Multi-objective Feature Selection in Remote Health Monitoring Applications

Radio frequency (RF) signals have facilitated the development of non-contact human monitoring tasks, such as vital signs measurement, activity recognition, and user identification. In some specific scenarios, an RF signal analysis framework may prioritize the performance of one task over that of others. In response to this requirement, we employ a multi-objective optimization approach inspired by biological principles to select discriminative features that enhance the accuracy of breathing patterns recognition while simultaneously impeding the identification of individual users. This approach is validated using a novel vital signs dataset consisting of 50 subjects engaged in four distinct breathing patterns. Our findings indicate a remarkable result: a substantial divergence in accuracy between breathing recognition and user identification. As a complementary viewpoint, we present a contrariwise result to maximize user identification accuracy and minimize the system's capacity for breathing activity recognition.

Non-contact Multimodal Indoor Human Monitoring Systems: A Survey

Indoor human monitoring systems leverage a wide range of sensors, including cameras, radio devices, and inertial measurement units, to collect extensive data from users and the environment. These sensors contribute diverse data modalities, such as video feeds from cameras, received signal strength indicators and channel state information from WiFi devices, and three-axis acceleration data from inertial measurement units. In this context, we present a comprehensive survey of multimodal approaches for indoor human monitoring systems, with a specific focus on their relevance in elderly care. Our survey primarily highlights non-contact technologies, particularly cameras and radio devices, as key components in the development of indoor human monitoring systems. Throughout this article, we explore well-established techniques for extracting features from multimodal data sources. Our exploration extends to methodologies for fusing these features and harnessing multiple modalities to improve the accuracy and robustness of machine learning models. Furthermore, we conduct comparative analysis across different data modalities in diverse human monitoring tasks and undertake a comprehensive examination of existing multimodal datasets. This extensive survey not only highlights the significance of indoor human monitoring systems but also affirms their versatile applications. In particular, we emphasize their critical role in enhancing the quality of elderly care, offering valuable insights into the development of non-contact monitoring solutions applicable to the needs of aging populations.

Audio-Based Classification of Respiratory Diseases using Advanced Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Assistive Diagnosis Support

In global healthcare, respiratory diseases are a leading cause of mortality, underscoring the need for rapid and accurate diagnostics. To advance rapid screening techniques via auscultation, our research focuses on employing one of the largest publicly available medical database of respiratory sounds to train multiple machine learning models able to classify different health conditions. Our method combines Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and spectral analysis to extract physiologically relevant biosignals from acoustic data, closely tied to cardiovascular and respiratory patterns, making our approach apart in its departure from conventional audio feature extraction practices. We use Power Spectral Density analysis and filtering techniques to select Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) strongly correlated with underlying physiological phenomena. These biosignals undergo a comprehensive feature extraction process for predictive modeling. Initially, we deploy a binary classification model that demonstrates a balanced accuracy of 87% in distinguishing between healthy and diseased individuals. Subsequently, we employ a six-class classification model that achieves a balanced accuracy of 72% in diagnosing specific respiratory conditions like pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). For the first time, we also introduce regression models that estimate age and body mass index (BMI) based solely on acoustic data, as well as a model for gender classification. Our findings underscore the potential of this approach to significantly enhance assistive and remote diagnostic capabilities.

Estimating exercise-induced fatigue from thermal facial images

Exercise-induced fatigue resulting from physical activity can be an early indicator of overtraining, illness, or other health issues. In this article, we present an automated method for estimating exercise-induced fatigue levels through the use of thermal imaging and facial analysis techniques utilizing deep learning models. Leveraging a novel dataset comprising over 400,000 thermal facial images of rested and fatigued users, our results suggest that exercise-induced fatigue levels could be predicted with only one static thermal frame with an average error smaller than 15\%. The results emphasize the viability of using thermal imaging in conjunction with deep learning for reliable exercise-induced fatigue estimation.

Improving Depression estimation from facial videos with face alignment, training optimization and scheduling

Deep learning models have shown promising results in recognizing depressive states using video-based facial expressions. While successful models typically leverage using 3D-CNNs or video distillation techniques, the different use of pretraining, data augmentation, preprocessing, and optimization techniques across experiments makes it difficult to make fair architectural comparisons. We propose instead to enhance two simple models based on ResNet-50 that use only static spatial information by using two specific face alignment methods and improved data augmentation, optimization, and scheduling techniques. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets obtain similar results to sophisticated spatio-temporal models for single streams, while the score-level fusion of two different streams outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our findings suggest that specific modifications in the preprocessing and training process result in noticeable differences in the performance of the models and could hide the actual originally attributed to the use of different neural network architectures.

Depression Recognition using Remote Photoplethysmography from Facial Videos

Depression is a mental illness that may be harmful to an individual's health. The detection of mental health disorders in the early stages and a precise diagnosis are critical to avoid social, physiological, or psychological side effects. This work analyzes physiological signals to observe if different depressive states have a noticeable impact on the blood volume pulse (BVP) and the heart rate variability (HRV) response. Although typically, HRV features are calculated from biosignals obtained with contact-based sensors such as wearables, we propose instead a novel scheme that directly extracts them from facial videos, just based on visual information, removing the need for any contact-based device. Our solution is based on a pipeline that is able to extract complete remote photoplethysmography signals (rPPG) in a fully unsupervised manner. We use these rPPG signals to calculate over 60 statistical, geometrical, and physiological features that are further used to train several machine learning regressors to recognize different levels of depression. Experiments on two benchmark datasets indicate that this approach offers comparable results to other audiovisual modalities based on voice or facial expression, potentially complementing them. In addition, the results achieved for the proposed method show promising and solid performance that outperforms hand-engineered methods and is comparable to deep learning-based approaches.