Heart rate (HR) is an important parameter in the study of the developmental physiology of chicken embryos and a crucial indicator of dead or live embryo grading in artificial incubation processes. A non-invasive HR measurement technique is required for long-term and routine HR assessment with minimal influence on embryo development. Accordingly, in this study, a non-invasive HR measurement technique of chicken embryos using a smartphone is demonstrated. The detection method of the proposed device is based on the photoplethysmography principle in which a smartphone camera is used for video recording, and the chicken embryonic HR is obtained from the recorded video images using a custom Android application. We used a smartphone to measure the embryonic HR of 60 native chicken eggs and found that it can measure the chicken embryonic HR from day 4 to day 20. The proposed smartphone HR device will be beneficial for scientific research and industrial applications. With internet connectivity, users can utilize their smartphone to measure the HR, display, share, and store the results.

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Coverage control is crucial for the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, most coverage control schemes are based on single objective optimization such as coverage area only, which do not consider other contradicting objectives such as energy consumption, the number of working nodes, wasteful overlapping areas. This paper proposes on a Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) coverage control called Scalarized Q Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (SQMORL). The two objectives are to achieve the maximize area coverage and to minimize the overlapping area to reduce energy consumption. Performance evaluation is conducted for both simulation and multi-agent lighting control testbed experiments. Simulation results show that SQMORL can obtain more efficient area coverage with fewer working nodes than other existing schemes.  The hardware testbed results show that SQMORL algorithm can find the optimal policy with good accuracy from the repeated runs.

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