When integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) occurred, tens of applications including smart agriculture have emerged to offer innovative solutions to modernize the farming sector. This paper aims to present a low-cost platform for comprehensive environmental parameter monitoring using flying IoT. This platform is deployed and tested in a real scenario on a farm in Medenine, Tunisia, in the period of March 2020 to March 2021. The experimental work fulfills the requirements of automated and real-time monitoring of the environmental parameters using both under- and aboveground sensors. These IoT sensors are on a farm collecting vast amounts of environmental data, where it is sent to ground gateways every 1 h, after which the obtained data is collected and transmitted by a drone to the cloud for storage and analysis every 12 h. This low-cost platform can help farmers, governmental, or manufacturers to predict environmental data over the geographically large farm field, which leads to enhancement in crop productivity and farm management in a cost-effective, and timely manner. Obtained experimental results infer that automated and human-made sets of actions can be applied and/or suggested, due to the innovative integration between IoT sensors with the drone. These smart actions help in precision agriculture, which, in turn, intensely boost crop productivity, saving natural resources.

Featured Application: The method presented in this paper can be applied in medical computer systems for supporting medical diagnosis.Abstract: Thoracic radiography (chest X-ray) is an inexpensive but effective and widely used medical imaging procedure. However, a lack of qualified radiologists severely limits the applicability of the technique. Even current Deep Learning-based approaches often require strong supervision, e.g., annotated bounding boxes, to train such systems, which is impossible to harvest on a large scale. In this work, we proposed the classification and prediction of lung pathologies of frontal thoracic X-rays using a modified model MobileNet V2. We considered using transfer learning with metadata leverage. We used the NIH Chest-Xray-14 database, and we did a comparison of performance of our approach to other state-of-the-art methods for pathology classification. The main comparison was by Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) statistics and analyzed the differences between classifiers. Overall, we notice a considerable spread in the achieved result with an average AUC of 0.811 and an accuracy above 90%. We conclude that resampling the dataset gives a huge improvement to the model performance. In this work, we intended to create a model that is capable of being trained, and modified devices with low computing power because they can be implemented into smaller IoT devices.

No abstract

Healthcare is one of the most promising domains for the application of Internet of Things- (IoT-) based technologies, where patients can use wearable or implanted medical sensors to measure medical parameters anywhere and anytime. The information collected by IoT devices can then be sent to the health care professionals, and physicians allow having a real-time access to patients’ data. However, besides limited batteries lifetime and computational power, there is spatio-temporal correlation, where unnecessary transmission of these redundant data has a significant impact on reducing energy consumption and reducing battery lifetime. Thus, this paper aims to propose a routing protocol to enhance energy-efficiency, which in turn prolongs the sensor lifetime. The proposed work is based on Energy Efficient Routing Protocol using Dual Prediction Model (EERP-DPM) for Healthcare using IoT, where Dual-Prediction Mechanism is used to reduce data transmission between sensor nodes and medical server if predictions match the readings or if the data are considered critical if it goes beyond the upper/lower limits of defined thresholds. The proposed system was developed and tested using MATLAB software and a hardware platform called “MySignals HW V2.” Both simulation and experimental results confirm that the proposed EERP-DPM protocol has been observed to be extremely successful compared to other existing routing protocols not only in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime but also in terms of guaranteeing reliability, throughput, and end-to-end delay.

In this paper, a metamaterial structure based on Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) cell is proposed to achieve an isotropic band-pass filtering response. This filter consists of a planar layer formed by a 3×3 metamaterials cell array with transmittive filtering behavior at 3.5 GHz. This design with 45 mm × 45 mm dimension is then integrated in close proximity at distance of 10 mm with an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) antenna to enhance it’ s performances around a 3.5 GHz operating frequency. Simulation results ensure that filter geometry provides the advantage of polarization independency and also exhibits the angular stability up to 45◦ for both Transverse Electric (TE) and Transverse magnetic (TM) modes. More importantly, enhancement in antenna radiation pattern characteristics is illustrated when the planar FSS layer is integrated at a small distance from the radiator. Moreover, antenna gain was improved to 3.22 dBi, adaptation of antenna port (S11) was increased to -53.26 dB and antenna bandwidth reduction to 1.7 GHz is also detected. All these performances make the proposed design as a good choice used to shield signals in UWB wireless applications especially for connected object in 5G.