88 research outputs found

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

    Full text link
    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

    Advanced sensing technologies and systems for lung function assessment

    Get PDF
    Chest X-rays and computed tomography scans are highly accurate lung assessment tools, but their hazardous nature and high cost remain a barrier for many patients. Acoustic imaging is an alternative to lung function assessment that is non-hazardous, less costly, and has a patient-to-equipment approach. In this thesis, the suitability of acoustic imaging for lung health assessment is proven via systematic review and numerical airway modelling. An acoustic lung sound acquisition system, consisting of an optimal denoising filter translated into imaging for continual and reliable lung function assessment, is then developed. To the author’s best knowledge, locating obstructed airways via an acoustic lung model andthe resulting acoustic lung imaging have yet to be investigated in the open literature; hence,a novel acoustic lung spatial model was first developed in this research, which links acousticlung sounds and acoustic images with pathologic changes. About 89% structural similaritybetween an acoustic reference image based on actual lung sound and the developed modelacoustic image based on the computation of airway impedance was achieved. External interference is inevitable in lung sound recordings; thus, an indirect unifying of wavelet-based total variation (WATV) and empirical Wiener denoising filter is proposed to enhance recorded lung sound signals. To the author’s best knowledge, the integration of WATV and Wiener filters has not been investigated for lung sound signals. Selection and analysis of optimal parameters for the denoising filter were performed through a case study. The optimal parameters achieved through simulation studies led to an average 12.69 ± 5.05 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the average SNR was improved by 16.92 ± 8.51 dB in the experimental studies. The hybrid denoising filter significantly enhances the signal quality of the captured lung sounds while preserving the characteristics of a lung sound signal and is less sensitive to the variation of SNR values of the input signal. A robust system was developed based on the established lung spatial model and denoising filter through hardware redesign and signal processing, which outperformed commercial digital stethoscopes regarding SNR and root mean square error by about 8 dB and 0.15, respectively. Regarding sensing sensitivity power spectrum mapping, the developed system sensors’ position is neutral, as opposed to digital stethoscopes, when representing lung signals, with a signal power loss ratio of around 5 dB compared to 10 dB from digital stethoscopes. The developed system obtains better detection by about 10% in the obstructed airway region compared to digital stethoscopes in the experimental studies

    Context-aware solutions for asthma condition management: a survey

    Get PDF
    The evolution of information technology has allowed the development of ubiquitous, user-centred, and context-aware solutions. This article considers existing context-aware systems supporting asthma management with the aim of describing their main benefits and opportunities for improvement. To achieve this, the main concepts related to asthma and context awareness are explained before describing and analysing the existing context-aware systems aiding asthma. The survey shows that the concept of personalisation is the key when developing context-aware solutions supporting asthma management because of the high level of heterogeneity of this condition. Hence, the benefits and challenges of context-aware systems supporting asthma management are strongly linked to contextual Just-In-Time information of internal and external factors related to a person and the heterogeneity it represents

    UML-Based co-design framework for body sensor network applications

    Get PDF
    Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

    Telemedicine

    Get PDF
    Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

    Towards the internet of smart clothing: a review on IoT wearables and garments for creating intelligent connected e-textiles

    Get PDF
    [Abstract] Technology has become ubiquitous, it is all around us and is becoming part of us. Togetherwith the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and enabling technologies (e.g., Augmented Reality (AR), Cyber-Physical Systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain or edge computing), smart wearables and IoT-based garments can potentially have a lot of influence by harmonizing functionality and the delight created by fashion. Thus, smart clothes look for a balance among fashion, engineering, interaction, user experience, cybersecurity, design and science to reinvent technologies that can anticipate needs and desires. Nowadays, the rapid convergence of textile and electronics is enabling the seamless and massive integration of sensors into textiles and the development of conductive yarn. The potential of smart fabrics, which can communicate with smartphones to process biometric information such as heart rate, temperature, breathing, stress, movement, acceleration, or even hormone levels, promises a new era for retail. This article reviews the main requirements for developing smart IoT-enabled garments and shows smart clothing potential impact on business models in the medium-term. Specifically, a global IoT architecture is proposed, the main types and components of smart IoT wearables and garments are presented, their main requirements are analyzed and some of the most recent smart clothing applications are studied. In this way, this article reviews the past and present of smart garments in order to provide guidelines for the future developers of a network where garments will be connected like other IoT objects: the Internet of Smart Clothing.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2016-045Xunta de Galicia; ED341D R2016/012Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Agencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2013-47141-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2016-75067-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2015-69648-RED

    Twitter Mining for Syndromic Surveillance

    Get PDF
    Enormous amounts of personalised data is generated daily from social media platforms today. Twitter in particular, generates vast textual streams in real-time, accompanied with personal information. This big social media data offers a potential avenue for inferring public and social patterns. This PhD thesis investigates the use of Twitter data to deliver signals for syndromic surveillance in order to assess its ability to augment existing syndromic surveillance efforts and give a better understanding of symptomatic people who do not seek healthcare advice directly. We focus on a specific syndrome - asthma/difficulty breathing. We seek to develop means of extracting reliable signals from the Twitter signal, to be used for syndromic surveillance purposes. We begin by outlining our data collection and preprocessing methods. However, we observe that even with keyword-based data collection, many of the collected tweets are not relevant because they represent chatter, or talk of awareness instead of an individual suffering a particular condition. In light of this, we set out to identify relevant tweets to collect a strong and reliable signal. We first develop novel features based on the emoji content of Tweets and apply semi-supervised learning techniques to filter Tweets. Next, we investigate the effectiveness of deep learning at this task. We pro-pose a novel classification algorithm based on neural language models, and compare it to existing successful and popular deep learning algorithms. Following this, we go on to propose an attentive bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network architecture for filtering Tweets which also offers additional syndromic surveillance utility by identifying keywords among syndromic Tweets. In doing so, we are not only able to detect alarms, but also have some clues into what the alarm involves. Lastly, we look towards optimizing the Twitter syndromic surveillance pipeline by selecting the best possible keywords to be supplied to the Twitter API. We developed algorithms to intelligently and automatically select keywords such that the quality, in terms of relevance, and quantity of Tweets collected is maximised
    corecore