RSN Editorial 2017

Abstract

It is a pleasure to report that the Premium Award for papers published in the journal in 2015 is made to Branka Jokanovic, Moeness Amin, Yiming Zhang and Fauzia Ahmad of Villanova University, USA, for their paper Multi-Window Time and Frequency Signature Reconstruction from Undersampled Continuous-Wave Radar Measurements for Fall Detection’, which appeared in the February 2015 Special Issue on Application of Radar to Remote Patient Monitoring and Eldercare (vol.9. no.2, pp 173-183). This is an example of an exciting new application of passive radar. It is attractive to provide some form of indoor monitoring of elderly people living in sheltered accommodation and particularly to detect falls, which are a significant issue for the elderly. Radar-based techniques have the advantages over video monitoring that they are not invasive of privacy and do not depend on particular lighting conditions. This might be particularly important in monitoring an individual in the bathroom, where the likelihood of slippage or falling might be high. Furthermore, since elderly people tend to well-defined patterns of behaviour, a monitoring system of this kind could potentially ‘learn’ such patterns and detect and flag any anomalies. The paper analyses the radar time-frequency signature of fall events, as well as bending over, sitting and standing, using an approach based on compressive sensing and multi-window analysis. This demonstrates that falls can reliably be detected and classified. We warmly congratulate the authors on this award. The names of the members of the Editorial Board are listed inside the front cover of this journal; the members are distinguished researchers who represent the full scope of the journal, and they come from all over the world. They help with reaching decisions on submitted papers, encouraging authors to submit their work to the journal, and proposing topics for Special Issues and Special Sections. Finally, we express our gratitude to the referees for their time, expertise and hard work in reviewing papers. This is an essential part of the publication process, but necessarily the referees must remain anonymous. This Editorial is one place where we can acknowledge their contribution and record our thanks to them.