Continuous measurement of blood pressure is crucial to the assessment of many medical conditions. However, the current clinical gold standard involving an arterial catheter, occluding cuff, and other invasive procedures are performed in hospital settings while home-based devices can provide only intermittent measurement and are not as reliable. Therefore, there is a significant need for continuous noninvasive blood pressure (cNIBP) monitoring in the daily life. Pulse transit time (PTT)/pulse arrival time (PAT) -based blood pressure measurement has proven its potential to address this need. In this article, we present state-of-the-art devices and recent literature related to measurement technologies used in PTT/PAT -based methods for cNIBP monitoring. Various physiological signals which could be used to enable cNIBP in the home setting are categorized into two groups (i.e., proximal waveforms and distal waveforms) and are thoroughly discussed and compared. Given insightful analysis of these waveforms, we highlight their combinations to derive PTT/PAT values for BP measurement then discuss challenges presented from the cuffless and PTT/PAT -based nature of these devices. Finally, we conclude with future directions needed for home-based cNIBP adaptation and present societal broader impacts.

The invasive method of fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) monitoring is widely used with electrodes directly attached to the fetal scalp. There are potential risks such as infection and, thus, it is usually carried out during labor in rare cases. Recent advances in electronics and technologies have enabled fECG monitoring from the early stages of pregnancy through fECG extraction from the combined fetal/maternal ECG (f/mECG) signal recorded non-invasively in the abdominal area of the mother. However, cumbersome algorithms that require the reference maternal ECG as well as heavy feature crafting makes out-of-clinics fECG monitoring in daily life not yet feasible. To address these challenges, we proposed a pure end-to-end deep learning model to detect fetal QRS complexes (i.e., the main spikes observed on a fetal ECG waveform). Additionally, the model has the residual network (ResNet) architecture that adopts the novel 1-D octave convolution (OctConv) for learning multiple temporal frequency features, which in turn reduce memory and computational cost. Importantly, the model is capable of highlighting the contribution of regions that are more prominent for the detection. To evaluate our approach, data from the PhysioNet 2013 Challenge with labeled QRS complex annotations were used in the original form, and the data were then modified with Gaussian and motion noise, mimicking real-world scenarios. The model can achieve a F₁ score of 91.1% while being able to save more than 50% computing cost with less than 2% performance degradation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Despite the growing interest in the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals as a potential biometric for subject identification and the recent advances in the use of deep learning (DL) models to study neurological signals, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), electroretinogram (ERG), and electromyogram (EMG), there has been a lack of exploration in the use of state-of-the-art DL models for EEG-based subject identification tasks owing to the high variability in EEG features across sessions for an individual subject. In this paper, we explore the use of state-of-the-art DL models such as ResNet, Inception, and EEGNet to realize EEG-based biometrics on the BED dataset, which contains EEG recordings from 21 individuals. We obtain promising results with an accuracy of 63.21%, 70.18%, and 86.74% for Resnet, Inception, and EEGNet, respectively, while the previous best effort reported accuracy of 83.51%. We also demonstrate the capabilities of these models to perform EEG biometric tasks in real-time by developing a portable, low-cost, real-time Raspberry Pi-based system that integrates all the necessary steps of subject identification from the acquisition of the EEG signals to the prediction of identity while other existing systems incorporate only parts of the whole system.

Social media channels such as social networks, forum or online blogs have been emerging as major sources from which brands can gather user opinions about their products, especially the negative mentions. This kind of task, popular known as sentiment analysis, has been addressed recently by many deep learning approaches. However, negative mentions on social media have their own language characteristics which require certain adaptation and improvement from existing works for better performance. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for handling negative mentions on social media channels. As compared to the architecture published in our previous work, we expose substantial change in the combination manner of deep neural network layers for better training and classification performance on social-oriented messages. We also propose the way to re-train the pre-trained embedded words for better reflect sentiment terms, introducing the resultant sentimentally-embedded word vectors. Finally, we introduce the concept of a penalty matrix which incurs more reasonable loss function when handling negative mentions. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrated significant improvement.