Preparing travel time data can be a time-consuming process, which greatly limits the flexibility of transport simulation models. In the current paper, we present an approach to integrate a routing engine locally in an existing modeling framework, hence enabling to dynamically calculate travel times in the constructed emergency medical services (EMS) simulation models. This integration eliminates the need for the pre-calculation typically required to prepare travel time data. Using the extended framework, we developed an EMS simulation model for stroke patients, which we applied in a scenario study to southern Sweden. This allowed us to evaluate the potential benefits of using dynamic travel time calculations in prehospital stroke care. The experimental results, supported by comparisons with pre-calculated travel times, confirm the effectiveness of our approach in integrating dynamic travel time calculations into the framework. Moreover, the results of our evaluation indicate that including this functionality in simulation models can provide more realistic results. Finally, our approach for local implementation of dynamic travel time calculations is faster and less restricted compared to using online services.

Falls frequently present substantial safety hazards to those who are alone, particularly the elderly. Deploying a rapid and proficient method for detecting falls is a highly effective approach to tackle this concealed peril. The majority of existing fall detection methods rely on either visual data or wearable devices, both of which have drawbacks. This research presents a multimodal approach that integrates video and audio modalities to address the issue of fall detection systems and enhances the accuracy of fall detection in challenging environmental conditions. This multimodal approach, which leverages the benefits of attention mechanism in both video and audio streams, utilizes features from both modalities through feature-level fusion to detect falls in unfavorable conditions where visual systems alone are unable to do so. We assessed the performance of our multimodal fall detection model using Le2i and UP-Fall datasets. Additionally, we compared our findings with other fall detection methods. The outstanding results of our multimodal model indicate its superior performance compared to single fall detection models.

This paper presents a novel Hierarchical Transfer and Multi-task Learning (HTMTL) approach designed to substantially improve the performance of scene classification networks by leveraging the collective influence of diverse scene types. HTMTL is distinguished by its ability to capture the interaction between various scene types, recognizing how context information from one scene category can enhance the classification performance of another. Our method, when applied to the Places365 dataset, demonstrates a significant improvement in the network’s ability to accurately identify scene types. By exploiting these inter-scene interactions, HTMTL significantly enhances scene classification performance, making it a potent tool for advancing scene understanding and classification. Additionally, this study explores the contribution of individual tasks and task groupings on the performance of other tasks. To further validate the generality of HTMTL, we applied it to the Cityscapes dataset, where the results also show promise. This indicates the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach across different datasets and scene types.

A mobile stroke unit (MSU) is a specialized ambulance, enabling to shorten the time to diagnosis and treatment for stroke patients. In the current paper, we present a simulation-based approach to study the potential impacts of collaborative use of regular ambulances and MSUs in prehospital transportation for stroke patients, denoted as co-dispatching. We integrated a co-dispatch policy in an existing modeling framework for constructing emergency medical services simulation models. In a case study, we applied the extended framework to southern Sweden to evaluate the effectiveness of using the co-dispatch policy for different types of stroke. The results indicate reduced time to diagnosis and treatment for stroke patients when using the co-dispatch policy compared to the situation where either a regular ambulance or an MSU is assigned for a stroke incident.

Object detection is a critical task in computer vision with applications across various domains, ranging from autonomous driving to surveillance systems. Despite extensive research on improving the performance of object detection systems, identifying all objects in different places remains a challenge. The traditional object detection approaches focus primarily on extracting and analyzing visual features without considering the contextual information about the places of objects. However, entities in many real-world scenarios closely relate to their surrounding environment, providing crucial contextual cues for accurate detection. This study investigates the importance and impact of places of images (indoor and outdoor) on object detection accuracy. To this purpose, we propose an approach that first categorizes images into two distinct categories: indoor and outdoor. We then train and evaluate three object detection models (indoor, outdoor, and general models) based on YOLOv5 and 19 classes of the PASCAL VOC dataset and 79 classes of COCO dataset that consider places. The experimental evaluations show that the specialized indoor and outdoor models have higher mAP (mean Average Precision) to detect objects in specific environments compared to the general model that detects objects found both indoors and outdoors. Indeed, the network can detect objects more accurately in similar places with common characteristics due to semantic relationships between objects and their surroundings, and the network’s misdetection is diminished. All the results were analyzed statistically with t-tests.

In this paper, we study temporal logic for finite linear structures and surjective bounded morphisms between them. We give a characterisation of such structures by modal formulas and show that every pair of linear structures with a bounded morphism between them can be uniquely characterised by a temporal formula up to an isomorphism. As the main result, we prove Kripke completeness of the logic with respect to the class of finite linear structures with bounded morphisms between them. 

A mobile stroke unit (MSU) is an advanced ambulance equipped with specialized technology and trained healthcare personnel to provide on-site diagnosis and treatment for stroke patients. Providing efficient access to healthcare (in a viable way) requires optimizing the placement of MSUs. In this study, we propose a time-efficient method based on a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the most suitable ambulance sites for the placement of MSUs (given the number of MSUs and a set of potential sites). We designed an efficient encoding scheme for the input data (the number of MSUs and potential sites) and developed custom selection, crossover, and mutation operators that are tailored according to the characteristics of the MSU allocation problem. We present a case study on the Southern Healthcare Region in Sweden to demonstrate the generality and robustness of our proposed GA method. Particularly, we demonstrate our method's flexibility and adaptability through a series of experiments across multiple settings. For the considered scenario, our proposed method outperforms the exhaustive search method by finding the best locations within 0.16, 1.44, and 10.09 minutes in the deployment of three MSUs, four MSUs, and five MSUs, resulting in 8.75x, 16.36x, and 24.77x faster performance, respectively. Furthermore, we validate the method's robustness by iterating GA multiple times and reporting its average fitness score (performance convergence). In addition, we show the effectiveness of our method by evaluating key hyperparameters, that is, population size, mutation rate, and the number of generations.

Mobile Stroke Units (MSUs) are specialized ambulances that can diagnose and treat stroke patients; hence, reducing the time to treatment for stroke patients. Optimal placement of MSUs in a geographic region enables to maximize access to treatment for stroke patients. We contribute a mathematical model to optimally place MSUs in a geographic region. The objective function of the model takes the tradeoff perspective, balancing between the efficiency and equity perspectives for the MSU placement. Solving the optimization problem enables to optimize the placement of MSUs for the chosen tradeoff between the efficiency and equity perspectives. We applied the model to the Blekinge and Kronoberg counties of Sweden to illustrate the applicability of our model. The experimental findings show both the correctness of the suggested model and the benefits of placing MSUs in the considered regions.

This paper concerns the novel concept of an Interactive Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Sensor (IDIVS), which extends virtual/soft sensors towards making use of user input through interactive learning (IML) and transfer learning. In research, many studies can be found on using machine learning in this domain, but not much on using IML. This paper contributes by highlighting how this can be done and the associated positive potential effects and challenges. An IDIVS provides a sensor-like output and achieves the output through the data fusion of sensor values or from the output values of other IDIVSs. We focus on settings where people are present in different roles: from basic service users in the environment being sensed to interactive service users supporting the learning of the IDIVS, as well as configurators of the IDIVS and explicit IDIVS teachers. The IDIVS aims at managing situations where sensors may disappear and reappear and be of heterogeneous types. We refer to and recap the major findings from related experiments and validation in complementing work. Further, we point at several application areas: smart building, smart mobility, smart learning, and smart health. The information properties and capabilities needed in the IDIVS, with extensions towards information security, are introduced and discussed.

Constructing simulation models can be a complex and time-consuming task, in particular if the models are constructed from scratch or if a general-purpose simulation modeling tool is used. In this paper, we propose a model construction framework, which aims to simplify the process of constructing discrete event simulation models for emergency medical service (EMS) policy analysis. The main building blocks used in the framework are a set of general activities that can be used to represent different EMS care chains modeled as flowcharts. The framework allows to build models only by specifying input data, including demographic and statistical data, and providing a care chain of activities and decisions. In a case study, we evaluated the framework by using it to construct a model for the simulation of the EMS activities related to acute stroke. Our evaluation shows that the predefined activities included in the framework are sufficient to build a simulation model for the rather complex case of acute stroke.