platform time-predictable, all components, as well as inter-core communication, need to have the worst-case execution time (WCET) estimations and be easily analyzed. Time-division multiplexing (TDM) networks can precisely allocate network resources at each time point and further provide time-predictable guarantees. However, the application developer must take the time to understand the hardware and capabilities of a network-on-chip (NoC) in order to communicate between the cores. Moreover, a wide variety of communication libraries belonging to different platforms increase the learning cost. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard inspires this project. For time-predictable communication on TDM-based MPSoCs, a specification with communication primitives should also be necessary for either system designers or application developers. Compared with the MPI standard, this specification should be lighter because it only elaborates on timepredictable communication. Besides, platforms it applies to are limited to real-time NoCs using TDM, which the worst-case communication time (WCCT) could be calculated at an early stage of the design. In this project, we abstracted from concurrency and communication libraries of existing platforms and derived communication primitives to this specification. Two different communication modes, push-based and interactive, are summarized. Push-based communication composes of checking the direct memory access (DMA) status, pushing the message, and checking the receiving buffer. Interactive communication comprises sending, receiving, and acknowledging primitives, which are divided into blocking and non-blocking. In addition, this specification permits the user to calculate WCCT of transmitting a message from one processor to another if one knows the size of messages transmitted and hardware configuration by addingWCET of all communication operations running on a single processor and latency of the communication connection together. The calculation process is shown using an existing platform. / Formell systemdesign (ForSyDe) syftar till att föra designen av multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) till en högre abstraktionsnivå och överbrygga abstraktionsgapet genom transformationell designförfining. Den aktuella forskningen är fokuserad på ett designflöde som är korrekt för konstruktion, vilket kräver utforskning av designutrymme inklusive formella beräkningsmodeller och tidsförutsägbara plattformar. Det senare används ofta för hårda realtidssystem. För att göra en plattform tidsförutsägbar måste alla komponenter, såväl som kommunikation mellan kärnor, ha de värsta tänkbara exekveringstiden (WCET) uppskattningar och vara lätta att analysera. Time-division multiplexing (TDM)-nätverk kan exakt allokera nätverksresurser vid varje tidpunkt och ytterligare ge tidsförutsägbara garantier. Applikationsutvecklaren måste dock ta sig tid att förstå hårdvaran och kapaciteten hos ett nätverk-på-chip (NoC) för att kunna kommunicera mellan kärnorna. Dessutom ökar ett brett utbud av kommunikationsbibliotek som tillhör olika plattformar inlärningskostnaden. Message Passing Interface (MPI)-standarden inspirerar detta projekt. För tidsförutsägbar kommunikation på TDM-baserade MPSoC:er bör en specifikation med kommunikationsprimitiver också vara nödvändig för antingen systemdesigners eller applikationsutvecklare. Jämfört med MPI-standarden borde denna specifikation vara lättare eftersom den bara utvecklar tidsförutsägbar kommunikation. Dessutom är plattformar som den gäller begränsade till realtids-NoCs som använder TDM, som den värsta kommunikationstiden (WCCT) skulle kunna beräknas i ett tidigt skede av designen. I detta projekt har vi abstraherat från samtidighets- och kommunikationsbibliotek för befintliga plattformar och härledda kommunikationsprimitiver till denna specifikation. Två olika kommunikationslägen, push-baserade och interaktiva, sammanfattas. Pushbaserad kommunikation består av att kontrollera DMA-statusen (Direct Memory Access), skicka meddelandet och kontrollera mottagningsbufferten. Interaktiv kommunikation innefattar att skicka, ta emot och bekräfta primitiver, som är uppdelade i blockerande och icke-blockerande. Dessutom tillåter denna specifikation användaren att beräkna WCCT för att sända ett meddelande från en processor till en annan om man känner till storleken på skickade meddelanden och hårdvarukonfigurationen genom att lägga till WCET för alla kommunikationsoperationer som körs på en enda processor och latens för kommunikationsanslutningen tillsammans . Beräkningsprocessen visas med en befintlig plattform.

The ideas of Richard Sennett in his most influential book The Fall of Public Man from 1974 are many, but the main point is that the resolution of the lines between the public life and the private life has affected society, the democracy and individuals in a negative way. The main point of this essay is to understand the nature of Sennet’s thinking, ideas and philosophy and how they are connected. I am focusing on the true nature of the way he is formulating the issues and conflicts he is dealing with. Even though Sennett is a very influential thinker, very few people actually have analyzed his works, especially The Fall of Public Man. “Res publica” is the Roman expression of the bigger responsibility each citizen has in a society that goes beyond themselves. This is when you are a part of something bigger than yourself, your friends and your family, you are a part of a close connected community and society. You are not strangers to each other, you are all one. This is exactly the type of society that sociology professor of London School of Economics Richard Sennett means has gone away. Richard Sennett is often described as a person standing on the left on the political scale when it comes to economics and at the same time culturally conservative. The result of this essay shows that Richard Sennett blames industrial capitalism, secularism and urban planning for the new modern society when the distinction between public life and private life has gone away. This is the new kind of society in the western world where people shifted focus from an extrovert personality to an introvert one, a world where we are trapped in our own minds instead of stepping out of it and actually living in it. Many times, the sociology professor goes back to the mid 18th century to understand the thriving public life in Paris and London. My theoretical perspective is based upon Collingwoods thoughts about question and answer which you need to understand the question in order to understand the thinker's answer. You could call Sennett either a nostalgic or a very sharp critic of the modern world, it all depends on how much you resonate and believe in his ideas.