This dissertation's primary goal was to systematically study human activity recognition and enhance its performance by advancing human activities' sequential modeling based on HMM-based machine learning. Driven by these purposes, this dissertation has the following major contributions: The proposal of our HAR research pipeline that guides the building of a robust wearable end-to-end HAR system and the implementation of the recording and recognition software Activity Signal Kit (ASK) according to the pipeline; Collecting several datasets of multimodal biosignals from over 25 subjects using the self-implemented ASK software and implementing an easy mechanism to segment and annotate the data; The comprehensive research on the offline HAR system based on the recorded datasets and the implementation of an end-to-end real-time HAR system; A novel activity modeling method for HAR, which partitions the human activity into a sequence of shared, meaningful, and activity ...

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 ...

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 ...

Localizing the bioelectric phenomena originating from the cerebral cortex and evoked by auditory and somatosensory stimuli are clear objectives to both understand how the brain works and to recognize different pathologies. Diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and epilepsy are intensively studied to find a cure or accurate diagnosis. Epilepsy is considered the disease with major prevalence within disorders with neurological origin. The recurrent and sudden incidence of seizures can lead to dangerous and possibly life-threatening situations. Since disturbance of consciousness and sudden loss of motor control often occur without any warning, the ability to predict epileptic seizures would reduce patients' anxiety, thus considerably improving quality of life and safety. The common procedure for epilepsy seizure detection is based on brain activity monitorization via electroencephalogram (EEG) data. This process consumes a lot of time, especially in the case of long ...

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 ...

When listening to music, some humans can easily recognize which instruments play at what time or when a new musical segment starts, but cannot describe exactly how they do this. To automatically describe particular aspects of a music piece – be it for an academic interest in emulating human perception, or for practical applications –, we can thus not directly replicate the steps taken by a human. We can, however, exploit that humans can easily annotate examples, and optimize a generic function to reproduce these annotations. In this thesis, I explore solving different music perception tasks with deep learning, a recent branch of machine learning that optimizes functions of many stacked nonlinear operations – referred to as deep neural networks – and promises to obtain better results or require less domain knowledge than more traditional techniques. In particular, I employ ...

In recent years, inertial sensors have undergone major developments. The quality of their measurements has improved while their cost has decreased, leading to an increase in availability. They can be found in stand-alone sensor units, so-called inertial measurement units, but are nowadays also present in for instance any modern smartphone, in Wii controllers and in virtual reality headsets. The term inertial sensor refers to the combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. These measure the external specific force and the angular velocity, respectively. Integration of their measurements provides information about the sensor’s position and orientation. However, the position and orientation estimates obtained by simple integration suffer from drift and are therefore only accurate on a short time scale. In order to improve these estimates, we combine the inertial sensors with additional sensors and models. To combine these different sources of information, also ...

Human Activity Recognition HAR has been a hot research topic in the last decade due to its wide range of applications. Indeed, it has been the basis for implementa- tion of many computer vision applications, home security, video surveillance, and human-computer interaction. We intend by HAR, tools, and systems allowing to detect and recognize actions performed by individuals. With the considerable progress made in sensing technologies, HAR systems shifted from wearable and ambient-based to vision-based. This motivated the researchers to propose a large mass of vision-based solutions. From another perspective, HAR plays an impor- tant role in the health care sector and gets involved in the construction of fall detection systems and many smart home-related systems. Fall detection FD con- sists in identifying the occurrence of falls among other daily life activities. This is essential because falling is one of ...

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is among the most prevalent sleep disorders, which is estimated to affect 6 %−19 % of women and 13 %−33 % of men. Besides daytime sleepiness, impaired cognitive functioning and an increased risk for accidents, OSA may lead to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases (CVD) on the long term. Its prevalence is only expected to rise, as it is linked to aging and excessive body fat. Nevertheless, many patients remain undiagnosed and untreated due to the cumbersome clinical diagnostic procedures. For this, the patient is required to sleep with an extensive set of body attached sensors. In addition, the recordings only provide a single night perspective on the patient in an uncomfortable, and often unknown, environment. Thus, large scale monitoring at home is desired with comfortable sensors, which can stay in place for several nights. To ...

Recent improvements in the development of inertial and visual sensors allow building small, lightweight, and cheap motion capture systems, which are becoming a standard feature of smartphones and personal digital assistants. This dissertation describes developments of new motion sensing strategies using the inertial and inertial-visual sensors. The thesis contributions are presented in two parts. The first part focuses mainly on the use of inertial measurement units. First, the problem of sensor calibration is addressed and a low-cost and accurate method to calibrate the accelerometer cluster of this unit is proposed. The method is based on the maximum likelihood estimation framework, which results in a minimum variance unbiased estimator.Then using the inertial measurement unit, a probabilistic user-independent method is proposed for pedestrian activity classification and gait analysis.The work targets two groups of applications including human activity classificationand joint human activity and ...

In many speech applications such as hands-free telephony or voice-controlled home assistants, the distance between the user and the recording microphones can be relatively large. In such a far-field scenario, the recorded microphone signals are typically corrupted by noise and reverberation, which may severely degrade the performance of speech recognition systems and reduce intelligibility and quality of speech in communication applications. In order to limit these effects, speech enhancement algorithms are typically applied. The main objective of this thesis is to develop novel speech enhancement algorithms for noisy and reverberant environments and signal-based measures to evaluate these algorithms, focusing on solutions that are applicable in realistic scenarios. First, we propose a single-channel speech enhancement algorithm for joint noise and reverberation reduction. The proposed algorithm uses a spectral gain to enhance the input signal, where the gain is computed using a ...

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 fact that a third of a human life is spent in a bed indicates the essential character of sleep. While some people might opt voluntarily for sleep deprivation, others don’t get to choose. Their healthy pattern of sleep is disrupted due to sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, insomnia and restless legs syndrome. Most clinical diagnoses revolve around complaints of excessive daytime sleepiness. People usually wait quite long however before contacting professional help, and might only do so when complaints have gone from minor to serious. It can be argued that people with minor complaints will have negligible compliance to rather obtrusive therapies, and should not be treated with pharmaceuticals. However, cognitive and behavioral therapy has proven its effectiveness for clinically diagnosed patients in different domains, and might thus also enhance the quality of life for people with minor ...

The subject of this PhD thesis is the efficient and robust processing and analysis of the audio recordings that are derived from a call center. The thesis is comprised of two parts. The first part is dedicated to dialogue/non-dialogue detection and to speaker segmentation. The systems that are developed are prerequisite for detecting (i) the audio segments that actually contain a dialogue between the system and the call center customer and (ii) the change points between the system and the customer. This way the volume of the audio recordings that need to be processed is significantly reduced, while the system is automated. To detect the presence of a dialogue several systems are developed. This is the first effort found in the international literature that the audio channel is exclusively exploited. Also, it is the first time that the speaker utterance ...

Current Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) lack of “emotional intelligence”, i.e. they are not able to identify human emotional states and take this information into account to decide on the proper actions to execute. The goal of affective computing is to fill this lack by detecting emotional cues occurring during Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and synthesizing emotional responses. In the last decades, most of the studies on emotion assessment have focused on the analysis of facial expressions and speech to determine the emotional state of a person. Physiological activity also includes emotional information that can be used for emotion assessment but has received less attention despite of its advantages (for instance it can be less easily faked than facial expressions). This thesis reports on the use of two types of physiological activities to assess emotions in the context of affective computing: the activity ...