GRAZE: Grounded Refinement and Motion-Aware Zero-Shot Event Localization

American football practice generates video at scale, yet the interaction of interest occupies only a brief window of each long, untrimmed clip. Reliable biomechanical analysis, therefore, depends on spatiotemporal localization that identifies both the interacting entities and the onset of contact. We study First Point of Contact (FPOC), defined as the first frame in which a player physically touches a tackle dummy, in unconstrained practice footage with camera motion, clutter, multiple similarly equipped athletes, and rapid pose changes around impact. We present GRAZE, a training-free pipeline for FPOC localization that requires no labeled tackle-contact examples. GRAZE uses Grounding DINO to discover candidate player-dummy interactions, refines them with motion-aware temporal reasoning, and uses SAM2 as an explicit pixel-level verifier of contact rather than relying on detection confidence alone. This separation between candidate discovery and contact confirmation makes the approach robust to cluttered scenes and unstable grounding near impact. On 738 tackle-practice videos, GRAZE produces valid outputs for 97.4% of clips and localizes FPOC within $\pm$ 10 frames on 77.5% of all clips and within $\pm$ 20 frames on 82.7% of all clips. These results show that frame-accurate contact onset localization in real-world practice footage is feasible without task-specific training.

ViTs for Action Classification in Videos: An Approach to Risky Tackle Detection in American Football Practice Videos

Early identification of hazardous actions in contact sports enables timely intervention and improves player safety. We present a method for detecting risky tackles in American football practice videos and introduce a substantially expanded dataset for this task. Our work contains 733 single-athlete-dummy tackle clips, each temporally localized around first point contact and labeled with a strike zone component of the standardized Assessment for Tackling Technique (SATT-3), extending prior work that reported 178 annotated videos. Using a Vision transformer-based model with imbalance-aware training, we obtain risky recall of 0.67 and Risky F1 of 0.59 under crossvalidation. Relative to the previous baseline in a smaller subset (risky recall of 0.58; Risky F1 0.56 ), our approach improves risky recall by more than 8% points on a much larger dataset. These results indicate that the vision transformer-based video analysis, coupled with careful handling of class imbalance, can reliably detect rare but safety-critical tackling patterns, offering a practical pathway toward coach-centered injury prevention tools.

Advancing Remote and Continuous Cardiovascular Patient Monitoring through a Novel and Resource-efficient IoT-Driven Framework

Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of fatalities worldwide, often occurring suddenly with limited time for intervention. Current healthcare monitoring systems for cardiac patients rely heavily on hospitalization, which can be impractical for continuous monitoring. This paper presents a novel IoT-based solution for remote, real-time tracking of critical cardiac metrics, addressing the pressing need for accessible and continuous healthcare, particularly for the aging population in Pakistan. The proposed IoT kit measures essential parameters such as body temperature, heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), oxygen saturation (SPO2), and electrocardiography (ECG). A key innovation of the system is its integration with a cloud-based application, enabling constant remote monitoring and incorporating an alarm mechanism to alert medical professionals for timely intervention, reducing the risk of catastrophic incidents. The system was tested in a clinical environment with 20 participants, demonstrating results closely aligned with those obtained using standard medical devices. The findings validate the system's potential for reliable remote monitoring, offering a significant step forward in proactive cardiac healthcare management. This novel approach combines IoT technology with cloud-based applications to provide a cost-effective and efficient solution for reducing unexpected fatalities among cardiac patients.