Wearable intelligent throat enables natural speech in stroke patients with dysarthria

Wearable silent speech systems hold significant potential for restoring communication in patients with speech impairments. However, seamless, coherent speech remains elusive, and clinical efficacy is still unproven. Here, we present an AI-driven intelligent throat (IT) system that integrates throat muscle vibrations and carotid pulse signal sensors with large language model (LLM) processing to enable fluent, emotionally expressive communication. The system utilizes ultrasensitive textile strain sensors to capture high-quality signals from the neck area and supports token-level processing for real-time, continuous speech decoding, enabling seamless, delay-free communication. In tests with five stroke patients with dysarthria, IT's LLM agents intelligently corrected token errors and enriched sentence-level emotional and logical coherence, achieving low error rates (4.2% word error rate, 2.9% sentence error rate) and a 55% increase in user satisfaction. This work establishes a portable, intuitive communication platform for patients with dysarthria with the potential to be applied broadly across different neurological conditions and in multi-language support systems.

A Unified Platform for At-Home Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Enabled by Wearable Technologies and Artificial Intelligence

At-home rehabilitation for post-stroke patients presents significant challenges, as continuous, personalized care is often limited outside clinical settings. Additionally, the absence of comprehensive solutions addressing diverse rehabilitation needs in home environments complicates recovery efforts. Here, we introduce a smart home platform that integrates wearable sensors, ambient monitoring, and large language model (LLM)-powered assistance to provide seamless health monitoring and intelligent support. The system leverages machine learning enabled plantar pressure arrays for motor recovery assessment (94% classification accuracy), a wearable eye-tracking module for cognitive evaluation, and ambient sensors for precise smart home control (100% operational success, <1 s latency). Additionally, the LLM-powered agent, Auto-Care, offers real-time interventions, such as health reminders and environmental adjustments, enhancing user satisfaction by 29%. This work establishes a fully integrated platform for long-term, personalized rehabilitation, offering new possibilities for managing chronic conditions and supporting aging populations.

Deep Learning for Motion Classification in Ankle Exoskeletons Using Surface EMG and IMU Signals

Ankle exoskeletons have garnered considerable interest for their potential to enhance mobility and reduce fall risks, particularly among the aging population. The efficacy of these devices relies on accurate real-time prediction of the user's intended movements through sensor-based inputs. This paper presents a novel motion prediction framework that integrates three Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and eight surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensors to capture both kinematic and muscular activity data. A comprehensive set of activities, representative of everyday movements in barrier-free environments, was recorded for the purpose. Our findings reveal that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) slightly outperform Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks on a dataset of five motion tasks, achieving classification accuracies of $96.5 \pm 0.8 \%$ and $87.5 \pm 2.9 \%$, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate the system's proficiency in transfer learning, enabling accurate motion classification for new subjects using just ten samples per class for finetuning. The robustness of the model is demonstrated by its resilience to sensor failures resulting in absent signals, maintaining reliable performance in real-world scenarios. These results underscore the potential of deep learning algorithms to enhance the functionality and safety of ankle exoskeletons, ultimately improving their usability in daily life.

A deep learning-enabled smart garment for versatile sleep behaviour monitoring

Continuous monitoring and accurate detection of complex sleep patterns associated to different sleep-related conditions is essential, not only for enhancing sleep quality but also for preventing the risk of developing chronic illnesses associated to unhealthy sleep. Despite significant advances in research, achieving versatile recognition of various unhealthy and sub-healthy sleep patterns with simple wearable devices at home remains a significant challenge. Here, we report a robust and durable ultrasensitive strain sensor array printed on a smart garment, in its collar region. This solution allows detecting subtle vibrations associated with multiple sleep patterns at the extrinsic laryngeal muscles. Equipped with a deep learning neural network, it can precisely identify six sleep states-nasal breathing, mouth breathing, snoring, bruxism, central sleep apnea (CSA), and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA)-with an impressive accuracy of 98.6%, all without requiring specific positioning. We further demonstrate its explainability and generalization capabilities in practical applications. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) visualizations reflect comprehensive signal pattern analysis with low bias. Transfer learning tests show that the system can achieve high accuracy (overall accuracy of 95%) on new users with very few-shot learning (less than 15 samples per class). The scalable manufacturing process, robustness, high accuracy, and excellent generalization of the smart garment make it a promising tool for next-generation continuous sleep monitoring.

Dissociation of Faithful and Unfaithful Reasoning in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. Our research investigates how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought, reaching the correct final answer despite mistakes in the reasoning text. Through analysis of these error recovery behaviors, we find evidence for unfaithfulness in Chain of Thought, but we also identify many clear examples of faithful error recovery behaviors. We identify factors that shift LLM recovery behavior: LLMs recover more frequently from obvious errors and in contexts that provide more evidence for the correct answer. However, unfaithful recoveries show the opposite behavior, occurring more frequently for more difficult error positions. Our results indicate that there are distinct mechanisms driving faithful and unfaithful error recoveries. Our results challenge the view that LLM reasoning is a uniform, coherent process.

Diagnosis of Multiple Fundus Disorders Amidst a Scarcity of Medical Experts Via Self-supervised Machine Learning

Fundus diseases are major causes of visual impairment and blindness worldwide, especially in underdeveloped regions, where the shortage of ophthalmologists hinders timely diagnosis. AI-assisted fundus image analysis has several advantages, such as high accuracy, reduced workload, and improved accessibility, but it requires a large amount of expert-annotated data to build reliable models. To address this dilemma, we propose a general self-supervised machine learning framework that can handle diverse fundus diseases from unlabeled fundus images. Our method's AUC surpasses existing supervised approaches by 15.7%, and even exceeds performance of a single human expert. Furthermore, our model adapts well to various datasets from different regions, races, and heterogeneous image sources or qualities from multiple cameras or devices. Our method offers a label-free general framework to diagnose fundus diseases, which could potentially benefit telehealth programs for early screening of people at risk of vision loss.

SSVT: Self-Supervised Vision Transformer For Eye Disease Diagnosis Based On Fundus Images

Machine learning-based fundus image diagnosis technologies trigger worldwide interest owing to their benefits such as reducing medical resource power and providing objective evaluation results. However, current methods are commonly based on supervised methods, bringing in a heavy workload to biomedical staff and hence suffering in expanding effective databases. To address this issue, in this article, we established a label-free method, name 'SSVT',which can automatically analyze un-labeled fundus images and generate high evaluation accuracy of 97.0% of four main eye diseases based on six public datasets and two datasets collected by Beijing Tongren Hospital. The promising results showcased the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised learning method, and the strong application potential in biomedical resource shortage regions to improve global eye health.

Ultrasensitive Textile Strain Sensors Redefine Wearable Silent Speech Interfaces with High Machine Learning Efficiency

Our research presents a wearable Silent Speech Interface (SSI) technology that excels in device comfort, time-energy efficiency, and speech decoding accuracy for real-world use. We developed a biocompatible, durable textile choker with an embedded graphene-based strain sensor, capable of accurately detecting subtle throat movements. This sensor, surpassing other strain sensors in sensitivity by 420%, simplifies signal processing compared to traditional voice recognition methods. Our system uses a computationally efficient neural network, specifically a one-dimensional convolutional neural network with residual structures, to decode speech signals. This network is energy and time-efficient, reducing computational load by 90% while achieving 95.25% accuracy for a 20-word lexicon and swiftly adapting to new users and words with minimal samples. This innovation demonstrates a practical, sensitive, and precise wearable SSI suitable for daily communication applications.

Intelligent machines work in unstructured environments by differential neural computing

Expecting intelligent machines to efficiently work in real world requires a new method to understand unstructured information in unknown environments with good accuracy, scalability and generalization, like human. Here, a memristive neural computing based perceptual signal differential processing and learning method for intelligent machines is presented, via extracting main features of environmental information and applying associated encoded stimuli to memristors, we successfully obtain human-like ability in processing unstructured environmental information, such as amplification (>720%) and adaptation (<50%) of mechanical stimuli. The method also exhibits good scalability and generalization, validated in two typical applications of intelligent machines: object grasping and autonomous driving. In the former, a robot hand experimentally realizes safe and stable grasping, through learning unknown object features (e.g., sharp corner and smooth surface) with a single memristor in 1 ms. In the latter, the decision-making information of 10 unstructured environments in autonomous driving (e.g., overtaking cars, pedestrians) are accurately (94%) extracted with a 40x25 memristor array. By mimicking the intrinsic nature of human low-level perception mechanisms in electronic memristive neural circuits, the proposed method is adaptable to diverse sensing technologies, helping intelligent machines to generate smart high-level decisions in real world.

Human Body Digital Twin: A Master Plan

The human body DT has the potential to revolutionize healthcare and wellness, but its responsible and effective implementation requires consideration of various factors. This article presents a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospects of the human body DT and proposes a five-level roadmap for its development. The roadmap covers the development of various components, such as wearable devices, data collection, data analysis, and decision-making systems. The article also highlights the necessary support, security, cost, and ethical considerations that must be addressed in order to ensure responsible and effective implementation of the human body DT. The proposed roadmap provides a framework for guiding future development and offers a unique perspective on the future of the human body DT, facilitating new interdisciplinary research and innovative solutions in this rapidly evolving field.