Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a growing problem in todays society. These musculoskeletal disorders are caused by, amongst others, repetitive movements and mental stress. Stress is defined as the mismatch between a perceived demand and the perceived capacities to meet this demand. Although stress has a subjective origin, several physiological manifestations (e.g. cardiovascular and muscular) occur during periods of perceived stress. New insight and algorithms to extract information, related to stress are beneficial. Therefore, two series of stress experiments are executed in a laboratory environment, where subjects underwent different tasks inducing physical strain, mental stress and a combination of both. In this manuscript, new and modified algorithms for electromyography signals are presented that improve the individual analysis of electromyography signals. A first algorithm removes the interference of the electrical activity of the heart on singlechannel electromyography measurements. This interference signal is ...

In recent years, a huge body of data generated by various applications in domains like social networks and healthcare have paved the way for the development of high performance models. Deep learning has transformed the field of data analysis by dramatically improving the state of the art in various classification and prediction tasks. Combined with advancements in electromyography it has given rise to new hand gesture recognition applications, such as human computer interfaces, sign language recognition, robotics control and rehabilitation games. The purpose of this thesis is to develop novel methods for electromyography signal analysis based on deep learning for the problem of hand gesture recognition. Specifically, we focus on methods for data preparation and developing accurate models even when few data are available. Electromyography signals are in general one-dimensional time-series with a rich frequency content. Various feature sets have ...

Signal processing within the neurophysiological field is challenging and requires short processing time and reliable results. In this thesis, three main problems are considered. First, a modified line source model for simulation of muscle action potentials (APs) is presented. It is formulated in continuous-time as a convolution of a muscle-fiber dependent transmembrane current and an electrode dependent weighting (impedance) function. In the discretization of the model, the Nyquist criterion is addressed. By applying anti-aliasing filtering, it is possible to decrease the discretization frequency while retaining the accuracy. Finite length muscle fibers are incorporated in the model through a simple transformation of the weighting function. The presented model is suitable for modeling large motor units. Second, the possibility of discerning the individual AP components of the concentric nee-dle electromyogram (EMG) is explored. Simulated motor unit APs (MUAPs) are pre-filtered using Wiener ...

The brain is the most important signal processing unit in the human body. It is responsible for receiving, processing and storing information. One of the possibilities to study brain functioning is by placing electrodes on the scalp and recording the synchronous neuronal activity of the brain. Such a recording measures a combination of active processes in the whole brain. Unfortunately, it is also contaminated by artifacts. By extracting the artifacts and removing them, cleaned recordings can be investigated. Furthermore, it is easier to look at specific brain activities, like an epileptic seizure, than at a combination. In this thesis, we present different mathematical techniques that can be used to extract individual contributing sources from the measured signals for this purpose. We focused on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Canonical/ Parallel Factor Analysis (CPA). We show that ...

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases that manifests in repetitive epileptic seizures as a result of an abnormal, synchronous activity of a large group of neurons. Depending on the affected brain regions, seizures produce various severe clinical symptoms. There is no cure for epilepsy and sometimes even medication and other therapies, like surgery, vagus nerve stimulation or ketogenic diet, do not control the number of seizures. In that case, long-term (home) monitoring and automatic seizure detection would enable the tracking of the evolution of the disease and improve objective insight in any responses to medical interventions or changes in medical treatment. Especially during the night, supervision is reduced; hence a large number of seizures is missed. In addition, an alarm should be integrated into the automated seizure detection algorithm for severe seizures in order to help the ...

Most cognitive processes in the brain are reflected through several aspects simultaneously, allowing us to observe the same process from different biological phenomena. The diverse nature of these biological processes suggests that a better understanding of cerebral activity may be achieved through multimodal measurements. One of the possible multimodal brain recording settings is the combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is one of the main topics of this thesis. Two groups of EEG-fMRI integration approaches are possible. The first group, commonly called model-based techniques, are very popular due to the fact that the results from such analyses confirm or disprove a specific hypothesis. However, such hypotheses are not always available, requiring a more explorative approach to analyze the data. This exploration is possible with the second group of approaches, the so-called data-driven methods. The data-driven ...

This work has, as its objective, the development of non-invasive and low-cost systems for monitoring and automatic diagnosing specific neonatal diseases by means of the analysis of suitable video signals. We focus on monitoring infants potentially at risk of diseases characterized by the presence or absence of rhythmic movements of one or more body parts. Seizures and respiratory diseases are specifically considered, but the approach is general. Seizures are defined as sudden neurological and behavioural alterations. They are age-dependent phenomena and the most common sign of central nervous system dysfunction. Neonatal seizures have onset within the 28th day of life in newborns at term and within the 44th week of conceptional age in preterm infants. Their main causes are hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, intracranial haemorrhage, and sepsis. Studies indicate an incidence rate of neonatal seizures of 2‰ live births, 11‰ for preterm ...

Various real-life data such as time series and multi-sensor recordings can be represented by vectors and matrices, which are one-way and two-way arrays of numerical values, respectively. Valuable information can be extracted from these measured data matrices by means of matrix factorizations in a broad range of applications within signal processing, data mining, and machine learning. While matrix-based methods are powerful and well-known tools for various applications, they are limited to single-mode variations, making them ill-suited to tackle multi-way data without loss of information. Higher-order tensors are a natural extension of vectors (first order) and matrices (second order), enabling us to represent multi-way arrays of numerical values, which have become ubiquitous in signal processing and data mining applications. By leveraging the powerful utitilies offered by tensor decompositions such as compression and uniqueness properties, we can extract more information from multi-way ...

All human actions involve motor control. Even the simplest movement requires the coordinated recruitment of many muscles, orchestrated by neuronal circuits in the brain and the spinal cord. As a consequence, lesions affecting the central nervous system, such as stroke, can lead to a wide range of motor impairments. While a certain degree of recovery can often be achieved by harnessing the plasticity of the motor hierarchy, patients typically struggle to regain full motor control. In this context, technology-assisted interventions offer the prospect of intense, controllable and quantifiable motor training. Yet, clinical outcomes remain comparable to conventional approaches, suggesting the need for a paradigm shift towards customized knowledge-driven treatments to fully exploit their potential. In this thesis, we argue that a detailed understanding of healthy and impaired motor pathways can foster the development of therapies optimally engaging plasticity. To this ...

Epilepsy is a neurological condition that manifests in epileptic seizures as a result of an abnormal, synchronous activity of a large group of neurons. Depending on the affected brain regions, seizures produce various severe clinical symptoms. Epilepsy cannot be cured and in many cases is not controlled by medication either. Surgical resection of the region responsible for generating the epileptic seizures might offer remedy for these patients. Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measure the changes of brain activity in time over different locations of the brain. As such, they provide valuable information on the nature, the timing and the spatial origin of the epileptic activity. Unfortunately, both techniques record activity of different brain and artefact sources as well. Hence, EEG and fMRI signals are characterised by low signal to noise ratio. Data quality and the vast amount ...

This thesis contributes to motion characterization through inertial and physiological signals captured by wearable devices and analyzed using signal processing and deep learning techniques. This research leverages the possibilities of motion analysis for three main applications: to know what physical activity a person is performing (Human Activity Recognition), to identify who is performing that motion (user identification) or know how the movement is being performed (motor anomaly detection). Most previous research has addressed human motion modeling using invasive sensors in contact with the user or intrusive sensors that modify the user’s behavior while performing an action (cameras or microphones). In this sense, wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches can collect motion signals from users during their daily lives in a less invasive or intrusive way. Recently, there has been an exponential increase in research focused on inertial-signal processing to ...

Speech signals carry important information about a speaker such as age, gender, language, accent and emotional/psychological state. Automatic recognition of speaker characteristics has a wide range of commercial, medical and forensic applications such as interactive voice response systems, service customization, natural human-machine interaction, recognizing the type of pathology of speakers, and directing the forensic investigation process. This research aims to develop accurate methods and tools to identify different physical characteristics of the speakers. Due to the lack of required databases, among all characteristics of speakers, our experiments cover gender recognition, age estimation, language recognition and accent/dialect identification. However, similar approaches and techniques can be applied to identify other characteristics such as emotional/psychological state. For speaker characterization, we first convert variable-duration speech signals into fixed-dimensional vectors suitable for classification/regression algorithms. This is performed by fitting a probability density function to acoustic ...

The present doctoral thesis aims towards the development of new long-term, multi-channel, audio-visual processing techniques for the analysis of bioacoustics phenomena. The effort is focused on the study of the physiology of the gastrointestinal system, aiming at the support of medical research for the discovery of gastrointestinal motility patterns and the diagnosis of functional disorders. The term "processing" in this case is quite broad, incorporating the procedures of signal processing, content description, manipulation and analysis, that are applied to all the recorded bioacoustics signals, the auxiliary audio-visual surveillance information (for the monitoring of experiments and the subjects' status), and the extracted audio-video sequences describing the abdominal sound-field alterations. The thesis outline is as follows. The main objective of the thesis, which is the technological support of medical research, is presented in the first chapter. A quick problem definition is initially ...

The field of Life Science Engineering (LSE) is rapidly expanding and predicted to grow strongly in the next decades. It covers areas of food and medical research, plant and pests’ research, and environmental research. In each research area, engineers try to find equations that model a certain life science problem. Once found, they research different numerical techniques to solve for the unknown variables of these equations. Afterwards, solution improvement is examined by adopting more accurate conventional techniques, or developing novel algorithms. In particular, signal and image processing techniques are widely used to solve those LSE problems require pattern recognition. However, due to the continuous evolution of the life science problems and their natures, these solution techniques can not cover all aspects, and therefore demanding further enhancement and improvement. The thesis presents numerical algorithms of digital signal and image processing to ...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice, and one of the main causes of ictus and strokes. Despite the advances in the comprehension of its mechanisms, its thorough characterization and the quantification of its effects on the human heart are still an open issue. In particular, the choice of the most appropriate therapy is frequently a hard task. Radiofrequency catheter ablation (CA) is becoming one of the most popular solutions for the treatment of the disease. Yet, very little is known about its impact on heart substrate during AF, thus leading to an inaccurate selection of positive responders to therapy and a low success rate; hence, the need for advanced signal processing tools able to quantify AF impact on heart substrate and assess the effectiveness of the CA therapy in an objective and ...