Multi-Modal Wireless Flexible Gel-Free Sensors with Edge Deep Learning for Detecting and Alerting Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Patients

Freezing of gait (FoG) is a debilitating symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD). This work develops flexible wearable sensors that can detect FoG and alert patients and companions to help prevent falls. FoG is detected on the sensors using a deep learning (DL) model with multi-modal sensory inputs collected from distributed wireless sensors. Two types of wireless sensors are developed, including: (1) a C-shape central node placed around the patient's ears, which collects electroencephalogram (EEG), detects FoG using an on-device DL model, and generates auditory alerts when FoG is detected; (2) a stretchable patch-type sensor attached to the patient's legs, which collects electromyography (EMG) and movement information from accelerometers. The patch-type sensors wirelessly send collected data to the central node through low-power ultra-wideband (UWB) transceivers. All sensors are fabricated on flexible printed circuit boards. Adhesive gel-free acetylene carbon black and polydimethylsiloxane electrodes are fabricated on the flexible substrate to allow conformal wear over the long term. Custom integrated circuits (IC) are developed in 180 nm CMOS technology and used in both types of sensors for signal acquisition, digitization, and wireless communication. A novel lightweight DL model is trained using multi-modal sensory data. The inference of the DL model is performed on a low-power microcontroller in the central node. The DL model achieves a high detection sensitivity of 0.81 and a specificity of 0.88. The developed wearable sensors are ready for clinical experiments and hold great promise in improving the quality of life of patients with PD. The proposed design methodologies can be used in wearable medical devices for the monitoring and treatment of a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases.

Edge Deep Learning Enabled Freezing of Gait Detection in Parkinson's Patients

This paper presents the design of a wireless sensor network for detecting and alerting the freezing of gait (FoG) symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease. Three sensor nodes, each integrating a 3-axis accelerometer, can be placed on a patient at ankle, thigh, and truck. Each sensor node can independently detect FoG using an on-device deep learning (DL) model, featuring a squeeze and excitation convolutional neural network (CNN). In a validation using a public dataset, the prototype developed achieved a FoG detection sensitivity of 88.8% and an F1 score of 85.34%, using less than 20 k trainable parameters per sensor node. Once FoG is detected, an auditory signal will be generated to alert users, and the alarm signal will also be sent to mobile phones for further actions if needed. The sensor node can be easily recharged wirelessly by inductive coupling. The system is self-contained and processes all user data locally without streaming data to external devices or the cloud, thus eliminating the cybersecurity risks and power penalty associated with wireless data transmission. The developed methodology can be used in a wide range of applications.

A CNN-Transformer Deep Learning Model for Real-time Sleep Stage Classification in an Energy-Constrained Wireless Device

This paper proposes a deep learning (DL) model for automatic sleep stage classification based on single-channel EEG data. The DL model features a convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformers. The model was designed to run on energy and memory-constrained devices for real-time operation with local processing. The Fpz-Cz EEG signals from a publicly available Sleep-EDF dataset are used to train and test the model. Four convolutional filter layers were used to extract features and reduce the data dimension. Then, transformers were utilized to learn the time-variant features of the data. To improve performance, we also implemented a subject specific training before the inference (i.e., prediction) stage. With the subject specific training, the F1 score was 0.91, 0.37, 0.84, 0.877, and 0.73 for wake, N1-N3, and rapid eye movement (REM) stages, respectively. The performance of the model was comparable to the state-of-the-art works with significantly greater computational costs. We tested a reduced-sized version of the proposed model on a low-cost Arduino Nano 33 BLE board and it was fully functional and accurate. In the future, a fully integrated wireless EEG sensor with edge DL will be developed for sleep research in pre-clinical and clinical experiments, such as real-time sleep modulation.

A Closed-loop Sleep Modulation System with FPGA-Accelerated Deep Learning

Closed-loop sleep modulation is an emerging research paradigm to treat sleep disorders and enhance sleep benefits. However, two major barriers hinder the widespread application of this research paradigm. First, subjects often need to be wire-connected to rack-mount instrumentation for data acquisition, which negatively affects sleep quality. Second, conventional real-time sleep stage classification algorithms give limited performance. In this work, we conquer these two limitations by developing a sleep modulation system that supports closed-loop operations on the device. Sleep stage classification is performed using a lightweight deep learning (DL) model accelerated by a low-power field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device. The DL model uses a single channel electroencephalogram (EEG) as input. Two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used to capture general and detailed features, and a bidirectional long-short-term memory (LSTM) network is used to capture time-variant sequence features. An 8-bit quantization is used to reduce the computational cost without compromising performance. The DL model has been validated using a public sleep database containing 81 subjects, achieving a state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 85.8% and a F1-score of 79%. The developed model has also shown the potential to be generalized to different channels and input data lengths. Closed-loop in-phase auditory stimulation has been demonstrated on the test bench.

ECE496Y Final Report: Edge Machine Learning for Detecting Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Patients

Parkinson's disease is a common neurological disease, entailing a multitude of motor deficiency symptoms. In this project, we developed a device with an uploaded edge machine learning algorithm that can detect the onset of freezing of gait symptoms in a Parkinson's patient. The algorithm achieved an accuracy of 83.7% in a validation using data from ten patients. The model was deployed in a microcontroller Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Board model and validated in real-time operation with data streamed to the microcontroller from a computer.

Classify Respiratory Abnormality in Lung Sounds Using STFT and a Fine-Tuned ResNet18 Network

Recognizing patterns in lung sounds is crucial to detecting and monitoring respiratory diseases. Current techniques for analyzing respiratory sounds demand domain experts and are subject to interpretation. Hence an accurate and automatic respiratory sound classification system is desired. In this work, we took a data-driven approach to classify abnormal lung sounds. We compared the performance using three different feature extraction techniques, which are short-time Fourier transformation (STFT), Mel spectrograms, and Wav2vec, as well as three different classifiers, including pre-trained ResNet18, LightCNN, and Audio Spectrogram Transformer. Our key contributions include the bench-marking of different audio feature extractors and neural network based classifiers, and the implementation of a complete pipeline using STFT and a fine-tuned ResNet18 network. The proposed method achieved Harmonic Scores of 0.89, 0.80, 0.71, 0.36 for tasks 1-1, 1-2, 2-1 and 2-2, respectively on the testing sets in the IEEE BioCAS 2022 Grand Challenge on Respiratory Sound Classification.

On-CMOS High-Throughput Multi-Modal Amperometric DNA Analysis with Distributed Thermal Regulation

Accurate temperature regulation is critical for amperometric DNA analysis to achieve high fidelity, reliability, and throughput. In this work, a 9x6 cell array of mixed-signal CMOS distributed temperature regulators for on-CMOS multi-modal amperometric DNA analysis is presented. Three DNA analysis methods are supported, including constant potential amperometry (CPA), cyclic voltammetry (CV), and impedance spectroscopy (IS). In-cell heating and temperature sensing elements are implemented in standard CMOS technology without post-processing. Using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, the local temperature can be regulated to within +/-0.5C of any desired value between 20C and 90C. The two computationally intensive operations in the PID algorithm, multiplication, and subtraction, are performed by an in-cell dual-slope multiplying ADC in the mixed-signal domain, resulting in a small area and low power consumption. Over 95% of the circuit blocks are synergistically shared among the four operating modes, including CPA, CV, IS, and the proposed temperature regulation mode. A 3mmx3mm CMOS prototype fabricated in a 0.13um CMOS technology has been fully experimentally characterized. Each channel occupies an area of 0.06mm2 and consumes 42uW from a 1.2V supply. The proposed distributed temperature regulation design and the mixed-signal PID implementation can be applied to a wide range of sensory and other applications.

Study on Compressed Sensing of Action Potential

Compressive sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique that enables sub-Nyquist sampling and near lossless reconstruction of a sparse signal. The technique is particularly appealing for neural signal processing since it avoids the issues relevant to high sampling rate and large data storage. In this project, different CS reconstruction algorithms were tested on raw action potential signals recorded in our lab. Two numerical criteria were set to evaluate the performance of different CS algorithms: Compression Ratio (CR) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). In order to do this, individual CS algorithm testing platforms for the EEG data were constructed within MATLAB scheme. The main considerations for the project were the following. 1) Feasibility of the dictionary 2) Tolerance to non-sparsity 3) Applicability of thresholding or interpolation.

Fractional spectral graph wavelets and their applications

One of the key challenges in the area of signal processing on graphs is to design transforms and dictionaries methods to identify and exploit structure in signals on weighted graphs. In this paper, we first generalize graph Fourier transform (GFT) to graph fractional Fourier transform (GFRFT), which is then used to define a novel transform named spectral graph fractional wavelet transform (SGFRWT), which is a generalized and extended version of spectral graph wavelet transform (SGWT). A fast algorithm for SGFRWT is also derived and implemented based on Fourier series approximation. The potential applications of SGFRWT are also presented.