ECG Classification with an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System

Heart signals allow for a comprehensive analysis of the heart. Electrocardiography (ECG or EKG) uses electrodes to measure the electrical activity of the heart. Extracting ECG signals is a non-invasive process that opens the door to new possibilities for the application of advanced signal processing and data analysis techniques in the diagnosis of heart diseases. With the help of today’s large database of ECG signals, a computationally intelligent system can learn and take the place of a cardiologist. Detection of various abnormalities in the patient’s heart to identify various heart diseases can be made through an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) preprocessed by subtractive clustering. Six types of heartbeats are classified: normal sinus rhythm, premature ventricular contraction (PVC), atrial premature contraction (APC), left bundle branch block (LBBB), right bundle branch block (RBBB), and paced beats. The goal is to detect important characteristics of an ECG signal to determine if the patient’s heartbeat is normal or irregular. The results from three trials indicate an average accuracy of 98.10%, average sensitivity of 94.99%, and average specificity of 98.87%. These results are comparable to two artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms: gradient descent and Levenberg Marquardt, as well as the ANFIS preprocessed by grid partitioning

Implementation of User-Independent Hand Gesture Recognition Classification Models Using IMU and EMG-based Sensor Fusion Techniques

According to the World Health Organization, stroke is the third leading cause of disability. A common consequence of stroke is hemiparesis, which leads to the impairment of one side of the body and affects the performance of activities of daily living. It has been proven that targeting the motor impairments as early as possible while using wearable mechatronic devices as a robot assisted therapy, and letting the patient be in control of the robotic system can improve the rehabilitation outcomes. However, despite the increased progress on control methods for wearable mechatronic devices, the need for a more natural interface that allows for better control remains. This work presents, a user-independent gesture classification method based on a sensor fusion technique that combines surface electromyography (EMG) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The Myo Armband was used to measure muscle activity and motion data from healthy subjects. Participants were asked to perform 10 types of gestures in 4 different arm positions while using the Myo on their dominant limb. Data obtained from 22 participants were used to classify the gestures using 4 different classification methods. Finally, for each classification method, a 5-fold cross-validation method was used to test the efficacy of the classification algorithms. Overall classification accuracies in the range of 33.11%-72.1% were obtained. However, following the optimization of the gesture datasets, the overall classification accuracies increased to the range of 45.5%-84.5%. These results suggest that by using the proposed sensor fusion approach, it is possible to achieve a more natural human machine interface that allows better control of wearable mechatronic devices during robot assisted therapies

Modelo adaptativo baseado em sensor virtual para eletromiografia de superfície com sistema de classificação tolerante a falhas

Apenas alguns sistemas de controle protético na literatura científica são baseados em algoritmos de reconhecimento de padrões, os quais são adaptados às mudanças que ocorrem no sinal mioelétrico ao longo do tempo, e, frequentemente, tais sistemas não são naturais e intuitivos. As mudanças no sinal mioelétrico são alguns dos vários desafios para as próteses mioelétricas serem amplamente utilizadas. O conceito do sensor virtual, que tem como objetivo fundamental estimar medidas indisponíveis por trás de outras medidas disponíveis, vem sendo utilizado em outras áreas de pesquisa. O sensor virtual aplicado à eletromiografia de superfície (sEMG) pode ajudar a minimizar esses problemas, tipicamente relacionados à degradação do sinal mioelétrico, os quais geralmente provocam uma diminuição na taxa de acerto da classificação dos movimentos por sistemas de inteligência computacional. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é o desenvolvimento de um sistema de classificação de movimentos tolerante a falhas, o qual utiliza o conceito de sensores virtuais para reduzir o impacto de degradação de sinais de sEMG. A segunda contribuição é um modelo do sinal de sEMG dinâmico e adaptativo para o sensor virtual, o qual produz um modelo de saída de sinal independente da aquisição física do sinal de interesse. A modelagem do sinal de sEMG é projetada de forma a combinar os conceitos de multicanais e sua correlação cruzada, além de utilizar um sistema de ajuste dos coeficientes de correlação, a fim de substituir os canais de sinais degradados Dois modelos são avaliados e detalhados: Time-Varying Autoregressive Moving Average (TVARMA) e o Time- Varying Kalman Filter (TVK). A terceira contribuição é a combinação de uma análise e detecção da contaminação do sinal realizada por um sensor de detecção tolerante a falhas (Sensor Fault-Tolerant Detector – SFTD). Os resultados da classificação dos movimentos foram apresentados comparando as técnicas usuais de classificação com o método da substituição do sinal degradado e um processo de retreinamento do classificador simplificado. Os resultados foram avaliados para cinco tipos de ruído em 16 estudos de caso da degradação dos canais de sEMG. O sistema adaptativo proposto sem o uso de técnicas de retreinamento do classificador recuperou a taxa de acerto média de classificação em até 46% para os ruídos de deslocamento de eletrodos e de saturação. Devido às limitações do sistema proposto quanto aos ruídos de artefato de movimento, de interferência de linha de energia e ECG, o sistema apresentado pode ser utilizado como uma técnica complementar com outras técnicas de classificação para aumentar o impacto clínico da prótese mioelétrica. Entretanto, o sistema ainda requer uma análise quanto a diferentes níveis de SNR antes de uma otimização do algoritmo. Além disso, o modelo TVARMA do sensor virtual obteve uma taxa de acerto média superior em comparação ao modelo TVK na maioria das situações avaliadas neste trabalho.Nowadays, only a few prosthetic control systems in the scientific literature are founded on pattern recognition algorithms adapted to changes that occur in the myoelectric signal over time and, frequently, such systems are not natural and intuitive. These are some of the several challenges for myoelectric prostheses for everyday use. The concept of the virtual sensor, which has as its fundamental objective to estimate unavailable measures based on other available measures, is already being used in other fields of research. The virtual sensor technique applied to surface electromyography (sEMG) can help to mitigate these problems, typically related to the degradation of the myoelectric signal that usually leads to a decrease in the classification accuracy of the movements characterized by intelligent computational systems. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is the Fault-Tolerant Classification System, that was developed using the concept of virtual sensors to reduce the degradation impact of sEMG signals. The second contribution is a dynamic and adaptive virtual sensor model, which produces a signal output model independent of the physical acquisition of the interest signal. The sEMG signal modeling was designed to combine multichannel concepts and their cross-correlation, in addition to the use of the correlation coefficient adjustment system to replace degraded signal channels. Two models were evaluated and detailed: Time-Varying Autoregressive Moving Average (TVARMA) and Time-Varying Kalman Filter (TVK) The third contribution is the analysis and detection of signal contamination by a Sensor Fault-Tolerant Detector (SFTD). The classification results of the movements were compared to the traditional classification techniques, the classification with the degraded signal replacement method and a simplified retraining process of the classifier. The results were evaluated for five noise types in 16 case studies of the sEMG channels degradation. The adaptive system proposed, without the classifier re-training techniques, was able to recover 46% of the mean classification accuracy for the electrodes displacement and saturation noise. Moreover, the proposed system can be used as a complementary technique with other classification techniques to increase the clinical impact of the myoelectric prosthesis since there are still limitations in the proposed method regarding the movement artifact noise, power line, and ECG interference. However, the system still requires an analysis of different SNR levels before the algorithm optimization. Also, the TVARMA model of the virtual sensor obtained a higher classification accuracy compared to the TVK model in most of the evaluated situations

On the Recognition of Emotion from Physiological Data

This work encompasses several objectives, but is primarily concerned with an experiment where 33 participants were shown 32 slides in order to create ‗weakly induced emotions‘. Recordings of the participants‘ physiological state were taken as well as a self report of their emotional state. We then used an assortment of classifiers to predict emotional state from the recorded physiological signals, a process known as Physiological Pattern Recognition (PPR). We investigated techniques for recording, processing and extracting features from six different physiological signals: Electrocardiogram (ECG), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electromyography (EMG), for the corrugator muscle, skin temperature for the finger and respiratory rate. Improvements to the state of PPR emotion detection were made by allowing for 9 different weakly induced emotional states to be detected at nearly 65% accuracy. This is an improvement in the number of states readily detectable. The work presents many investigations into numerical feature extraction from physiological signals and has a chapter dedicated to collating and trialing facial electromyography techniques. There is also a hardware device we created to collect participant self reported emotional states which showed several improvements to experimental procedure

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimization method, proposed originally by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of the most commonly used optimization techniques. This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (to multiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research, mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms

Deep Learning Based Upper-limb Motion Estimation Using Surface Electromyography

To advance human-machine interfaces (HMI) that can help disabled people reconstruct lost functions of upper-limbs, machine learning (ML) techniques, particularly classification-based pattern recognition (PR), have been extensively implemented to decode human movement intentions from surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. However, performances of ML can be substantially affected, or even limited, by feature engineering that requires expertise in both domain knowledge and experimental experience. To overcome this limitation, researchers are now focusing on deep learning (DL) techniques to derive informative, representative, and transferable features from raw data automatically. Despite some progress reported in recent literature, it is still very challenging to achieve reliable and robust interpretation of user intentions in practical scenarios. This is mainly because of the high complexity of upper-limb motions and the non-stable characteristics of sEMG signals. Besides, the PR scheme only identifies discrete states of motion. To complete coordinated tasks such as grasping, users have to rely on a sequential on/off control of each individual function, which is inherently different from the simultaneous and proportional control (SPC) strategy adopted by the natural motions of upper-limbs. The aim of this thesis is to develop and advance several DL techniques for the estimation of upper-limb motions from sEMG, and the work is centred on three themes: 1) to improve the reliability of gesture recognition by rejecting uncertain classification outcomes; 2) to build regression frameworks for joint kinematics estimation that enables SPC; and 3) to reduce the degradation of estimation performances when DL model is applied to a new individual. In order to achieve these objectives, the following efforts were made: 1) a confidence model was designed to predict the possibility of correctness with regard to each classification of convolutional neural networks (CNN), such that the uncertain recognition can be identified and rejected; 2) a hybrid framework using CNN for deep feature extraction and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) was constructed to conduct sequence regression, which could simultaneously exploit the temporal and spatial information in sEMG data; 3) the hybrid framework was further extended by integrating Kalman filter with LSTM units in the recursive learning process, obtaining a deep Kalman filter network (DKFN) to perform kinematics estimation more effectively; and 4) a novel regression scheme was proposed for supervised domain adaptation (SDA), based on which the model generalisation among subjects can be substantially enhanced

Adaptive threshold optimisation for colour-based lip segmentation in automatic lip-reading systems

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in ful lment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, September 2016Having survived the ordeal of a laryngectomy, the patient must come to terms with the resulting loss of speech. With recent advances in portable computing power, automatic lip-reading (ALR) may become a viable approach to voice restoration. This thesis addresses the image processing aspect of ALR, and focuses three contributions to colour-based lip segmentation. The rst contribution concerns the colour transform to enhance the contrast between the lips and skin. This thesis presents the most comprehensive study to date by measuring the overlap between lip and skin histograms for 33 di erent colour transforms. The hue component of HSV obtains the lowest overlap of 6:15%, and results show that selecting the correct transform can increase the segmentation accuracy by up to three times. The second contribution is the development of a new lip segmentation algorithm that utilises the best colour transforms from the comparative study. The algorithm is tested on 895 images and achieves percentage overlap (OL) of 92:23% and segmentation error (SE) of 7:39 %. The third contribution focuses on the impact of the histogram threshold on the segmentation accuracy, and introduces a novel technique called Adaptive Threshold Optimisation (ATO) to select a better threshold value. The rst stage of ATO incorporates -SVR to train the lip shape model. ATO then uses feedback of shape information to validate and optimise the threshold. After applying ATO, the SE decreases from 7:65% to 6:50%, corresponding to an absolute improvement of 1:15 pp or relative improvement of 15:1%. While this thesis concerns lip segmentation in particular, ATO is a threshold selection technique that can be used in various segmentation applications.MT201

Strategies for neural networks in ballistocardiography with a view towards hardware implementation

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of LutonThe work described in this thesis is based on the results of a clinical trial conducted by the research team at the Medical Informatics Unit of the University of Cambridge, which show that the Ballistocardiogram (BCG) has prognostic value in detecting impaired left ventricular function before it becomes clinically overt as myocardial infarction leading to sudden death. The objective of this study is to develop and demonstrate a framework for realising an on-line BCG signal classification model in a portable device that would have the potential to find pathological signs as early as possible for home health care. Two new on-line automatic BeG classification models for time domain BeG classification are proposed. Both systems are based on a two stage process: input feature extraction followed by a neural classifier. One system uses a principal component analysis neural network, and the other a discrete wavelet transform, to reduce the input dimensionality. Results of the classification, dimensionality reduction, and comparison are presented. It is indicated that the combined wavelet transform and MLP system has a more reliable performance than the combined neural networks system, in situations where the data available to determine the network parameters is limited. Moreover, the wavelet transfonn requires no prior knowledge of the statistical distribution of data samples and the computation complexity and training time are reduced. Overall, a methodology for realising an automatic BeG classification system for a portable instrument is presented. A fully paralJel neural network design for a low cost platform using field programmable gate arrays (Xilinx's XC4000 series) is explored. This addresses the potential speed requirements in the biomedical signal processing field. It also demonstrates a flexible hardware design approach so that an instrument's parameters can be updated as data expands with time. To reduce the hardware design complexity and to increase the system performance, a hybrid learning algorithm using random optimisation and the backpropagation rule is developed to achieve an efficient weight update mechanism in low weight precision learning. The simulation results show that the hybrid learning algorithm is effective in solving the network paralysis problem and the convergence is much faster than by the standard backpropagation rule. The hidden and output layer nodes have been mapped on Xilinx FPGAs with automatic placement and routing tools. The static time analysis results suggests that the proposed network implementation could generate 2.7 billion connections per second performance

Biomechatronics: Harmonizing Mechatronic Systems with Human Beings

This eBook provides a comprehensive treatise on modern biomechatronic systems centred around human applications. A particular emphasis is given to exoskeleton designs for assistance and training with advanced interfaces in human-machine interaction. Some of these designs are validated with experimental results which the reader will find very informative as building-blocks for designing such systems. This eBook will be ideally suited to those researching in biomechatronic area with bio-feedback applications or those who are involved in high-end research on manmachine interfaces. This may also serve as a textbook for biomechatronic design at post-graduate level