Classroom observation is a way for teachers to better understand and thus improve what happens in their classes. Reading is a complex cognitive process, and one that is often difficult to observe. However, e-books present one way to overcome this problem, as they can be used to better understand students' reading strengths and weaknesses, thus making it possible to offer more effective reading guidance. Therefore, this study proposed an E-book Reading Behavior Monitoring System based on sensing technology and e-books, with the following three stages: the analysis of a real classroom situation, system design and implementation, and an evaluation of the functionality and usability of the proposed system. This system uses a webcam and touch screen with the artificial bee colony algorithm to record data of the students' reading fixation and reading rates, which can then be used as a reference by teachers to provide individual reading guidance. Finally, this study carried out a series of experiments to evaluate the usability and functionality of the proposed system through a case study, system simulation, expert evaluation and actual assessment. The results show that the proposed system has both good usability and functionality with regard to its aim.

This work builds an intelligent environmental monitoring system for industrial production and safety concerns. There are a number of smart monitoring systems developed for smart grids, bridges or machine system management, temperature/humidity monitoring and so on. As information technology advances at a continuous rapid pace, humans have become connected online and this connection has extended into the interactions between things and humans. Employing the FLAG‐PSoC‐1605A development board as the platform, all sensor data are transmitted via a ZigBee wireless module, a TCP/IP network module and a long range wireless communication GPRS/SMS module to a remote end PC for analysis. This constitutes a smart network for connections between humans and objects.

The traditional chip-synchronous assumption used in the analyses of optical codes in optical code-division multiple access gives a pessimistic performance upper bound, while a more realistic chip-asynchronous assumption gives a more accurate performance. It is also known that a hard-limiter can be placed at the front end of an optical decoder to reduce the effects of multiple-access interference and the near-far problem. In this paper, the "hard-limiting" performance of two-dimensional (2-D) optical codes is analyzed under the chip-asynchronous assumption. We apply a Markov-chain method for a more accurate analysis, which can be generalized to 2-D optical codes with arbitrary maximum cross-correlation values. The performance of 2-D optical codes with the hard-limiting and chip-asynchronous assumptions is also compared with the soft-limiting and chip- synchronous assumptions.

In this paper, the performance of two-dimensional optical codes with cross-correlation functions of at most one, such as the carrier-hopping prime code (CHPC), is analyzed without the traditional chip-synchronous assumption. In addition to the Gaussian approximation method, we apply a combinatorial technique for a more accurate analysis, especially when there exists only a small number of simultaneous users. It is known that an optical hard-limiter can be placed at the front end of a receiver to reduce the effect of multiple-access interference. We also derive the hard-limiting error probability under the chip-asynchronous assumption. Finally, the performance improvement of the CHPC with the hard-limiting and chip-asynchronous assumptions is studied.