RespEar: Earable-Based Robust Respiratory Rate Monitoring

Respiratory rate (RR) monitoring is integral to understanding physical and mental health and tracking fitness. Existing studies have demonstrated the feasibility of RR monitoring under specific user conditions (e.g., while remaining still, or while breathing heavily). Yet, performing accurate, continuous and non-obtrusive RR monitoring across diverse daily routines and activities remains challenging. In this work, we present RespEar, an earable-based system for robust RR monitoring. By leveraging the unique properties of in-ear microphones in earbuds, RespEar enables the use of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) and Locomotor Respiratory Coupling (LRC), physiological couplings between cardiovascular activity, gait and respiration, to indirectly determine RR. This effectively addresses the challenges posed by the almost imperceptible breathing signals under daily activities. We further propose a suite of meticulously crafted signal processing schemes to improve RR estimation accuracy and robustness. With data collected from 18 subjects over 8 activities, RespEar measures RR with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.48 breaths per minutes (BPM) and a mean absolute percent error (MAPE) of 9.12% in sedentary conditions, and a MAE of 2.28 BPM and a MAPE of 11.04% in active conditions, respectively, which is unprecedented for a method capable of generalizing across conditions with a single modality.

Towards Open Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models: Pretraining and Benchmarking

Respiratory audio, such as coughing and breathing sounds, has predictive power for a wide range of healthcare applications, yet is currently under-explored. The main problem for those applications arises from the difficulty in collecting large labeled task-specific data for model development. Generalizable respiratory acoustic foundation models pretrained with unlabeled data would offer appealing advantages and possibly unlock this impasse. However, given the safety-critical nature of healthcare applications, it is pivotal to also ensure openness and replicability for any proposed foundation model solution. To this end, we introduce OPERA, an OPEn Respiratory Acoustic foundation model pretraining and benchmarking system, as the first approach answering this need. We curate large-scale respiratory audio datasets (~136K samples, 440 hours), pretrain three pioneering foundation models, and build a benchmark consisting of 19 downstream respiratory health tasks for evaluation. Our pretrained models demonstrate superior performance (against existing acoustic models pretrained with general audio on 16 out of 19 tasks) and generalizability (to unseen datasets and new respiratory audio modalities). This highlights the great promise of respiratory acoustic foundation models and encourages more studies using OPERA as an open resource to accelerate research on respiratory audio for health. The system is accessible from https://github.com/evelyn0414/OPERA.

FLea: Addressing Data Scarcity and Label Skew in Federated Learning via Privacy-preserving Feature Augmentation

Federated Learning (FL) enables model development by leveraging data distributed across numerous edge devices without transferring local data to a central server. However, existing FL methods still face challenges when dealing with scarce and label-skewed data across devices, resulting in local model overfitting and drift, consequently hindering the performance of the global model. In response to these challenges, we propose a pioneering framework called FLea, incorporating the following key components: i) A global feature buffer that stores activation-target pairs shared from multiple clients to support local training. This design mitigates local model drift caused by the absence of certain classes; ii) A feature augmentation approach based on local and global activation mix-ups for local training. This strategy enlarges the training samples, thereby reducing the risk of local overfitting; iii) An obfuscation method to minimize the correlation between intermediate activations and the source data, enhancing the privacy of shared features. To verify the superiority of FLea, we conduct extensive experiments using a wide range of data modalities, simulating different levels of local data scarcity and label skew. The results demonstrate that FLea consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FL counterparts (among 13 of the experimented 18 settings, the improvement is over 5% while concurrently mitigating the privacy vulnerabilities associated with shared features. Code is available at https://github.com/XTxiatong/FLea.git.

UR2M: Uncertainty and Resource-Aware Event Detection on Microcontrollers

Traditional machine learning techniques are prone to generating inaccurate predictions when confronted with shifts in the distribution of data between the training and testing phases. This vulnerability can lead to severe consequences, especially in applications such as mobile healthcare. Uncertainty estimation has the potential to mitigate this issue by assessing the reliability of a model's output. However, existing uncertainty estimation techniques often require substantial computational resources and memory, making them impractical for implementation on microcontrollers (MCUs). This limitation hinders the feasibility of many important on-device wearable event detection (WED) applications, such as heart attack detection. In this paper, we present UR2M, a novel Uncertainty and Resource-aware event detection framework for MCUs. Specifically, we (i) develop an uncertainty-aware WED based on evidential theory for accurate event detection and reliable uncertainty estimation; (ii) introduce a cascade ML framework to achieve efficient model inference via early exits, by sharing shallower model layers among different event models; (iii) optimize the deployment of the model and MCU library for system efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments and compared UR2M to traditional uncertainty baselines using three wearable datasets. Our results demonstrate that UR2M achieves up to 864% faster inference speed, 857% energy-saving for uncertainty estimation, 55% memory saving on two popular MCUs, and a 22% improvement in uncertainty quantification performance. UR2M can be deployed on a wide range of MCUs, significantly expanding real-time and reliable WED applications.

Balancing Continual Learning and Fine-tuning for Human Activity Recognition

Wearable-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a key task in human-centric machine learning due to its fundamental understanding of human behaviours. Due to the dynamic nature of human behaviours, continual learning promises HAR systems that are tailored to users' needs. However, because of the difficulty in collecting labelled data with wearable sensors, existing approaches that focus on supervised continual learning have limited applicability, while unsupervised continual learning methods only handle representation learning while delaying classifier training to a later stage. This work explores the adoption and adaptation of CaSSLe, a continual self-supervised learning model, and Kaizen, a semi-supervised continual learning model that balances representation learning and down-stream classification, for the task of wearable-based HAR. These schemes re-purpose contrastive learning for knowledge retention and, Kaizen combines that with self-training in a unified scheme that can leverage unlabelled and labelled data for continual learning. In addition to comparing state-of-the-art self-supervised continual learning schemes, we further investigated the importance of different loss terms and explored the trade-off between knowledge retention and learning from new tasks. In particular, our extensive evaluation demonstrated that the use of a weighting factor that reflects the ratio between learned and new classes achieves the best overall trade-off in continual learning.

FLea: Improving federated learning on scarce and label-skewed data via privacy-preserving feature augmentation

Learning a global model by abstracting the knowledge, distributed across multiple clients, without aggregating the raw data is the primary goal of Federated Learning (FL). Typically, this works in rounds alternating between parallel local training at several clients, followed by model aggregation at a server. We found that existing FL methods under-perform when local datasets are small and present severe label skew as these lead to over-fitting and local model bias. This is a realistic setting in many real-world applications. To address the problem, we propose \textit{FLea}, a unified framework that tackles over-fitting and local bias by encouraging clients to exchange privacy-protected features to aid local training. The features refer to activations from an intermediate layer of the model, which are obfuscated before being shared with other clients to protect sensitive information in the data. \textit{FLea} leverages a novel way of combining local and shared features as augmentations to enhance local model learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that \textit{FLea} outperforms the start-of-the-art FL methods, sharing only model parameters, by up to $17.6\%$, and FL methods that share data augmentations by up to $6.3\%$, while reducing the privacy vulnerability associated with shared data augmentations.

LifeLearner: Hardware-Aware Meta Continual Learning System for Embedded Computing Platforms

Continual Learning (CL) allows applications such as user personalization and household robots to learn on the fly and adapt to context. This is an important feature when context, actions, and users change. However, enabling CL on resource-constrained embedded systems is challenging due to the limited labeled data, memory, and computing capacity. In this paper, we propose LifeLearner, a hardware-aware meta continual learning system that drastically optimizes system resources (lower memory, latency, energy consumption) while ensuring high accuracy. Specifically, we (1) exploit meta-learning and rehearsal strategies to explicitly cope with data scarcity issues and ensure high accuracy, (2) effectively combine lossless and lossy compression to significantly reduce the resource requirements of CL and rehearsal samples, and (3) developed hardware-aware system on embedded and IoT platforms considering the hardware characteristics. As a result, LifeLearner achieves near-optimal CL performance, falling short by only 2.8% on accuracy compared to an Oracle baseline. With respect to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) Meta CL method, LifeLearner drastically reduces the memory footprint (by 178.7x), end-to-end latency by 80.8-94.2%, and energy consumption by 80.9-94.2%. In addition, we successfully deployed LifeLearner on two edge devices and a microcontroller unit, thereby enabling efficient CL on resource-constrained platforms where it would be impractical to run SOTA methods and the far-reaching deployment of adaptable CL in a ubiquitous manner. Code is available at https://github.com/theyoungkwon/LifeLearner.

UDAMA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Multi-discriminator Adversarial Training with Noisy Labels Improves Cardio-fitness Prediction

Deep learning models have shown great promise in various healthcare monitoring applications. However, most healthcare datasets with high-quality (gold-standard) labels are small-scale, as directly collecting ground truth is often costly and time-consuming. As a result, models developed and validated on small-scale datasets often suffer from overfitting and do not generalize well to unseen scenarios. At the same time, large amounts of imprecise (silver-standard) labeled data, annotated by approximate methods with the help of modern wearables and in the absence of ground truth validation, are starting to emerge. However, due to measurement differences, this data displays significant label distribution shifts, which motivates the use of domain adaptation. To this end, we introduce UDAMA, a method with two key components: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and Multidiscriminator Adversarial Training, where we pre-train on the silver-standard data and employ adversarial adaptation with the gold-standard data along with two domain discriminators. In particular, we showcase the practical potential of UDAMA by applying it to Cardio-respiratory fitness (CRF) prediction. CRF is a crucial determinant of metabolic disease and mortality, and it presents labels with various levels of noise (goldand silver-standard), making it challenging to establish an accurate prediction model. Our results show promising performance by alleviating distribution shifts in various label shift settings. Additionally, by using data from two free-living cohort studies (Fenland and BBVS), we show that UDAMA consistently outperforms up to 12% compared to competitive transfer learning and state-of-the-art domain adaptation models, paving the way for leveraging noisy labeled data to improve fitness estimation at scale.

TinyTrain: Deep Neural Network Training at the Extreme Edge

On-device training is essential for user personalisation and privacy. With the pervasiveness of IoT devices and microcontroller units (MCU), this task becomes more challenging due to the constrained memory and compute resources, and the limited availability of labelled user data. Nonetheless, prior works neglect the data scarcity issue, require excessively long training time (e.g. a few hours), or induce substantial accuracy loss ($\geq$10\%). We propose TinyTrain, an on-device training approach that drastically reduces training time by selectively updating parts of the model and explicitly coping with data scarcity. TinyTrain introduces a task-adaptive sparse-update method that dynamically selects the layer/channel based on a multi-objective criterion that jointly captures user data, the memory, and the compute capabilities of the target device, leading to high accuracy on unseen tasks with reduced computation and memory footprint. TinyTrain outperforms vanilla fine-tuning of the entire network by 3.6-5.0\% in accuracy, while reducing the backward-pass memory and computation cost by up to 2,286$\times$ and 7.68$\times$, respectively. Targeting broadly used real-world edge devices, TinyTrain achieves 9.5$\times$ faster and 3.5$\times$ more energy-efficient training over status-quo approaches, and 2.8$\times$ smaller memory footprint than SOTA approaches, while remaining within the 1 MB memory envelope of MCU-grade platforms.

Heart Rate Extraction from Abdominal Audio Signals

Abdominal sounds (ABS) have been traditionally used for assessing gastrointestinal (GI) disorders. However, the assessment requires a trained medical professional to perform multiple abdominal auscultation sessions, which is resource-intense and may fail to provide an accurate picture of patients' continuous GI wellbeing. This has generated a technological interest in developing wearables for continuous capture of ABS, which enables a fuller picture of patient's GI status to be obtained at reduced cost. This paper seeks to evaluate the feasibility of extracting heart rate (HR) from such ABS monitoring devices. The collection of HR directly from these devices would enable gathering vital signs alongside GI data without the need for additional wearable devices, providing further cost benefits and improving general usability. We utilised a dataset containing 104 hours of ABS audio, collected from the abdomen using an e-stethoscope, and electrocardiogram as ground truth. Our evaluation shows for the first time that we can successfully extract HR from audio collected from a wearable on the abdomen. As heart sounds collected from the abdomen suffer from significant noise from GI and respiratory tracts, we leverage wavelet denoising for improved heart beat detection. The mean absolute error of the algorithm for average HR is 3.4 BPM with mean directional error of -1.2 BPM over the whole dataset. A comparison to photoplethysmography-based wearable HR sensors shows that our approach exhibits comparable accuracy to consumer wrist-worn wearables for average and instantaneous heart rate.