Method of Step Detection and Counting Based on Measurements of Magnetic Field Variations

Basic human activity recognition (HAR) and analysis is becoming a key aspect of tracking and identifying daily habits that can have a critical impact on healthy lifestyles by providing feedback on health status and warning of deterioration. However, current approaches for detecting basic activities such as movements or steps rely on solutions with multiple sensors which affect their size and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel method that uses only a single magnetic field sensor for basic step detection, unlike the well-known multisensory solutions. The approach presented here is based on real-time analysis of magnetic field sensor measurements to detect and count steps during a walking activity. The approach is implemented in a system that integrates a digital magnetic field sensor with software blocks: filter, steady state detector, extrema detector with classifier, and threshold comparator implemented in an embedded platform. Outdoor experiments with volunteers of different ages and genders walking at variable speeds showed that the proposed detection method achieves up to 98% accuracy in step detection. The obtained results show that a single magnetic field sensor can be used to detect steps, and in general offers the possibility of simplifying the current solutions by reducing the device dimensions, the cost of a system and its power consumption.

Deep Learning Methods for Lung Cancer Nodule Classification: A Survey

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths. It is due to the complexity of early detection of nodules. In clinical practice, radiologists find it difficult to determine whether a condition is normal or abnormal by manually analysing CT scan or X-ray images for nodule identification. Currently, various deep learning techniques have been developed to identify lung nodules as benign or malignant, but each technique has its own advantages and drawbacks. This work presents a thorough analysis based on segmentation techniques, Related features-based detection, multi-step detection, automatic detection, and deep convolutional neural network techniques. Performance comparison was conducted on a selected works based on performance measures. A potential research direction for the recognition of lung nodules is given at the end of this study.