Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications

In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment, Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare (2017), Springe

Automatic voice disorder detection using self-supervised representations

Many speech features and models, including Deep Neural Networks (DNN), are used for classification tasks between healthy and pathological speech with the Saarbruecken Voice Database (SVD). However, accuracy values of 80.71% for phrases or 82.8% for vowels /aiu/ are the highest reported for audio samples in SVD when the evaluation includes the wide amount of pathologies in the database, instead of a selection of some pathologies. This paper targets this top performance in the state-of-the-art Automatic Voice Disorder Detection (AVDD) systems. In the framework of a DNN-based AVDD system we study the capability of Self-Supervised (SS) representation learning for describing discriminative cues between healthy and pathological speech. The system processes the SS temporal sequence of features with a single feed-forward layer and Class-Token (CT) Transformer for obtaining the classification between healthy and pathological speech. Furthermore, there is evaluated a suitable data extension of the training set with out-of-domain data is also evaluated to deal with the low availability of data for using DNN-based models in voice pathology detection. Experimental results using audio samples corresponding to phrases in the SVD dataset, including all pathologies available, show classification accuracy values until 93.36%. This means that the proposed AVDD system achieved accuracy improvements of 4.1% without the training data extension, and 15.62% after the training data extension compared to the baseline system. Beyond the novelty of using SS representations for AVDD, the fact of obtaining accuracies over 90% in these conditions and using the whole set of pathologies in the SVD is a milestone for voice disorder-related research. Furthermore, the study on the amount of in-domain data in the training set related to the system performance show guidance for the data preparation stage. Lessons learned in this work suggest guidelines for taking advantage of DNN, to boost the performance in developing automatic systems for diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of voice pathologies

A survey of voice pathology surveillance systems based on internet of things and machine learning algorithms

The incorporation of the cloud technology with the Internet of Things (IoT) is significant in order to obtain better performance for a seamless, continuous, and ubiquitous framework. IoT has many applications in the healthcare sector, one of these applications is voice pathology monitoring. Unfortunately, voice pathology has not gained much attention, where there is an urgent need in this area due to the shortage of research and diagnosis of lethal diseases. Most of the researchers are focusing on the voice pathology and their finding is only to differentiating either the voice is normal (healthy) or pathological voice, where there is a lack of the current studies for detecting a certain disease such as laryngeal cancer. In this paper, we present an extensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques and studies of IoT frameworks and machine learning algorithms used in the healthcare in general and in the voice pathology surveillance systems in particular. Furthermore, this paper also presents applications, challenges and key issues of both IoT and machine learning algorithms in the healthcare. Finally, this paper highlights some open issues of IoT in healthcare that warrant further research and investigation in order to present an easy, comfortable and effective diagnosis and treatment of disease for both patients and doctors

A longitudinal observational study of home-based conversations for detecting early dementia:protocol for the CUBOId TV task

INTRODUCTION: Limitations in effective dementia therapies mean that early diagnosis and monitoring are critical for disease management, but current clinical tools are impractical and/or unreliable, and disregard short-term symptom variability. Behavioural biomarkers of cognitive decline, such as speech, sleep and activity patterns, can manifest prodromal pathological changes. They can be continuously measured at home with smart sensing technologies, and permit leveraging of interpersonal interactions for optimising diagnostic and prognostic performance. Here we describe the ContinUous behavioural Biomarkers Of cognitive Impairment (CUBOId) study, which explores the feasibility of multimodal data fusion for in-home monitoring of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The report focuses on a subset of CUBOId participants who perform a novel speech task, the ‘TV task’, designed to track changes in ecologically valid conversations with disease progression. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: CUBOId is a longitudinal observational study. Participants have diagnoses of MCI or AD, and controls are their live-in partners with no such diagnosis. Multimodal activity data were passively acquired from wearables and in-home fixed sensors over timespans of 8–25 months. At two time points participants completed the TV task over 5 days by recording audio of their conversations as they watched a favourite TV programme, with further testing to be completed after removal of the sensor installations. Behavioural testing is supported by neuropsychological assessment for deriving ground truths on cognitive status. Deep learning will be used to generate fused multimodal activity-speech embeddings for optimisation of diagnostic and predictive performance from speech alone. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: CUBOId was approved by an NHS Research Ethics Committee (Wales REC; ref: 18/WA/0158) and is sponsored by University of Bristol. It is supported by the National Institute for Health Research Clinical Research Network West of England. Results will be reported at conferences and in peer-reviewed scientific journals

Analysis and Detection of Pathological Voice using Glottal Source Features

Automatic detection of voice pathology enables objective assessment and earlier intervention for the diagnosis. This study provides a systematic analysis of glottal source features and investigates their effectiveness in voice pathology detection. Glottal source features are extracted using glottal flows estimated with the quasi-closed phase (QCP) glottal inverse filtering method, using approximate glottal source signals computed with the zero frequency filtering (ZFF) method, and using acoustic voice signals directly. In addition, we propose to derive mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) from the glottal source waveforms computed by QCP and ZFF to effectively capture the variations in glottal source spectra of pathological voice. Experiments were carried out using two databases, the Hospital Universitario Principe de Asturias (HUPA) database and the Saarbrucken Voice Disorders (SVD) database. Analysis of features revealed that the glottal source contains information that discriminates normal and pathological voice. Pathology detection experiments were carried out using support vector machine (SVM). From the detection experiments it was observed that the performance achieved with the studied glottal source features is comparable or better than that of conventional MFCCs and perceptual linear prediction (PLP) features. The best detection performance was achieved when the glottal source features were combined with the conventional MFCCs and PLP features, which indicates the complementary nature of the features

Towards using Cough for Respiratory Disease Diagnosis by leveraging Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

Cough acoustics contain multitudes of vital information about pathomorphological alterations in the respiratory system. Reliable and accurate detection of cough events by investigating the underlying cough latent features and disease diagnosis can play an indispensable role in revitalizing the healthcare practices. The recent application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advances of ubiquitous computing for respiratory disease prediction has created an auspicious trend and myriad of future possibilities in the medical domain. In particular, there is an expeditiously emerging trend of Machine learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based diagnostic algorithms exploiting cough signatures. The enormous body of literature on cough-based AI algorithms demonstrate that these models can play a significant role for detecting the onset of a specific respiratory disease. However, it is pertinent to collect the information from all relevant studies in an exhaustive manner for the medical experts and AI scientists to analyze the decisive role of AI/ML. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of the cough data-driven ML/DL detection and preliminary diagnosis frameworks, along with a detailed list of significant features. We investigate the mechanism that causes cough and the latent cough features of the respiratory modalities. We also analyze the customized cough monitoring application, and their AI-powered recognition algorithms. Challenges and prospective future research directions to develop practical, robust, and ubiquitous solutions are also discussed in detail.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figures, 9 table

A survey on artificial intelligence-based acoustic source identification

The concept of Acoustic Source Identification (ASI), which refers to the process of identifying noise sources has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The ASI technology can be used for surveillance, monitoring, and maintenance applications in a wide range of sectors, such as defence, manufacturing, healthcare, and agriculture. Acoustic signature analysis and pattern recognition remain the core technologies for noise source identification. Manual identification of acoustic signatures, however, has become increasingly challenging as dataset sizes grow. As a result, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for identifying noise sources has become increasingly relevant and useful. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of AI-based acoustic source identification techniques. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of AI-based ASI processes and associated methods proposed by researchers in the literature. Additionally, we did a detailed survey of ASI applications in machinery, underwater applications, environment/event source recognition, healthcare, and other fields. We also highlight relevant research directions

Combining Artificial Intelligence with Traditional Chinese Medicine for Intelligent Health Management

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is being referred to as the beginning of "the fourth industrial revolution". With the rapid development of hardware, algorithms, and applications, AI not only provides a new concept and relevant solutions to solve the problem of complexity science but also provides a new concept and method to promote the development of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). In this study, based on the research and development of AI technology applications in biomedical and clinical diagnosis and treatment, we introduce AI technologies in current TCM research. This can have applications in intelligent clinical information acquisition, intelligent clinical decision, and efficacy evaluation of TCM; intelligent classification management, intelligent prescription, and drug research in Chinese herbal medicine; and health management. Furthermore, we propose a framework of "intelligent TCM" and outline its development prospects

Automatic Detection of Myotonia using a Sensory Glove with Resistive Flex Sensors and Machine Learning Techniques

This paper deals with the automatic detection of Myotonia from a task based on the sudden opening of the hand. Data have been gathered from 44 subjects, divided into 17 controls and 27 myotonic patients, by measuring a 2-point articulation of each finger thanks to a calibrated sensory glove equipped with a Resistive Flex Sensor (RFS). RFS gloves are proven to be reliable in the analysis of motion for myotonic patients, which is a relevant task for the monitoring of the disease and subsequent treatment. With the focus on a healthy VS pathological comparison, customized features were extracted, and several classifications entailing motion data from single fingers, single articulations and aggregations were prepared. The pipeline employed a Correlation-based feature selector followed by a SVM classifier. Results prove that it’s possible to detect Myotonia, with aggregated data from four fingers and upper/lower articulations providing the most promising accuracies (91.1%