An intelligent information forwarder for healthcare big data systems with distributed wearable sensors

© 2016 IEEE. An increasing number of the elderly population wish to live an independent lifestyle, rather than rely on intrusive care programmes. A big data solution is presented using wearable sensors capable of carrying out continuous monitoring of the elderly, alerting the relevant caregivers when necessary and forwarding pertinent information to a big data system for analysis. A challenge for such a solution is the development of context-awareness through the multidimensional, dynamic and nonlinear sensor readings that have a weak correlation with observable human behaviours and health conditions. To address this challenge, a wearable sensor system with an intelligent data forwarder is discussed in this paper. The forwarder adopts a Hidden Markov Model for human behaviour recognition. Locality sensitive hashing is proposed as an efficient mechanism to learn sensor patterns. A prototype solution is implemented to monitor health conditions of dispersed users. It is shown that the intelligent forwarders can provide the remote sensors with context-awareness. They transmit only important information to the big data server for analytics when certain behaviours happen and avoid overwhelming communication and data storage. The system functions unobtrusively, whilst giving the users peace of mind in the knowledge that their safety is being monitored and analysed

Robust Bayesian target detection algorithm for depth imaging from sparse single-photon data

This paper presents a new Bayesian model and associated algorithm for depth and intensity profiling using full waveforms from time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) measurements in the limit of very low photon counts (i.e., typically less than 20 photons per pixel). The model represents each Lidar waveform as an unknown constant background level, which is combined in the presence of a target, to a known impulse response weighted by the target intensity and finally corrupted by Poisson noise. The joint target detection and depth imaging problem is expressed as a pixel-wise model selection and estimation problem which is solved using Bayesian inference. Prior knowledge about the problem is embedded in a hierarchical model that describes the dependence structure between the model parameters while accounting for their constraints. In particular, Markov random fields (MRFs) are used to model the joint distribution of the background levels and of the target presence labels, which are both expected to exhibit significant spatial correlations. An adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm including reversible-jump updates is then proposed to compute the Bayesian estimates of interest. This algorithm is equipped with a stochastic optimization adaptation mechanism that automatically adjusts the parameters of the MRFs by maximum marginal likelihood estimation. Finally, the benefits of the proposed methodology are demonstrated through a series of experiments using real data.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1507.0251

Langevin and Hamiltonian based Sequential MCMC for Efficient Bayesian Filtering in High-dimensional Spaces

Nonlinear non-Gaussian state-space models arise in numerous applications in statistics and signal processing. In this context, one of the most successful and popular approximation techniques is the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm, also known as particle filtering. Nevertheless, this method tends to be inefficient when applied to high dimensional problems. In this paper, we focus on another class of sequential inference methods, namely the Sequential Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) techniques, which represent a promising alternative to SMC methods. After providing a unifying framework for the class of SMCMC approaches, we propose novel efficient strategies based on the principle of Langevin diffusion and Hamiltonian dynamics in order to cope with the increasing number of high-dimensional applications. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve significantly better performance compared to existing algorithms