Large AI models, or foundation models, are models recently emerging with massive scales both parameter-wise and data-wise, the magnitudes of which can reach beyond billions. Once pretrained, large AI models demonstrate impressive performance in various downstream tasks. A prime example is ChatGPT, whose capability has compelled people's imagination about the far-reaching influence that large AI models can have and their potential to transform different domains of our lives. In health informatics, the advent of large AI models has brought new paradigms for the design of methodologies. The scale of multi-modal data in the biomedical and health domain has been ever-expanding especially since the community embraced the era of deep learning, which provides the ground to develop, validate, and advance large AI models for breakthroughs in health-related areas. This article presents a comprehensive review of large AI models, from background to their applications. We identify seven key sectors in which large AI models are applicable and might have substantial influence, including 1) bioinformatics; 2) medical diagnosis; 3) medical imaging; 4) medical informatics; 5) medical education; 6) public health; and 7) medical robotics. We examine their challenges, followed by a critical discussion about potential future directions and pitfalls of large AI models in transforming the field of health informatics.

Finite/fixed-time control yields a promising tool to optimize a system's settling time, but lacks the ability to separately define the settling time and the convergence domain (known as practically prescribed-time stability , PPTS). We provide a sufficient condition for PPTS based on a new piecewise exponential function, which decouples the settling time and convergence domain into separately user-defined parameters. We propose an adaptive event-triggered prescribed-time control scheme for nonlinear systems with asymmetric output constraints, using an exponential-type barrier Lyapunov function. We show that this PPTS control scheme can guarantee tracking error convergence performance, while restricting the output state according to the prescribed asymmetric constraints. Compared with traditional finite/fixed-time control, the proposed methodology yields separately user-defined settling time and convergence domain without the prior information on disturbance. Moreover, asymmetric state constraints can be handled in the control structure through bias state transformation, which offers an intuitive analysis technique for general constraint issues. Simulation and experiment results on a heterogeneous teleoperation system demonstrate the merits of the proposed control scheme.

In this paper, the stability and performance of the interval type-2 (IT2) polynomial fuzzy-model-based (PFMB) tracking control system, formed by an IT2 polynomial fuzzy model and an IT2 polynomial fuzzy controller, based on the output feedback and sampled-data structure are investigated. IT2 fuzzy sets are employed to capture the uncertainties of the nonlinear plant. Furthermore, considering the digital implementation of control strategy and only the system outputs are available, the IT2 polynomial fuzzy controller is of discrete time and output-feedback type. Both membership-function-independent and membership-function-dependent stability analysis, with the consideration $H_\infty$ performance index, are conducted to develop stability conditions in terms of sum-of-square (SOS) based on Lyapunov stability theory. The information of membership functions, system states and sampling process are included in the stability analysis for the relaxation of stability conditions. Simulation examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed tracking control approach.

Limited by operation time window and working space, the space teleoperation task needs to be completed within an expected time while ensuring that the end effector meets the physical constraints. Meanwhile, the interaction with unknown environments would cause uncertainty in the closed-loop system, which brings great challenges to the control design. To solve the above problems, the control performance issue for a class of space teleoperation systems subject to multiple constraints and interaction uncertainties is investigated in this paper. The force interaction with the human operator/space environment is represented by interval type-2 (IT2) Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems, where the uncertain equivalent mass and damping parameters can be effectively described and captured by IT2 membership functions. In order to reduce the communication burden and satisfy the constraints of settling time, transient-state performance and operating space, a time-varying threshold event-triggered control scheme together with exponential-type Lyapunov function (EBLF) is developed for the first time. We show that, with the proposed controller, the synchronization tracking errors are guaranteed to converge to a user-defined residual set within pre-assigned settling time, and never exceed the prescribed range despite unknown control direction and actuator faults, which solves the long-standing constraint issue with more flexibility due to the fact that the related constraints can be arbitrarily specific within the physically available range. Moreover, the convergence set is only dependent on fewer user-defined parameters rather than approximation errors, which provides an effective analysis technique to deal with the difficulty that the convergence accuracy is difficult to calculate quantitatively in the presence of unknown disturbance. Detailed simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness and merit of the proposed control strategy.

In this paper, the stability analysis and control synthesis of Interval Type-2 (IT2) Polynomial-Fuzzy-Model-Based (PFMB) networked control systems are investigated under the event-triggered control framework. The nonlinear dynamics in the plant is efficiently represented by an IT2 polynomial fuzzy model that the IT2 membership functions are utilized to capture the uncertainties in the plant. An event-triggered IT2 polynomial fuzzy controller is then designed to stabilize the nonlinear model subject to uncertainties. The stability conditions of the closed-loop control system are summarized in the form of Sum-of-Squares (SOS). Under the Imperfectly Premise Matching (IPM) concept, the Membership-Function-Dependent (MFD) approach is applied to endow the polynomial fuzzy controllers with more flexibility in terms of number of rules and premise membership functions. In the MFD approach under the IPM concept, both the number of rules and the shape of membership functions in the fuzzy models and controllers can be different. Also, the information of IT2 membership functions of the polynomial fuzzy model and controller is considered and adopted to further relax the stability conditions. Furthermore, the intrinsic mismatched issue of the premise variables of the fuzzy model and controllers due to the event-triggering mechanism is handled by the MFD approach. A detailed simulation example is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed event-based control strategy.

Conventional approaches to dietary assessment are primarily grounded in self-reporting methods or structured interviews conducted under the supervision of dietitians. These methods, however, are often subjective, potentially inaccurate, and time-intensive. Although artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions have been devised to automate the dietary assessment process, prior AI methodologies tackle dietary assessment in a fragmented landscape (e.g., merely recognizing food types or estimating portion size), and encounter challenges in their ability to generalize across a diverse range of food categories, dietary behaviors, and cultural contexts. Recently, the emergence of multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4V, has exhibited transformative potential across a wide range of tasks (e.g., scene understanding and image captioning) in various research domains. These models have demonstrated remarkable generalist intelligence and accuracy, owing to their large-scale pre-training on broad datasets and substantially scaled model size. In this study, we explore the application of GPT-4V powering multimodal ChatGPT for dietary assessment, along with prompt engineering and passive monitoring techniques. We evaluated the proposed pipeline using a self-collected, semi free-living dietary intake dataset comprising 16 real-life eating episodes, captured through wearable cameras. Our findings reveal that GPT-4V excels in food detection under challenging conditions without any fine-tuning or adaptation using food-specific datasets. By guiding the model with specific language prompts (e.g., African cuisine), it shifts from recognizing common staples like rice and bread to accurately identifying regional dishes like banku and ugali. Another GPT-4V's standout feature is its contextual awareness. GPT-4V can leverage surrounding objects as scale references to deduce the portion sizes of food items, further facilitating the process of dietary assessment.