Sleep staging has a very important role in diagnosing patients with sleep disorders. In general, this task is very time-consuming for physicians to perform. Deep learning shows great potential to automate this process and remove physician bias from decision making. In this study, we aim to identify recent trends on performance improvement and the causes for these trends. Recent papers on sleep stage classification and interpretability are investigated to explore different modeling and data manipulation techniques, their efficiency, and recent advances. We identify an improvement in performance up to 12% on standard datasets over the last 5 years. The improvements in performance do not appear to be necessarily correlated to the size of the models, but instead seem to be caused by incorporating new architectural components, such as the use of transformers and contrastive learning.
5 April 2023 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Cough is an important defense mechanism of the respiratory system and is also a symptom of lung diseases, such as asthma. Acoustic cough detection collected by portable recording devices is a convenient way to track potential condition worsening for patients who have asthma. However, the data used in building current cough detection models are often clean, containing a limited set of sound categories, and thus perform poorly when they are exposed to a variety of real-world sounds which could be picked up by portable recording devices. The sounds that are not learned by the model are referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we propose two robust cough detection methods combined with an OOD detection module, that removes OOD data without sacrificing the cough detection performance of the original system. These methods include adding a learning confidence parameter and maximizing entropy loss. Our experiments show that 1) the OOD system can produce dependable In-Distribution (ID) and OOD results at a sampling rate above 750 Hz; 2) the OOD sample detection tends to perform better for larger audio window sizes; 3) the model's overall accuracy and precision get better as the proportion of OOD samples increase in the acoustic signals; 4) a higher percentage of OOD data is needed to realize performance gains at lower sampling rates. The incorporation of OOD detection techniques improves cough detection performance by a significant margin and provides a valuable solution to real-world acoustic cough detection problems.
While physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have become a popular deep learning framework for tackling forward and inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), their performance is known to degrade when larger and deeper neural network architectures are employed. Our study identifies that the root of this counter-intuitive behavior lies in the use of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) architectures with non-suitable initialization schemes, which result in poor trainablity for the network derivatives, and ultimately lead to an unstable minimization of the PDE residual loss. To address this, we introduce Physics-informed Residual Adaptive Networks (PirateNets), a novel architecture that is designed to facilitate stable and efficient training of deep PINN models. PirateNets leverage a novel adaptive residual connection, which allows the networks to be initialized as shallow networks that progressively deepen during training. We also show that the proposed initialization scheme allows us to encode appropriate inductive biases corresponding to a given PDE system into the network architecture. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that PirateNets are easier to optimize and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth, ultimately achieving state-of-the-art results across various benchmarks. All code and data accompanying this manuscript will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/PredictiveIntelligenceLab/jaxpi}.
Body-rocking is an undesired stereotypical motor movement performed by some individuals, and its detection is essential for self-awareness and habit change. We envision a pipeline that includes inertial wearable sensors and a real-time detection system for notifying the user so that they are aware of their body-rocking behavior. For this task, similarities of body rocking to other non-related repetitive activities may cause false detections which prevent continuous engagement, leading to alarm fatigue. We present a pipeline using Bayesian Neural Networks with uncertainty quantification for jointly reducing false positives and providing accurate detection. We show that increasing model capacity does not consistently yield higher performance by itself, while pairing it with the Bayesian approach does yield significant improvements. Disparities in uncertainty quantification are better quantified by calibrating them using deep neural networks. We show that the calibrated probabilities are effective quality indicators of reliable predictions. Altogether, we show that our approach provides additional insights on the role of Bayesian techniques in deep learning as well as aids in accurate body-rocking detection, improving our prior work on this subject.
2 October 2025 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Longitudinal and continuous monitoring of cough is crucial for early and accurate diagnosis of respiratory diseases. While recent developments in wearables offer a promise for daily assessment at-home remote symptom monitoring with respect to more accurate and less frequent assessment in the clinics, important practical challenges exist such as maintaining user speech privacy and potential poor audio quality and background noise in uncontrolled real-world settings. This study addresses these challenges by developing and optimizing a compact multimodal cough detection system, enhanced with an Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection algorithm. The cough sensing modalities include audio and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals. We optimized this multimodal cough detection system by training with an enhanced dataset and employing a weighted multi-loss approach for the ID classifier. For OOD detection, we improved the system by reconstructing the training data components. Our preliminary results indicate the robustness of the system across window sizes from 1 to 5 seconds and performs efficiently at low audio frequencies, which can protect user privacy due to illegibility or incomprehensibility at lower sampling rates. Although we found that the multimodal model is sensitive to OOD data, the final optimized robust multimodal cough detection system outperforms the singlemodal model integrated with OOD detection. Specifically, the optimized system maintains 90.08% accuracy and a cough F1 score of 0.7548 at a 16 kHz audio frequency, and 87.3% accuracy and a cough F1 score of 0.7015 at 750 Hz, even with half of the data being OOD during inference. The misclassified components mainly originate from nonverbal sounds, including sneezes and groans. These issues could be further mitigated by acquiring more data on cough, speech, and other nonverbal vocalizations. In general, we observed that the Audio-IMU multimodal model incorporating OOD detection techniques significantly improved cough detection performance and could provide a tangible solution to real-world acoustic cough detection problems.
Cough is an important defense mechanism of the respiratory system and is also a symptom of lung diseases, such as asthma. Acoustic cough detection collected by portable recording devices is a convenient way to track potential condition worsening for patients who have asthma. However, the data used in building current cough detection models are often clean, containing a limited set of sound categories, and thus perform poorly when they are exposed to a variety of real-world sounds which could be picked up by portable recording devices. The sounds that are not learned by the model are referred to as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we propose two robust cough detection methods combined with an OOD detection module, that removes OOD data without sacrificing the cough detection performance of the original system. These methods include adding a learning confidence parameter and maximizing entropy loss. Our experiments show that 1) the OOD system can produce dependable In-Distribution (ID) and OOD results at a sampling rate above 750 Hz; 2) the OOD sample detection tends to perform better for larger audio window sizes; 3) the model’s overall accuracy and precision get better as the proportion of OOD samples increase in the acoustic signals; 4) a higher percentage of OOD data is needed to realize performance gains at lower sampling rates. The incorporation of OOD detection techniques improves cough detection performance by a significant margin and provides a valuable solution to real-world acoustic cough detection problems.