SensorTalk: An IoT Device Failure Detection and Calibration Mechanism for Smart Farming.

In an Internet of Things (IoT) system, it is essential that the data measured from the sensors are accurate so that the produced results are meaningful. For example, in AgriTalk, a smart farm platform for soil cultivation with a large number of sensors, the produced sensor data are used in several Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to provide precise farming for soil microbiome and fertility, disease regulation, irrigation regulation, and pest regulation. It is important that the sensor data are correctly used in AI modeling. Unfortunately, no sensor is perfect. Even for the sensors manufactured from the same factory, they may yield different readings. This paper proposes a solution called SensorTalk to automatically detect potential sensor failures and calibrate the aging sensors semi-automatically. Numerical examples are given to show the calibration tables for temperature and humidity sensors. When the sensors control the actuators, the SensorTalk solution can also detect whether a failure occurs within a detection delay. Both analytic and simulation models are proposed to appropriately select the detection delay so that, when a potential failure occurs, it is detected reasonably early without incurring too many false alarms. Specifically, our selection can limit the false detection probability to be less than 0.7%.

Sample size determination for a specific region in multiregional clinical trials with multiple co-primary endpoints.

Recently, multi-regional clinical trials (MRCTs), which incorporate subjects from many countries/regions around the world under the same protocol, have been widely conducted by many global pharmaceutical companies. The objective of such trials is to accelerate the development process for a drug and shorten the drug's approval time in key markets. Several statistical methods have been purposed for the design and evaluation of MRCTs, as well as for assessing the consistency of treatment effects across all regions with one primary endpoint. However, in some therapeutic areas (e.g., Alzheimer's disease), the clinical efficacy of a new treatment may be characterized by a set of possibly correlated endpoints, known as multiple co-primary endpoints. In this paper, we focus on a specific region and establish three statistical criteria for evaluating consistency between the specific region and overall results in MRCTs with multiple co-primary endpoints. More specifically, two of those criteria are used to assess whether the treatment effect in the region of interest is as large as that of the other regions or of the regions overall, while the other criterion is used to assess the consistency of the treatment effect of the specific region achieving a pre-specified threshold. The sample size required for the region of interest can also be evaluated based on these three criteria.