An electrocardiograph (ECG) is employed as a primary tool for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases (CVD). ECG signals provide a framework to probe the underlying properties and enhance the initial diagnosis obtained via traditional tools and patient-doctor dialogues. Notwithstanding its proven utility, deciphering large datasets to determine appropriate information remains a challenge in ECG-based CVD diagnosis and treatment. Our study presents a deep neural network (DNN) strategy to ameliorate the aforementioned difficulties. Our strategy consists of a learning stage where classification accuracy is improved via a robust feature extraction protocol. This is followed by using a genetic algorithm (GA) process to aggregate the best combination of feature extraction and classification. Comparison of the performance recorded for the proposed technique alongside state-of-the-art methods reported the area shows an increase of 0.94 and 0.953 in terms of average accuracy and F1 score, respectively. The outcomes suggest that the proposed model could serve as an analytic module to alert users and/or medical experts when anomalies are detected.

The recent advancement of motion recognition using Microsoft Kinect stimulates many new ideas in motion capture and virtual reality applications. Utilizing a pattern recognition algorithm, Kinect can determine the positions of different body parts from the user. However, due to the use of a single-depth camera, recognition accuracy drops significantly when the parts are occluded. This hugely limits the usability of applications that involve interaction with external objects, such as sport training or exercising systems. The problem becomes more critical when Kinect incorrectly perceives body parts. This is because applications have limited information about the recognition correctness, and using those parts to synthesize body postures would result in serious visual artifacts. In this paper, we propose a new method to reconstruct valid movement from incomplete and noisy postures captured by Kinect. We first design a set of measurements that objectively evaluates the degree of reliability on each tracked body part. By incorporating the reliability estimation into a motion database query during run time, we obtain a set of similar postures that are kinematically valid. These postures are used to construct a latent space, which is known as the natural posture space in our system, with local principle component analysis. We finally apply frame-based optimization in the space to synthesize a new posture that closely resembles the true user posture while satisfying kinematic constraints. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the quality of the recognized posture under severely occluded environments, such as a person exercising with a basketball or moving in a small room.

Motion control algorithms in the presence of pedes- trians are critical for the development of safe and reliable Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Traditional motion control algo- rithms rely on manually designed decision-making policies which neglect the mutual interactions between AVs and pedestrians. On the other hand, recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning allow for the automatic learning of policies without manual designs. To tackle the problem of decision-making in the presence of pedestrians, the authors introduce a framework based on Social Value Orientation and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that is capable of generating decision-making policies with different driving styles. The policy is trained using state- of-the-art DRL algorithms in a simulated environment. A novel computationally-efficient pedestrian model that is suitable for DRL training is also introduced. We perform experiments to validate our framework and we conduct a comparative analysis of the policies obtained with two different model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms. Simulations results show how the developed model exhibits natural driving behaviours, such as short-stopping, to facilitate the pedestrian's crossing.

The self-regulated recognition of human activities from time-series smartphone sensor data is a growing research area in smart and intelligent health care. Deep learning (DL) approaches have exhibited improvements over traditional machine learning (ML) models in various domains, including human activity recognition (HAR). Several issues are involved with traditional ML approaches; these include handcrafted feature extraction, which is a tedious and complex task involving expert domain knowledge, and the use of a separate dimensionality reduction module to overcome overfitting problems and hence provide model generalization. In this article, we propose a DL-based approach for activity recognition with smartphone sensor data, i.e., accelerometer and gyroscope data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), autoencoders (AEs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) possess complementary modeling capabilities, as CNNs are good at automatic feature extraction, AEs are used for dimensionality reduction and LSTMs are adept at temporal modeling. In this study, we take advantage of the complementarity of CNNs, AEs, and LSTMs by combining them into a unified architecture. We explore the proposed architecture, namely, “ConvAE-LSTM”, on four different standard public datasets (WISDM, UCI, PAMAP2, and OPPORTUNITY). The experimental results indicate that our novel approach is practical and provides relative smartphone-based HAR solution performance improvements in terms of computational time, accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Data-driven modeling of human motions is ubiquitous in computer graphics and vision applications. Such problems can be approached by deep learning on a large amount data. However, existing methods can be sub-optimal for two reasons. First, skeletal information has not been fully utilized. Unlike images, it is difficult to define spatial proximity in skeletal motions in the way that deep networks can be applied for feature extraction. Second, motion is time-series data with strong multi-modal temporal correlations between frames. A frame could lead to different motions; on the other hand, long-range dependencies exist where a number of frames in the beginning correlate to a number of frames later. Ineffective temporal modeling would either under-estimate the multi-modality and variance. We propose a new deep network to tackle these challenges by creating a natural motion manifold that is versatile for many applications. The network has a new spatial component and is equipped with a new batch prediction model that predicts a large number of frames at once, such that long-term temporally-based objective functions can be employed to correctly learn the motion multi-modality and variances. We demonstrate that our system can create superior results comparing to existing work in multiple applications.

The pursuit of early diagnosis of cerebral palsy has been an active research area with some very promising results using tools such as the General Movements Assessment (GMA). In our previous work, we explored the feasibility of extracting pose-based features from video sequences to automatically classify infant body movement into two categories, normal and abnormal. The classification was based upon the GMA, which was carried out on the video data by an independent expert reviewer. In this paper we extend our previous work by extracting the normalised pose-based feature sets, Histograms of Joint Orientation 2D (HOJO2D) and Histograms of Joint Displacement 2D (HOJD2D), for use in new deep learning architectures. We explore the viability of using these pose-based feature sets for automated classification within a deep learning framework by carrying out extensive experiments on five new deep learning architectures. Experimental results show that the proposed fully connected neural network FCNet performed robustly across different feature sets. Furthermore, the proposed convolutional neural network architectures demonstrated excellent performance in handling features in higher dimensionality. We make the code, extracted features and associated GMA labels publicly available.