Correlation Analysis of In-Vehicle Sensors Data and Driver Signals in Identifying Driving and Driver Behaviors.

Today's cars have dozens of sensors to monitor vehicle performance through different systems, most of which communicate via vehicular networks (CAN). Many of these sensors can be used for applications other than the original ones, such as improving the driver experience or creating new safety tools. An example is monitoring variables that describe the driver's behavior. Interactions with the pedals, speed, and steering wheel, among other signals, carry driving characteristics. However, not always all variables related to these interactions are available in all vehicles; for example, the excursion of the brake pedal. Using an acquisition module, data from the in-vehicle sensors were obtained from the CAN bus, the brake pedal (externally instrumented), and the driver's signals (instrumented with an inertial sensor and electromyography of their leg), to observe the driver and car information and evaluate the correlation hypothesis between these data, as well as the importance of the brake pedal signal not usually available in all car models. Different sets of sensors were evaluated to analyze the performance of three classifiers when analyzing the driver's driving mode. It was found that there are superior results in classifying identity or behavior when driver signals are included. When the vehicle and driver attributes were used, hits above 0.93 were obtained in the identification of behavior and 0.96 in the identification of the driver; without driver signals, accuracy was more significant than 0.80 in identifying behavior. The results show a good correlation between vehicle data and data obtained from the driver, suggesting that further studies may be promising to improve the accuracy of rates based exclusively on vehicle characteristics, both for behavior identification and driver identification, thus allowing practical applications in embedded systems for local signaling and/or storing information about the driving mode, which is important for logistics companies.

Air pollution epidemiology: A simplified Generalized Linear Model approach optimized by bio-inspired metaheuristics.

Studies in air pollution epidemiology are of paramount importance in diagnosing and improve life quality. To explore new methods or modify existing ones is critical to obtain better results. Most air pollution epidemiology studies use the Generalized Linear Model, especially the default version of R, Splus, SAS, and Stata softwares, which use maximum likelihood estimators in parameter optimization. Also, a smooth time function (usually spline) is generally used as a pre-processing step to consider seasonal and long-term tendencies. This investigation introduces a new approach to GLM, proposing the estimation of the free coefficients through bio-inspired metaheuristics - Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithms, and Differential Evolution, as well as the replacement of the spline function by a simple normalization procedure. The considered case studies comprise three important cities of São Paulo state, Brazil with distinct characteristics: São Paulo, Campinas, and Cubatão. We considered the impact of particles with an aerodynamic diameter less than 10 µm (PM10), ambient temperature, and relative humidity in the number of hospital admissions for respiratory diseases (ICD-10, J00 to J99). The results showed that the new approach (especially PSO) brings performance gains compared to the default version of statistical software like R.