Adaptive wake and sleep detection for wearable systems

Sleep problems and disorders have a serious impact on human health and wellbeing. The rising costs for treating sleep-related chronic diseases in industrialized countries demands efficient prevention. Low-cost, wearable sleep / wake detection systems which give feedback on the wearer's "sleep performance" are a promising approach to reduce the risk of developing serious sleep disorders and fatigue. Not all bio-medical signals that are useful for sleep / wake discrimination can be easily recorded with wearable systems. Sensors often need to be placed in an obtrusive location on the body or cannot be efficiently embedded into a wearable frame. Furthermore, wearable systems have limited computational and energetic resources, which restrict the choice of sensors and algorithms for online processing and classification. Since wearable systems are used outside the laboratory, the recorded signals tend to be corrupted with additional noise that influences the precision of classification algorithms. In this thesis we present the research on a wearable sleep / wake classifier system that relies on cardiorespiratory (ECG and respiratory effort) and activity recordings and that works autonomously with minimal user interaction. This research included the selection of optimal signals and sensors, the development of a custom-tailored hardware demonstrator with embedded classification algorithms, and the realization of experiments in real-world environments for the customization and validation of the system. The processing and classification of the signals were based on Fourier transformations and artificial neural networks that are efficiently implementable into digital signal controllers. Literature analysis and empiric measurements revealed that cardiorespiratory signals are more promising for a wearable sleep / wake classification than clinically used signals such as brain potentials. The experiments conducted during this thesis showed that inter-subject differences within the recorded physiological signals make it difficult to design a sleep / wake classification model that can generalize to a group of subjects. This problem was addressed in two ways: First by adding features from another signal to the classifier, that is, measuring the behavioral quiescence during sleep using accelerometers. Conducted research on different feature extraction methods from accelerometer data showed that this data generalizes well for distinct subjects in the study group. In addition, research on user-adaptation methods was conducted. Behavioral sleep and wake measures, notably the measurement of reactivity and activity, were developed to build up a priori knowledge that was used to adapt the classification algorithm automatically to new situations. This thesis demonstrates the design and development of a low-cost, wearable hardware and embedded software for on-line sleep / wake discrimination. The proposed automatic user-adaptive classifier is advantageous compared to previously suggested classification methods that generalize over multiple subjects, because it can take changes in the wearer's physiology and sleep / wake behavior into account without adjustment from a human expert. The results of this thesis contribute to the development of smart, wearable, bio-physiological monitoring systems which require a high degree of autonomy and have only low computational resources available. We believe that the proposed sleep / wake classification system is a first promising step toward a context-aware system for sleep management, sleep disorder prevention, and reduction of fatigue.

Fourier Sampling in Signal Processing and Numerical Linear Algebra

Amir Zandieh

This thesis focuses on developing efficient algorithmic tools for processing large datasets. In many modern data analysis tasks, the sheer volume of available datasets far outstrips our abilities to process them. This scenario commonly arises in tasks including parameter tuning of machine learning models (e.g., Google Vizier) and training neural networks. These tasks often require solving numerical linear algebraic problems on large matrices, making the classical primitives prohibitively expensive. Hence, there is a crucial need to efficiently compress the available datasets. In other settings, even collecting the input dataset is extremely expensive, making it vital to design optimal data sampling strategies. This is common in applications such as MRI acquisition and spectrum sensing. The fundamental questions above are often dual to each other, and hence can be addressed using the same set of core techniques. Indeed, exploiting structured Fourier sparsity is a recurring source of efficiency in this thesis, leading to both fast numerical linear algebra methods and sample efficient data acquisition schemes. One of the main results that we present in this thesis is the first Sublinear-time Model-based Sparse FFT algorithm that achieves a nearly optimal sample complexity for recovery of every signal whose Fourier transform is well approximated by a small number of blocks (e.g., such structure is common in spectrum sensing). Our method matches in sublinear time the result of Baraniuk et. al. (2010), which started the field of model-based compressed sensing. Another highlight of this thesis includes the first Dimension-independent Sparse FFT algorithm that, computes the Fourier transform of a sparse signal in sublinear runtime in any dimension. This is the first algorithm that just like the FFT of Cooley and Tukey is dimension independent and avoids the curse of dimensionality inherent to all previously known techniques. Finally, we give a Universal Sampling Scheme for the reconstruction of structured Fourier signals from continuous measurements. Our approach matches the classical results of Slepian, Pollak, and Landau (1960s) on the reconstruction of bandlimited signals via Prolate Spheroidal Wave Functions and extends these results to a wide class of Fourier structure types. Besides having classical applications in signal processing and data analysis, Fourier techniques have been at the core of many machine learning tasks such as Kernel Matrix Approximation. The second half of this thesis is dedicated to finding compressed and low-rank representations of kernel matrices, which are the primary means of computation with large kernel matrices in machine learning. We build on Fourier techniques and achieve spectral approximation guarantees to the Gaussian kernel using an optimal number of samples, significantly improving upon the classical Random Fourier Features of Rahimi and Recht (2008). Finally, we present a nearly-optimal Oblivious Subspace Embedding for high-degree Polynomial kernels which leads to nearly-optimal embeddings of the high-dimensional Gaussian kernel. This is the first result that does not suffer from an exponential loss in the degree of the polynomial kernel or the dimension of the input point set, providing exponential improvements over the prior works, including the TensorSketch of Pagh (2013) and application of the celebrated Fast Multipole Method of Greengard and Rokhlin (1986) to the kernel approximation problem.

EPFL2020

Monitoring of Cardiovascular and Neurological Diseases Using Wearable Devices

Dionisije Sopic

In this thesis, I focus on monitoring of patients suffering from cardiovascular and neurological diseases through the use of wearable devices. The main diseases considered in this thesis are atrial fibrillation (AF), myocardial infarction (MI), and epilepsy. The proposed methods for the detection of the considered cardiovascular diseases use ECG as the main biosignal, whereas the main biosignal used for detecting epileptic seizures is EEG. Firstly, I propose a hierarchical heart-rhythm classification method for AF detection from a single lead ECG recording. The proposed method is based on the features that capture the morphology of important ECG signal segments, along with heart-rate oscillations and time and frequency domain features of the ECG signal. Furthermore, the classification scheme used in this method incorporates two different classifiers: a multiclass classifier and a random forest classifier, resulting in an F1 score of 78.95% for AF detection. Secondly, I address the problem of early detection and prevention of MI by introducing a real-time event-driven classification technique that uses a hierarchical classifier with multiple levels. The main goal of this technique is to maintain a high classification accuracy while reducing the complexity of the classification algorithm. The reduction in computational complexity, in turn, results in a longer battery life, which is an important factor for wearable devices. The proposed technique is validated on a public database and ported on a real-life wearable device. The experimental evaluation of the proposed technique on MI data shows that this scheme reduces the energy consumption by a factor of 2.60, with no significant loss in classification performance. The third chapter of this thesis is split into two parts and it focuses on epilepsy. In the first part, I present a real-time method for personalized epileptic seizure detection that uses EEG signals acquired from two electrode pairs: F7T3, and F8T4. The proposed method reaches a sensitivity of 90.98% and specificity of 92.10% on the database used in this study. Furthermore, this method is ported on a pair of eyeglasses in which the used electrodes are embedded and hidden in the temples, allowing for 2.71 days of operation on a single battery charge. This method overcomes the lack of portability and the effect of social stigma of EEG caps, which are used as a gold standard technique for epilepsy detection. Since the main pitfall of epilepsy detection algorithms is the unacceptably high number of false alarms, in the last part of my thesis, I propose an interpretable patient-specific approach to false alarm reduction for epilepsy detection. This approach is based on similarly occurring morphological EEG signal patterns (seizure signature) that occur frequently during seizures. The proposed approach has been experimentally validated on more than 5500 hours of long-term EEG recordings, resulting in a high classification performance with no false positive alarms. The high degree of interpretability of this method can help physicians discover seizures faster, as well as it can be used to improve data labeling quality in publicly available databases, which confirms its applicability for long-term seizure monitoring.

EPFL2020

Error handling in multimodal voice-enabled interfaces of tour-guide robots using graphical models

Plamen Prodanov

Mobile service robots are going to play an increasing role in the society of humans. Voice-enabled interaction with service robots becomes very important, if such robots are to be deployed in real-world environments and accepted by the vast majority of potential human users. The research presented in this thesis addresses the problem of speech recognition integration in an interactive voice-enabled interface of a service robot, in particular a tour-guide robot. The task of a tour-guide robot is to engage visitors to mass exhibitions (users) in dialogue providing the services it is designed for (e.g. exhibit presentations) within a limited time. In managing tour-guide dialogues, extracting the user goal (intention) for requesting a particular service at each dialogue state is the key issue. In mass exhibition conditions speech recognition errors are inevitable because of noisy speech and uncooperative users of robots with no prior experience in robotics. They can jeopardize the user goal identification. Wrongly identified user goals can lead to communication failures. Therefore, to reduce the risk of such failures, methods for detecting and compensating for communication failures in human-robot dialogue are needed. During the short-term interaction with visitors, the interpretation of the user goal at each dialogue state can be improved by combining speech recognition in the speech modality with information from other available robot modalities. The methods presented in this thesis exploit probabilistic models for fusing information from speech and auxiliary modalities of the robot for user goal identification and communication failure detection. To compensate for the detected communication failures we investigate multimodal methods for recovery from communication failures. To model the process of modality fusion, taking into account the uncertainties in the information extracted from each input modality during human-robot interaction, we use the probabilistic framework of Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks are graphical models that represent a joint probability function over a set of random variables. They are used to model the dependencies among variables associated with the user goals, modality related events (e.g. the event of user presence that is inferred from the laser scanner modality of the robot), and observed modality features providing evidence in favor of these modality events. Bayesian networks are used to calculate posterior probabilities over the possible user goals at each dialogue state. These probabilities serve as a base in deciding if the user goal is valid, i.e. if it can be mapped into a tour-guide service (e.g. exhibit presentation) or is undefined – signaling a possible communication failure. The Bayesian network can be also used to elicit probabilities over the modality events revealing information about the possible cause for a communication failure. Introducing new user goal aspects (e.g. new modality events and related features) that provide auxiliary information for detecting communication failures makes the design process cumbersome, calling for a systematic approach in the Bayesian network modelling. Generally, introducing new variables for user goal identification in the Bayesian networks can lead to complex and computationally expensive models. In order to make the design process more systematic and modular, we adapt principles from the theory of grounding in human communication. When people communicate, they resolve understanding problems in a collaborative joint effort of providing evidence of common shared knowledge (grounding). We use Bayesian network topologies, tailored to limited computational resources, to model a state-based grounding model fusing information from three different input modalities (laser, video and speech) to infer possible grounding states. These grounding states are associated with modality events showing if the user is present in range for communication, if the user is attending to the interaction, whether the speech modality is reliable, and if the user goal is valid. The state-based grounding model is used to compute probabilities that intermediary grounding states have been reached. This serves as a base for detecting if the the user has reached the final grounding state, or wether a repair dialogue sequence is needed. In the case of a repair dialogue sequence, the tour-guide robot can exploit the multiple available modalities along with speech. For example, if the user has failed to reach the grounding state related to her/his presence in range for communication, the robot can use its move modality to search and attract the attention of the visitors. In the case when speech recognition is detected to be unreliable, the robot can offer the alternative use of the buttons modality in the repair sequence. Given the probability of each grounding state, and the dialogue sequence that can be executed in the next dialogue state, a tour-guide robot has different preferences on the possible dialogue continuation. If the possible dialogue sequences at each dialogue state are defined as actions, the introduced principle of maximum expected utility (MEU) provides an explicit way of action selection, based on the action utility, given the evidence about the user goal at each dialogue state. Decision networks, constructed as graphical models based on Bayesian networks are proposed to perform MEU-based decisions, incorporating the utility of the actions to be chosen at each dialogue state by the tour-guide robot. These action utilities are defined taking into account the tour-guide task requirements. The proposed graphical models for user goal identification and dialogue error handling in human-robot dialogue are evaluated in experiments with multimodal data. These data were collected during the operation of the tour-guide robot RoboX at the Autonomous System Lab of EPFL and at the Swiss National Exhibition in 2002 (Expo.02). The evaluation experiments use component and system level metrics for technical (objective) and user-based (subjective) evaluation. On the component level, the technical evaluation is done by calculating accuracies, as objective measures of the performance of the grounding model, and the resulting performance of the user goal identification in dialogue. The benefit of the proposed error handling framework is demonstrated comparing the accuracy of a baseline interactive system, employing only speech recognition for user goal identification, and a system equipped with multimodal grounding models for error handling.

EPFL2006

Error handling in multimodal voice-enabled interfaces of tour-guide robots using graphical models

Plamen Prodanov

EPFL2006

Monitoring of Cardiovascular and Neurological Diseases Using Wearable Devices

Dionisije Sopic

EPFL2020

Fourier Sampling in Signal Processing and Numerical Linear Algebra

Amir Zandieh

EPFL2020