In this prospective, interventional, international study, we investigate continuous monitoring of hospitalised patients’ vital signs using wearable technology as a basis for real-time early warning scores (EWS) estimation and vital signs time-series prediction. The collected continuous monitored vital signs are heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and oxygen saturation of a heterogeneous patient population hospitalised in cardiology, postsurgical, and dialysis wards. Two aspects are elaborated in this study. The first is the high-rate (every minute) estimation of the statistical values (e.g., minimum and mean) of the vital signs components of the EWS for one-minute segments in contrast with the conventional routine of 2 to 3 times per day. The second aspect explores the use of a hybrid machine learning algorithm of kNN-LS-SVM for predicting future values of monitored vital signs. It is demonstrated that a real-time implementation of EWS in clinical practice is possible. Furthermore, we showed a promising prediction performance of vital signs compared to the most recent state of the art of a boosted approach of LSTM. The reported mean absolute percentage errors of predicting one-hour averaged heart rate are 4.1, 4.5, and 5% for the upcoming one, two, and three hours respectively for cardiology patients. The obtained results in this study show the potential of using wearable technology to continuously monitor the vital signs of hospitalised patients as the real-time estimation of EWS in addition to a reliable prediction of the future values of these vital signs is presented. Ultimately, both approaches of high-rate EWS computation and vital signs time-series prediction is promising to provide efficient cost-utility, ease of mobility and portability, streaming analytics, and early warning for vital signs deterioration.

Thermal comfort and sensation are important aspects of building design and indoor climate control, as modern man spends most of the day indoors. Conventional indoor climate design and control approaches are based on static thermal comfort/sensation models that view the building occupants as passive recipients of their thermal environment. To overcome the disadvantages of static models, adaptive thermal comfort models aim to provide opportunity for personalized climate control and thermal comfort enhancement. Recent advances in wearable technologies contributed to new possibilities in controlling and monitoring health conditions and human wellbeing in daily life. The generated streaming data generated from wearable sensors are providing a unique opportunity to develop a real-time monitor of an individual’s thermal state. The main goal of this work is to introduce a personalized adaptive model to predict individual’s thermal sensation based on non-intrusive and easily measured variables, which could be obtained from already available wearable sensors. In this paper, a personalized classification model for individual thermal sensation with a reduced-dimension input-space, including 12 features extracted from easily measured variables, which are obtained from wearable sensors, was developed using least-squares support vector machine algorithm. The developed classification model predicted the individual’s thermal sensation with an overall average accuracy of 86%. Additionally, we introduced the main framework of streaming algorithm for personalized classification model to predict an individual’s thermal sensation based on streaming data obtained from wearable sensors.

This study introduces machine learning predictive models to predict the future values of the monitored vital signs of COVID-19 ICU patients. The main vital sign predictors include heart rate, respiration rate, and oxygen saturation. We investigated the performances of the developed predictive models by considering different approaches. The first predictive model was developed by considering the following vital signs: heart rate, blood pressure (systolic, diastolic and mean arterial, pulse pressure), respiration rate, and oxygen saturation. Similar to the first approach, the second model was developed using the same vital signs, but it was trained and tested based on a leave-one-subject-out approach. The third predictive model was developed by considering three vital signs: heart rate (HR), respiration rate (RR), and oxygen saturation (SpO${}_2$). The fourth model was a leave-one-subject-out model for the three vital signs. Finally, the fifth predictive model was developed based on the same three vital signs, but with a five-minute observation rate, in contrast with the aforementioned four models, where the observation rate was hourly to bi-hourly. For the five models, the predicted measurements were those of the three upcoming observations (on average, three hours ahead). Based on the obtained results, we observed that by limiting the number of vital sign predictors (i.e., three vital signs), the prediction performance was still acceptable, with the average mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) being $12\%,5\%$, and $21.4\%$ for heart rate, oxygen saturation, and respiration rate, respectively. Moreover, increasing the observation rate could enhance the prediction performance to be, on average, $8\%,4.8\%$, and $17.8\%$ for heart rate, oxygen saturation, and respiration rate, respectively. It is envisioned that such models could be integrated with monitoring systems that could, using a limited number of vital signs, predict the health conditions of COVID-19 ICU patients in real-time.

This study introduces the global-local least-squares support vector machine (GLocal-LS-SVM), a novel machine learning algorithm that combines the strengths of localised and global learning. GLocal-LS-SVM addresses the challenges associated with decentralised data sources, large datasets, and input-space-related issues. The algorithm is a double-layer learning approach that employs multiple local LS-SVM models in the first layer and one global LS-SVM model in the second layer. The key idea behind GLocal-LS-SVM is to extract the most informative data points, known as support vectors, from each local region in the input space. Local LS-SVM models are developed for each region to identify the most contributing data points with the highest support values. The local support vectors are then merged at the final layer to form a reduced training set used to train the global model. We evaluated the performance of GLocal-LS-SVM using both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that GLocal-LS-SVM achieves comparable or superior classification performance compared to standard LS-SVM and state-of-the-art models. In addition, our experiments show that GLocal-LS-SVM outperforms standard LS-SVM in terms of computational efficiency. For instance, on a training dataset of 9, 000 instances, the average training time for GLocal-LS-SVM was only 2% of the time required to train the LS-SVM model while maintaining classification performance. In summary, the GLocal-LS-SVM algorithm offers a promising solution to address the challenges associated with decentralised data sources and large datasets while maintaining high classification performance. Furthermore, its computational efficiency makes it a valuable tool for practical applications in various domains.

The recognition of human physical activities and postures based on sensor data has received much research attention in several human health and biomedical engineering applications. In this study, the challenges of class-imbalance and ambiguity (or confusion) are discussed that frequently arise in data from human activity recognition (HAR) systems. In order to reduce the influence of imbalance and ambiguity in HAR problems, a novel hybrid localised learning approach of K-nearest neighbours least-squares support vector machine (KNN-LS-SVM) is proposed. The classifier is applied to different synthetic and real-world datasets where imbalance and ambiguity are present. In this study, it is novel to apply a hybrid localised learning algorithm to the HAR problem. When compared to different global and local approaches, higher classification performances could be obtained by using the proposed localised learning approach. Furthermore, the computational effort could be reduced in an online learning mode.

Four novel EEG signal features for discriminating phase-coded steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) are presented, and their performance in view of target selection in an SSVEP-based brain–computer interfacing (BCI) is assessed. The novel features are based on phase estimation and correlations between target responses. The targets are decoded from the feature scores using the least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier, and it is shown that some of the proposed features compete with state-of-the-art classifiers when using short (0.5 s) EEG recordings in a binary classification setting.