Algorithms design for improving homecare using Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals and Internet of Things (IoT)

Due to the fast growing of population, a lot of hospitals get crowded from the huge amount of patients visits. Moreover, during COVID-19 a lot of patients prefer staying at home to minimize the spread of the virus. The need for providing care to patients at home is essential. Internet of Things (IoT) is widely known and used by different fields. IoT based homecare will help in reducing the burden upon hospitals. IoT with homecare bring up several benefits such as minimizing human exertions, economical savings and improved efficiency and effectiveness. One of the important requirement on homecare system is the accuracy because those systems are dealing with human health which is sensitive and need high amount of accuracy. Moreover, those systems deal with huge amount of data due to the continues sensing that need to be processed well to provide fast response regarding the diagnosis with minimum cost requirements. Heart is one of the most important organ in the human body that requires high level of caring. Monitoring heart status can diagnose disease from the early stage and find the best medication plan by health experts. Continues monitoring and diagnosis of heart could exhaust caregivers efforts. Having an IoT heart monitoring model at home is the solution to this problem. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are used to track heart condition using waves and peaks. Accurate and efficient IoT ECG monitoring at home can detect heart diseases and save human lives. As a consequence, an IoT ECG homecare monitoring model is designed in this thesis for detecting Cardiac Arrhythmia and diagnosing heart diseases. Two databases of ECG signals are used; one online which is old and limited, and another huge, unique and special from real patients in hospital. The raw ECG signal for each patient is passed through the implemented Low Pass filter and Savitzky Golay filter signal processing techniques to remove the noise and any external interference. The clear signal in this model is passed through feature extraction stage to extract number of features based on some metrics and medical information along with feature extraction algorithm to find peaks and waves. Those features are saved in the local database to apply classification on them. For the diagnosis purpose a classification stage is made using three classification ways; threshold values, machine learning and deep learning to increase the accuracy. Threshold values classification technique worked based on medical values and boarder lines. In case any feature goes above or beyond these ranges, a warning message appeared with expected heart disease. The second type of classification is by using machine learning to minimize the human efforts. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is proposed by running the algorithm on the features extracted from both databases. The classification accuracy for online and hospital databases was 91.67% and 94% respectively. Due to the non-linearity of the decision boundary, a third way of classification using deep learning is presented. A full Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) Neural Network is implemented to improve the accuracy and reduce the errors. The number of errors reduced to 0.019 and 0.006 using online and hospital databases. While using hospital database which is huge, there is a need for a technique to reduce the amount of data. Furthermore, a novel adaptive amplitude threshold compression algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is able to make diagnosis of heart disease from the reduced size using compressed ECG signals with high level of accuracy and low cost. The extracted features from compressed and original are similar with only slight differences of 1%, 2% and 3% with no effects on machine learning and deep learning classification accuracy without the need for any reconstructions. The throughput is improved by 43% with reduced storage space of 57% when using data compression. Moreover, to achieve fast response, the amount of data should be reduced further to provide fast data transmission. A compressive sensing based cardiac homecare system is presented. It gives the channel between sender and receiver the ability to carry small amount of data. Experiment results reveal that the proposed models are more accurate in the classification of Cardiac Arrhythmia and in the diagnosis of heart diseases. The proposed models ensure fast diagnosis and minimum cost requirements. Based on the experiments on classification accuracy, number of errors and false alarms, the dictionary of the compressive sensing selected to be 900. As a result, this thesis provided three different scenarios that achieved IoT homecare Cardiac monitoring to assist in further research for designing homecare Cardiac monitoring systems. The experiment results reveal that those scenarios produced better results with high level of accuracy in addition to minimizing data and cost requirements

Ensemble approach on enhanced compressed noise EEG data signal in wireless body area sensor network

The Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is used for communication among sensor nodes operating on or inside the human body in order to monitor vital body parameters and movements. One of the important applications of WBASN is patients’ healthcare monitoring of chronic diseases such as epileptic seizure. Normally, epileptic seizure data of the electroencephalograph (EEG) is captured and compressed in order to reduce its transmission time. However, at the same time, this contaminates the overall data and lowers classification accuracy. The current work also did not take into consideration that large size of collected EEG data. Consequently, EEG data is a bandwidth intensive. Hence, the main goal of this work is to design a unified compression and classification framework for delivery of EEG data in order to address its large size issue. EEG data is compressed in order to reduce its transmission time. However, at the same time, noise at the receiver side contaminates the overall data and lowers classification accuracy. Another goal is to reconstruct the compressed data and then recognize it. Therefore, a Noise Signal Combination (NSC) technique is proposed for the compression of the transmitted EEG data and enhancement of its classification accuracy at the receiving side in the presence of noise and incomplete data. The proposed framework combines compressive sensing and discrete cosine transform (DCT) in order to reduce the size of transmission data. Moreover, Gaussian noise model of the transmission channel is practically implemented to the framework. At the receiving side, the proposed NSC is designed based on weighted voting using four classification techniques. The accuracy of these techniques namely Artificial Neural Network, Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbour, and Support Victor Machine classifiers is fed to the proposed NSC. The experimental results showed that the proposed technique exceeds the conventional techniques by achieving the highest accuracy for noiseless and noisy data. Furthermore, the framework performs a significant role in reducing the size of data and classifying both noisy and noiseless data. The key contributions are the unified framework and proposed NSC, which improved accuracy of the noiseless and noisy EGG large data. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provided several credible benefits including simplicity, and accuracy enhancement. Finally, the research improves clinical information about patients who not only suffer from epilepsy, but also neurological disorders, mental or physiological problems

IoT and fog computing-based monitoring system for cardiovascular patients with automatic ECG classification using deep neural networks

[EN] Telemedicine and all types of monitoring systems have proven to be a useful and low-cost tool with a high level of applicability in cardiology. The objective of this work is to present an IoT-based monitoring system for cardiovascular patients. The system sends the ECG signal to a Fog layer service by using the LoRa communication protocol. Also, it includes an AI algorithm based on deep learning for the detection of Atrial Fibrillation and other heart rhythms. The automatic detection of arrhythmias can be complementary to the diagnosis made by the physician, achieving a better clinical vision that improves therapeutic decision making. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated on a dataset of 8.528 short single-lead ECG records using two merge MobileNet networks that classify data with an accuracy of 90% for atrial fibrillation.This work was partly supported by the Spanish Government (RTI2018-095390-B-C31), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia Research Grant PAID-10-19. S.G-O has been funded by grant PDBCEx COLDOC 679, scholarship programme from COLCIENCIAS (Administrative Department of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia).Rincón-Arango, JA.; Guerra-Ojeda, S.; Carrascosa Casamayor, C.; Julian, V. (2020). IoT and fog computing-based monitoring system for cardiovascular patients with automatic ECG classification using deep neural networks. Sensors. 20(24):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20247353119202

Improving Maternal and Fetal Cardiac Monitoring Using Artificial Intelligence

Early diagnosis of possible risks in the physiological status of fetus and mother during pregnancy and delivery is critical and can reduce mortality and morbidity. For example, early detection of life-threatening congenital heart disease may increase survival rate and reduce morbidity while allowing parents to make informed decisions. To study cardiac function, a variety of signals are required to be collected. In practice, several heart monitoring methods, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG), are commonly performed. Although there are several methods for monitoring fetal and maternal health, research is currently underway to enhance the mobility, accuracy, automation, and noise resistance of these methods to be used extensively, even at home. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to design a precise and convenient monitoring system. To achieve the goals, the following objectives are defined in this research: The first step for a signal acquisition system is to obtain high-quality signals. As the first objective, a signal processing scheme is explored to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of signals and extract the desired signal from a noisy one with negative SNR (i.e., power of noise is greater than signal). It is worth mentioning that ECG and PPG signals are sensitive to noise from a variety of sources, increasing the risk of misunderstanding and interfering with the diagnostic process. The noises typically arise from power line interference, white noise, electrode contact noise, muscle contraction, baseline wandering, instrument noise, motion artifacts, electrosurgical noise. Even a slight variation in the obtained ECG waveform can impair the understanding of the patient's heart condition and affect the treatment procedure. Recent solutions, such as adaptive and blind source separation (BSS) algorithms, still have drawbacks, such as the need for noise or desired signal model, tuning and calibration, and inefficiency when dealing with excessively noisy signals. Therefore, the final goal of this step is to develop a robust algorithm that can estimate noise, even when SNR is negative, using the BSS method and remove it based on an adaptive filter. The second objective is defined for monitoring maternal and fetal ECG. Previous methods that were non-invasive used maternal abdominal ECG (MECG) for extracting fetal ECG (FECG). These methods need to be calibrated to generalize well. In other words, for each new subject, a calibration with a trustable device is required, which makes it difficult and time-consuming. The calibration is also susceptible to errors. We explore deep learning (DL) models for domain mapping, such as Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, to map MECG to fetal ECG (FECG) and vice versa. The advantages of the proposed DL method over state-of-the-art approaches, such as adaptive filters or blind source separation, are that the proposed method is generalized well on unseen subjects. Moreover, it does not need calibration and is not sensitive to the heart rate variability of mother and fetal; it can also handle low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Thirdly, AI-based system that can measure continuous systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) with minimum electrode requirements is explored. The most common method of measuring blood pressure is using cuff-based equipment, which cannot monitor blood pressure continuously, requires calibration, and is difficult to use. Other solutions use a synchronized ECG and PPG combination, which is still inconvenient and challenging to synchronize. The proposed method overcomes those issues and only uses PPG signal, comparing to other solutions. Using only PPG for blood pressure is more convenient since it is only one electrode on the finger where its acquisition is more resilient against error due to movement. The fourth objective is to detect anomalies on FECG data. The requirement of thousands of manually annotated samples is a concern for state-of-the-art detection systems, especially for fetal ECG (FECG), where there are few publicly available FECG datasets annotated for each FECG beat. Therefore, we will utilize active learning and transfer-learning concept to train a FECG anomaly detection system with the least training samples and high accuracy. In this part, a model is trained for detecting ECG anomalies in adults. Later this model is trained to detect anomalies on FECG. We only select more influential samples from the training set for training, which leads to training with the least effort. Because of physician shortages and rural geography, pregnant women's ability to get prenatal care might be improved through remote monitoring, especially when access to prenatal care is limited. Increased compliance with prenatal treatment and linked care amongst various providers are two possible benefits of remote monitoring. If recorded signals are transmitted correctly, maternal and fetal remote monitoring can be effective. Therefore, the last objective is to design a compression algorithm that can compress signals (like ECG) with a higher ratio than state-of-the-art and perform decompression fast without distortion. The proposed compression is fast thanks to the time domain B-Spline approach, and compressed data can be used for visualization and monitoring without decompression owing to the B-spline properties. Moreover, the stochastic optimization is designed to retain the signal quality and does not distort signal for diagnosis purposes while having a high compression ratio. In summary, components for creating an end-to-end system for day-to-day maternal and fetal cardiac monitoring can be envisioned as a mix of all tasks listed above. PPG and ECG recorded from the mother can be denoised using deconvolution strategy. Then, compression can be employed for transmitting signal. The trained CycleGAN model can be used for extracting FECG from MECG. Then, trained model using active transfer learning can detect anomaly on both MECG and FECG. Simultaneously, maternal BP is retrieved from the PPG signal. This information can be used for monitoring the cardiac status of mother and fetus, and also can be used for filling reports such as partogram

Exploiting Prior Knowledge in Compressed Sensing Wireless ECG Systems

Recent results in telecardiology show that compressed sensing (CS) is a promising tool to lower energy consumption in wireless body area networks for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring. However, the performance of current CS-based algorithms, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality of the ECG, still falls short of the performance attained by state-of-the-art wavelet based algorithms. In this paper, we propose to exploit the structure of the wavelet representation of the ECG signal to boost the performance of CS-based methods for compression and reconstruction of ECG signals. More precisely, we incorporate prior information about the wavelet dependencies across scales into the reconstruction algorithms and exploit the high fraction of common support of the wavelet coefficients of consecutive ECG segments. Experimental results utilizing the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database show that significant performance gains, in terms of compression rate and reconstruction quality, can be obtained by the proposed algorithms compared to current CS-based methods.Comment: Accepted for publication at IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatic

Sensor Signal and Information Processing II

In the current age of information explosion, newly invented technological sensors and software are now tightly integrated with our everyday lives. Many sensor processing algorithms have incorporated some forms of computational intelligence as part of their core framework in problem solving. These algorithms have the capacity to generalize and discover knowledge for themselves and learn new information whenever unseen data are captured. The primary aim of sensor processing is to develop techniques to interpret, understand, and act on information contained in the data. The interest of this book is in developing intelligent signal processing in order to pave the way for smart sensors. This involves mathematical advancement of nonlinear signal processing theory and its applications that extend far beyond traditional techniques. It bridges the boundary between theory and application, developing novel theoretically inspired methodologies targeting both longstanding and emergent signal processing applications. The topic ranges from phishing detection to integration of terrestrial laser scanning, and from fault diagnosis to bio-inspiring filtering. The book will appeal to established practitioners, along with researchers and students in the emerging field of smart sensors processing

Boosting the Battery Life of Wearables for Health Monitoring Through the Compression of Biosignals

Modern wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices enable the monitoring of vital parameters such as heart or respiratory (RESP) rates, electrocardiography (ECG), photo-plethysmographic (PPG) signals within e-health applications. A common issue of wearable technology is that signal transmission is power-demanding and, as such, devices require frequent battery charges and this poses serious limitations to the continuous monitoring of vitals. To ameliorate this, we advocate the use of lossy signal compression as a means to decrease the data size of the gathered biosignals and, in turn, boost the battery life of wearables and allow for fine-grained and long-term monitoring. Considering 1-D biosignals such as ECG, RESP, and PPG, which are often available from commercial wearable IoT devices, we provide a thorough review of existing biosignal compression algorithms. Besides, we present novel approaches based on online dictionaries, elucidating their operating principles and providing a quantitative assessment of compression, reconstruction and energy consumption performance of all schemes. As we quantify, the most efficient schemes allow reductions in the signal size of up to 100 times, which entail similar reductions in the energy demand, by still keeping the reconstruction error within 4% of the peak-to-peak signal amplitude. Finally, avenues for future research are discussed. © 2014 IEEE

Intelligent Biosignal Processing in Wearable and Implantable Sensors

This reprint provides a collection of papers illustrating the state-of-the-art of smart processing of data coming from wearable, implantable or portable sensors. Each paper presents the design, databases used, methodological background, obtained results, and their interpretation for biomedical applications. Revealing examples are brain–machine interfaces for medical rehabilitation, the evaluation of sympathetic nerve activity, a novel automated diagnostic tool based on ECG data to diagnose COVID-19, machine learning-based hypertension risk assessment by means of photoplethysmography and electrocardiography signals, Parkinsonian gait assessment using machine learning tools, thorough analysis of compressive sensing of ECG signals, development of a nanotechnology application for decoding vagus-nerve activity, detection of liver dysfunction using a wearable electronic nose system, prosthetic hand control using surface electromyography, epileptic seizure detection using a CNN, and premature ventricular contraction detection using deep metric learning. Thus, this reprint presents significant clinical applications as well as valuable new research issues, providing current illustrations of this new field of research by addressing the promises, challenges, and hurdles associated with the synergy of biosignal processing and AI through 16 different pertinent studies. Covering a wide range of research and application areas, this book is an excellent resource for researchers, physicians, academics, and PhD or master students working on (bio)signal and image processing, AI, biomaterials, biomechanics, and biotechnology with applications in medicine

Dictionary selection for Compressed Sensing of EEG signals using sparse binary matrix and spatiotemporal sparse Bayesian learning

Online monitoring of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is challenging due to the high volume of data and power requirements. Compressed sensing (CS) may be employed to address these issues. Compressed sensing using sparse binary matrix, owing to its low power features, and reconstruction/decompression using spatiotemporal sparse Bayesian learning have been shown to constitute a robust framework for fast, energy efficient and accurate multichannel bio-signal monitoring. EEG signal, however, does not show a strong temporal correlation. Therefore, the use of sparsifying dictionaries has been proposed to exploit the sparsity in a transformed domain instead. Assuming sparsification adds values, a challenge, therefore, in employing this CS framework for the EEG signal is to identify the suitable dictionary. Using real multichannel EEG data from 15 subjects, in this paper, we systematically evaluated the performance of the framework when using various wavelet bases while considering their key attributes of number of vanishing moments and coherence with sensing matrix. We identified Beylkin as the wavelet dictionary leading to the best performance. Using the same dataset, we then compared the performance of Beylkin with discrete cosine basis, often used in the literature, and the case of using no sparsifying dictionary. We further demonstrate that using dictionaries (Beylkin and DCT) may improve performance tangibly only for a high compression ratio (CR) of 80% and with smaller block sizes; as compared to when using no dictionaries