VIDVIP: Dataset for Object Detection During Sidewalk Travel

In this paper, we report on the “VIsual Dataset for Visually Impaired Persons” (VIDVIP), a dataset for obstacle detection during sidewalk travel. In recent years, there have been many reports on assistive technologies using deep learning and computer vision technologies; nevertheless, developers cannot implement the corresponding applications without datasets. Although a number of open-source datasets have been released by research institutes and companies, large-scale datasets are not as abundant in the field of disability support, owing to their high development costs. Therefore, we began developing a dataset for outdoor mobility support for the visually impaired in April 2018. As of May 1, 2021, we have annotated 538,747 instances for 32,036 images in 39 classes of labels. We have implemented and tested navigation systems and other applications that utilize our dataset. In this study, we first compare our dataset with other general-purpose datasets, and show that our dataset has properties similar to those of datasets for automated driving. As a result of the discussion on the characteristics of the dataset, it is shown that the nature of the image shooting location, rather than the regional characteristics, tends to affect the annotation ratio. Accordingly, it is possible to examine the type of location based on the nature of the shooting location, and to infer the maintenance statuses of traffic facilities (such as Braille blocks) from the annotation ratio.

MEQA-RPL: A Mobility Energy and Queue Aware Routing Protocol for Mobile Nodes in Internet of Things

Increase in mobile nodes has brought new challenges to IoT’s routing protocol-RPL. Mobile nodes (MN) bring new possibilities as well as challenges to the network. MN creates frequent route disruption, energy loss and increases end-to-end delay in the network. This could be solved by improving RPL to react faster to route failures through route prediction, while keeping energy expenditure for this process in reasonable limits. In this context a new Mobility Energy and Queue Aware-RPL (MEQA-RPL) is proposed that have the capability to sense route failure and to identify proactively the next possible route before the current route fails. While identifying the next route, MEQA-RPL employs constraint check on energy and queue availability to guarantee QoS for MN and better lifetime for the network. When compared to RPL with mobility support our model reduce average signaling cost by 31%, handover delay by 32% and improve packet delivery ratio by 17%. We run simulations with multiple mobile nodes which have also shown promising results on aforementioned parameters.

Special Issue on Nursing Robots and Support Systems for Welfare Sites

Japan’s population is aging at a speed unprecedented in the world, and its shortage of caregivers has become a major issue. At the same time, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to create unprecedented new value by connecting all people and things, allowing them to share various kinds of knowledge and information. In addition, as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are undergoing a transformation that is changing the value of human labor, robots incorporating these innovative technologies are expected to solve the problems of the aging society. On the other hand, in the field of nursing care, the relationship between the caregiver and the care-receiver is basically a person-to-person connection. There is a question of how people and technology can coexist and produce new creations in such fields. This special issue on Nursing Robots and Support Systems for Welfare Sites includes one review paper and 23 other interesting papers that cover the following topics: ı Research on independence support and systems to watch over the elderly. ı Research on support systems for diet, recreation, medication, etc. for people with dementia. ı Research on control and sensor systems for vital signs and excretion. ı Research on rehabilitation equipment for the physically handicapped. ı Research on assistive technologies for mobility support. ı Research on upper and lower limb power assistance devices and robots. We thank all authors and reviewers of the papers as well as the Editorial Board of the Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics for their help with this special issue.

Mobility Support 5G Architecture with Real-Time Routing for Sustainable Smart Cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology and provides connectivity among physical objects with the support of 5G communication. In recent decades, there have been a lot of applications based on IoT technology for the sustainability of smart cities, such as farming, e-healthcare, education, smart homes, weather monitoring, etc. These applications communicate in a collaborative manner between embedded IoT devices and systematize daily routine tasks. In the literature, many solutions facilitate remote users to gather the observed data by accessing the stored information on the cloud network and lead to smart systems. However, most of the solutions raise significant research challenges regarding information sharing in mobile IoT networks and must be able to stabilize the performance of smart operations in terms of security and intelligence. Many solutions are based on 5G communication to support high user mobility and increase the connectivity among a huge number of IoT devices. However, such approaches lack user and data privacy against anonymous threats and incur resource costs. In this paper, we present a mobility support 5G architecture with real-time routing for sustainable smart cities that aims to decrease the loss of data against network disconnectivity and increase the reliability for 5G-based public healthcare networks. The proposed architecture firstly establishes a mutual relationship among the nodes and mobile sink with shared secret information and lightweight processing. Secondly, multi-secured levels are proposed to protect the interaction with smart transmission systems by increasing the trust threshold over the insecure channels. The conducted experiments are analyzed, and it is concluded that their performance significantly increases the information sustainability for mobile networks in terms of security and routing.