The development of interactive rehabilitation technologies which rely on wearable-sensing for upper body rehabilitation is attracting increasing research interest. This paper reviews related research with the aim: 1) To inventory and classify interactive wearable systems for movement and posture monitoring during upper body rehabilitation, regarding the sensing technology, system measurements and feedback conditions; 2) To gauge the wearability of the wearable systems; 3) To inventory the availability of clinical evidence supporting the effectiveness of related technologies. A systematic literature search was conducted in the following search engines: PubMed, ACM, Scopus and IEEE (January 2010–April 2016). Forty-five papers were included and discussed in a new cuboid taxonomy which consists of 3 dimensions: sensing technology, feedback modalities and system measurements. Wearable sensor systems were developed for persons in: 1) Neuro-rehabilitation: stroke (n = 21), spinal cord injury (n = 1), cerebral palsy (n = 2), Alzheimer (n = 1); 2) Musculoskeletal impairment: ligament rehabilitation (n = 1), arthritis (n = 1), frozen shoulder (n = 1), bones trauma (n = 1); 3) Others: chronic pulmonary obstructive disease (n = 1), chronic pain rehabilitation (n = 1) and other general rehabilitation (n = 14). Accelerometers and inertial measurement units (IMU) are the most frequently used technologies (84% of the papers). They are mostly used in multiple sensor configurations to measure upper limb kinematics and/or trunk posture. Sensors are placed mostly on the trunk, upper arm, the forearm, the wrist, and the finger. Typically sensors are attachable rather than embedded in wearable devices and garments; although studies that embed and integrate sensors are increasing in the last 4 years. 16 studies applied knowledge of result (KR) feedback, 14 studies applied knowledge of performance (KP) feedback and 15 studies applied both in various modalities. 16 studies have conducted their evaluation with patients and reported usability tests, while only three of them conducted clinical trials including one randomized clinical trial. This review has shown that wearable systems are used mostly for the monitoring and provision of feedback on posture and upper extremity movements in stroke rehabilitation. The results indicated that accelerometers and IMUs are the most frequently used sensors, in most cases attached to the body through ad hoc contraptions for the purpose of improving range of motion and movement performance during upper body rehabilitation. Systems featuring sensors embedded in wearable appliances or garments are only beginning to emerge. Similarly, clinical evaluations are scarce and are further needed to provide evidence on effectiveness and pave the path towards implementation in clinical settings.

Epilepsy seizure prediction paves the way of timely warning for patients to take more active and effective intervention measures. Compared to seizure detection that only identifies the inter-ictal state and the ictal state, far fewer researches have been conducted on seizure prediction because the high similarity makes it challenging to distinguish between the pre-ictal state and the inter-ictal state. In this paper, a novel solution on seizure prediction is proposed using common spatial pattern (CSP) and convolutional neural network (CNN). Firstly, artificial pre-ictal EEG signals based on the original ones are generated by combining the segmented pre-ictal signals to solve the trial imbalance problem between the two states. Secondly, a feature extractor employing wavelet packet decomposition and CSP is designed to extract the distinguishing features in both the time domain and the frequency domain. It can improve overall accuracy while reducing the training time. Finally, a shallow CNN is applied to discriminate between the pre-ictal state and the inter-ictal state. Our proposed solution is evaluated on 23 patient's data from Boston Children's Hospital-MIT scalp EEG dataset by employing a leave-one-out cross-validation, and it achieves a sensitivity of 92.2% and false prediction rate of 0.12/h. Experimental result demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms most state-of-the-art methods.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as a pandemic with serious clinical manifestations including death. A pandemic at the large-scale like COVID-19 places extraordinary demands on the world's health systems, dramatically devastates vulnerable populations, and critically threatens the global communities in an unprecedented way. While tremendous efforts at the frontline are placed on detecting the virus, providing treatments and developing vaccines, it is also critically important to examine the technologies and systems for tackling disease emergence, arresting its spread and especially the strategy for diseases prevention. The objective of this article is to review enabling technologies and systems with various application scenarios for handling the COVID-19 crisis. The article will focus specifically on 1) wearable devices suitable for monitoring the populations at risk and those in quarantine, both for evaluating the health status of caregivers and management personnel, and for facilitating triage processes for admission to hospitals; 2) unobtrusive sensing systems for detecting the disease and for monitoring patients with relatively mild symptoms whose clinical situation could suddenly worsen in improvised hospitals; and 3) telehealth technologies for the remote monitoring and diagnosis of COVID-19 and related diseases. Finally, further challenges and opportunities for future directions of development are highlighted.

We provide an open access dataset of High densitY Surface Electromyogram (HD-sEMG) Recordings (named “Hyser”), a toolbox for neural interface research, and benchmark results for pattern recognition and EMG-force applications. Data from 20 subjects were acquired twice per subject on different days following the same experimental paradigm. We acquired 256-channel HD-sEMG from forearm muscles during dexterous finger manipulations. This Hyser dataset contains five sub-datasets as: (1) pattern recognition (PR) dataset acquired during 34 commonly used hand gestures, (2) maximal voluntary muscle contraction (MVC) dataset while subjects contracted each individual finger, (3) one-degree of freedom (DoF) dataset acquired during force-varying contraction of each individual finger, (4) N-DoF dataset acquired during prescribed contractions of combinations of multiple fingers, and (5) random task dataset acquired during random contraction of combinations of fingers without any prescribed force trajectory. Dataset 1 can be used for gesture recognition studies. Datasets 2-5 also recorded individual finger forces, thus can be used for studies on proportional control of neuroprostheses. Our toolbox can be used to: (1) analyze each of the five datasets using standard benchmark methods and (2) decompose HD-sEMG signals into motor unit action potentials via independent component analysis. We expect our dataset, toolbox and benchmark analyses can provide a unique platform to promote a wide range of neural interface research and collaboration among neural rehabilitation engineers.

Identifying bio-signals based-sleep stages requires time-consuming and tedious labor of skilled clinicians. Deep learning approaches have been introduced in order to challenge the automatic sleep stage classification conundrum. However, the difficulties can be posed in replacing the clinicians with the automatic system due to the differences in many aspects found in individual bio-signals, causing the inconsistency in the performance of the model on every incoming individual. Thus, we aim to explore the feasibility of using a novel approach, capable of assisting the clinicians and lessening the workload. We propose the transfer learning framework, entitled MetaSleepLearner, based on Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), in order to transfer the acquired sleep staging knowledge from a large dataset to new individual subjects. The framework was demonstrated to require the labelling of only a few sleep epochs by the clinicians and allow the remainder to be handled by the system. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) was also applied to understand the learning course of our approach. In all acquired datasets, in comparison to the conventional approach, MetaSleepLearner achieved a range of 5.4% to 17.7% improvement with statistical difference in the mean of both approaches. The illustration of the model interpretation after the adaptation to each subject also confirmed that the performance was directed towards reasonable learning. MetaSleepLearner outperformed the conventional approaches as a result from the fine-tuning using the recordings of both healthy subjects and patients. This is the first work that investigated a non-conventional pre-training method, MAML, resulting in a possibility for human-machine collaboration in sleep stage classification and easing the burden of the clinicians in labelling the sleep stages through only several epochs rather than an entire recording.