Among all animals, mosquitoes are responsible for the most deaths worldwide. Interestingly, not all types of mosquitoes spread diseases, but rather, a select few alone are competent enough to do so. In the case of any disease outbreak, an important first step is surveillance of vectors (i.e., those mosquitoes capable of spreading diseases). To do this today, public health workers lay several mosquito traps in the area of interest. Hundreds of mosquitoes will get trapped. Naturally, among these hundreds, taxonomists have to identify only the vectors to gauge their density. This process today is manual, requires complex expertise/ training, and is based on visual inspection of each trapped specimen under a microscope. It is long, stressful and self-limiting. This paper presents an innovative solution to this problem. Our technique assumes the presence of an embedded camera (similar to those in smart-phones) that can take pictures of trapped mosquitoes. Our techniques proposed here will then process these images to automatically classify the genus and species type. Our CNN model based on Inception-ResNet V2 and Transfer Learning yielded an overall accuracy of 80% in classifying mosquitoes when trained on 25, 867 images of 250 trapped mosquito vector specimens captured via many smart-phone cameras. In particular, the accuracy of our model in classifying Aedes aegypti and Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes (both of which are especially deadly vectors) is amongst the highest. We also present important lessons learned and practical impact of our techniques in this paper.

In recent years, there have been a surge in ubiquitous technologies such as smartwatches and fitness trackers that can track the human physical activities effortlessly. These devices have enabled common citizens to track their physical fitness and encourage them to lead a healthy lifestyle. Among various exercises, walking and running are the most common ones people do in everyday life, either through commute, exercise, or doing household chores. If done at the right intensity, walking and running are sufficient enough to help individual reach the fitness and weight-loss goals. Therefore, it is important to measure walking/ running speed to estimate the burned calories along with preventing them from the risk of soreness, injury, and burnout. Existing wearable technologies use GPS sensor to measure the speed which is highly energy inefficient and does not work well indoors. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate a convolutional neural network based algorithm that leverages accelerometer and gyroscope sensory data from the wrist-worn device to detect the speed with high precision. Data from 15 participants were collected while they were walking/running at different speeds on a treadmill. Our speed detection algorithm achieved 4.2% and 9.8% MAPE (Mean Absolute Error Percentage) value using 70-15-15 train-test-evaluation split and leave-one-out cross-validation evaluation strategy respectively.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and congestive heart failure (CHF) are leading chronic health concerns among the aging population today. They are both typically characterized by episodes of cough that share similarities. In this paper, we design TussisWatch, a smart-phone-based system to record and process cough episodes for early identification of COPD or CHF. In our technique, for each cough episode, we do the following: 1) filter noise; 2) use domain expertise to partition each cough episode into multiple segments, indicative of disease or otherwise; 3) identify a limited number of audio features for each cough segment; 4) remove inherent biases as a result of sample size differences; and 5) design a two-level classification scheme, based on the idea of Random Forests, to process a recorded cough segment. Our classifier, at the first-level, identifies whether or not a given cough segment indicates a disease. If yes, the second-level classifier identifies the cough segment as symptomatic of COPD or CHF. Testing with a cohort of 9 COPD, 9 CHF, and 18 CONTROLS subjects spread across both the genders, races, and ages, our system achieves good performance in terms of Sensitivity, Specificity, Accuracy, and Area under ROC curve. The proposed system has the potential to aid early access to healthcare, and may be also used to educate patients on self-care at home.

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of leveraging the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors in modern smartphones to detect instances of distracted driving activities (e.g., calling, texting, and reading while driving). To do so, we conducted an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator. As discussed later, the simulator is equipped with a realistic steering wheel, acceleration/braking pedals, and a wide screen to visualize background vehicular traffic. It is also programmed to simulate multiple environmental conditions like daytime, nighttime, fog, and rain/snow. The subjects were instructed to drive the simulator while performing a randomized sequence of activities that included texting, calling, and reading from a phone while they were driving, during which the accelerometer and gyroscope in the phone were logging sensory data. By extracting features from this sensory data, we then implemented a machine learning technique based on random forests to detect distracted driving. Our technique achieves very good precision, recall, and F -measure across all environmental conditions we tested. We believe that our contributions in this paper can have a significant impact on enhancing road safety.

Current state-of-the-art systems in the literature using wearables are not capable of distinguishing a large number of fine-grained and/or complex human activities, which may appear similar but with vital differences in context, such as lying on floor versus lying on bed versus lying on sofa. This paper fills the gap by proposing a novel system, called HuMAn, that recognizes and classifies complex at-home activities of humans with wearable sensing. Specifically, HuMAn makes such classifications feasible by leveraging selective multi-modal sensor suites from wearable devices, and enhances the richness of sensed information for activity classification by carefully leveraging placement of the wearable devices across multiple positions on the human body. The HuMAn system consists of the following components: (a) a practical feature set extraction method from selected multi-modal sensor suites; and (b) a novel two-level structured classification algorithm that improves accuracy by leveraging sensors in multiple body positions; and (c) improved refinement in classification of complex activities with minimal external infrastructure support (e.g., only a few Bluetooth beacons used for location context). The proposed system is evaluated with 10 users in real home environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the HuMAn system can detect 21 complex at-home activities with high degree of accuracy. For same-user evaluation strategy, the average activity classification accuracy is as high as 95 percent over all of the 21 activities. For the case of 10-fold cross-validation evaluation strategy, the average classification accuracy is 92 percent, and for the case of leave-one-out cross-validation strategy, the average classification accuracy is 75 percent.

Mosquito borne diseases continue to pose grave dangers to global health. An important step in combating their spread in any area is to identify the type of species prevalent there. To do so, trained personnel lay local mosquito traps, and after collecting trapped specimens, they visually inspect each specimen to identify the species type and log their counts. This process takes hours and is cognitively very demanding. In this paper, we design a smart-phone based system that allows anyone to take images of a still mosquito that is either alive or dead (but still retaining its physical form) and automatically classifies the species type. Our system integrates image processing, feature selection, unsupervised clustering, and an SVM based machine learning algorithm for classification. Results with a total of 101 mosquito specimens spread across nine different vector carrying species (that were captured from a real outdoor trap in Tampa, Florida) demonstrate high accuracy in species identification. When implemented as a smart-phone application, the latency and energy consumption were minimal. With our system, the currently manual process of species identification and recording can be sped up, while also minimizing the ensuing cognitive workload of personnel. Secondly, ordinary citizens can use our system in their own homes for self-awareness and information sharing with public health agencies.

In a 2012 survey, in the United States alone, there were more than 35 000 reported suicides with approximately 1800 of being psychiatric inpatients. Recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports indicate an upward trend in these numbers. In psychiatric facilities, staff perform intermittent or continuous observation of patients manually in order to prevent such tragedies, but studies show that they are insufficient, and also consume staff time and resources. In this paper, we present the Watch-Dog system, to address the problem of detecting self-harming activities when attempted by in-patients in clinical settings. Watch-Dog comprises of three key components-Data sensed by tiny accelerometer sensors worn on wrists of subjects; an efficient algorithm to classify whether a user is active versus dormant (i.e., performing a physical activity versus not performing any activity); and a novel decision selection algorithm based on random forests and continuity indices for fine grained activity classification. With data acquired from 11 subjects performing a series of activities (both self-harming and otherwise), Watch-Dog achieves a classification accuracy of , , and for same-user 10-fold cross-validation, cross-user 10-fold cross-validation, and cross-user leave-one-out evaluation, respectively. We believe that the problem addressed in this paper is practical, important, and timely. We also believe that our proposed system is practically deployable, and related discussions are provided in this paper.

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of leveraging the accelerometer in modern smartphones to detect the triggering of explosion events. By emplacing a static smartphone and a state-of-the-art seismometer in the vicinity of real explosion blasts (conducted at an Explosives Research Lab in a university setting), and comparing their detected event readings, we make several insightful contributions. We find that readings from events in the smartphone and the seismometer are highly correlated in the temporal and frequency domain. We then demonstrate the feasibility of designing an algorithm in the smartphone (executing as an app) to detect the triggering of an explosion based on comparing short term sudden spikes in vibrations due to an explosion event, and long-term dormancy in vibration readings (in the absence of an explosion). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that demonstrates the feasibility of leveraging smartphones for detecting explosion events.