Cyberoception: Finding a Painlessly-Measurable New Sense in the Cyberworld Towards Emotion-Awareness in Computing

In Affective computing, recognizing users' emotions accurately is the basis of affective human-computer interaction. Understanding users' interoception contributes to a better understanding of individually different emotional abilities, which is essential for achieving inter-individually accurate emotion estimation. However, existing interoception measurement methods, such as the heart rate discrimination task, have several limitations, including their dependence on a well-controlled laboratory environment and precision apparatus, making monitoring users' interoception challenging. This study aims to determine other forms of data that can explain users' interoceptive or similar states in their real-world lives and propose a novel hypothetical concept "cyberoception," a new sense (1) which has properties similar to interoception in terms of the correlation with other emotion-related abilities, and (2) which can be measured only by the sensors embedded inside commodity smartphone devices in users' daily lives. Results from a 10-day-long in-lab/in-the-wild hybrid experiment reveal a specific cyberoception type "Turn On" (users' subjective sensory perception about the frequency of turning-on behavior on their smartphones), significantly related to participants' emotional valence. We anticipate that cyberoception to serve as a fundamental building block for developing more "emotion-aware", user-friendly applications and services.

Auto-FEDUS: Autoregressive Generative Modeling of Doppler Ultrasound Signals from Fetal Electrocardiograms

Fetal health monitoring through one-dimensional Doppler ultrasound (DUS) signals offers a cost-effective and accessible approach that is increasingly gaining interest. Despite its potential, the development of machine learning based techniques to assess the health condition of mothers and fetuses using DUS signals remains limited. This scarcity is primarily due to the lack of extensive DUS datasets with a reliable reference for interpretation and data imbalance across different gestational ages. In response, we introduce a novel autoregressive generative model designed to map fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signals to corresponding DUS waveforms (Auto-FEDUS). By leveraging a neural temporal network based on dilated causal convolutions that operate directly on the waveform level, the model effectively captures both short and long-range dependencies within the signals, preserving the integrity of generated data. Cross-subject experiments demonstrate that Auto-FEDUS outperforms conventional generative architectures across both time and frequency domain evaluations, producing DUS signals that closely resemble the morphology of their real counterparts. The realism of these synthesized signals was further gauged using a quality assessment model, which classified all as good quality, and a heart rate estimation model, which produced comparable results for generated and real data, with a Bland-Altman limit of 4.5 beats per minute. This advancement offers a promising solution for mitigating limited data availability and enhancing the training of DUS-based fetal models, making them more effective and generalizable.

RF-BayesPhysNet: A Bayesian rPPG Uncertainty Estimation Method for Complex Scenarios

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technology infers heart rate by capturing subtle color changes in facial skin using a camera, demonstrating great potential in non-contact heart rate measurement. However, measurement accuracy significantly decreases in complex scenarios such as lighting changes and head movements compared to ideal laboratory conditions. Existing deep learning models often neglect the quantification of measurement uncertainty, limiting their credibility in dynamic scenes. To address the issue of insufficient rPPG measurement reliability in complex scenarios, this paper introduces Bayesian neural networks to the rPPG field for the first time, proposing the Robust Fusion Bayesian Physiological Network (RF-BayesPhysNet), which can model both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. It leverages variational inference to balance accuracy and computational efficiency. Due to the current lack of uncertainty estimation metrics in the rPPG field, this paper also proposes a new set of methods, using Spearman correlation coefficient, prediction interval coverage, and confidence interval width, to measure the effectiveness of uncertainty estimation methods under different noise conditions. Experiments show that the model, with only double the parameters compared to traditional network models, achieves a MAE of 2.56 on the UBFC-RPPG dataset, surpassing most models. It demonstrates good uncertainty estimation capability in no-noise and low-noise conditions, providing prediction confidence and significantly enhancing robustness in real-world applications. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/AIDC-rPPG/RF-Net

Pushing the Limit of PPG Sensing in Sedentary Conditions by Addressing Poor Skin-sensor Contact

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a widely used non-invasive technique for monitoring cardiovascular health and various physiological parameters on consumer and medical devices. While motion artifacts are well-known challenges in dynamic settings, suboptimal skin-sensor contact in sedentary conditions - a critical issue often overlooked in existing literature - can distort PPG signal morphology, leading to the loss or shift of essential waveform features and therefore degrading sensing performance. In this work, we propose CP-PPG, a novel approach that transforms Contact Pressure-distorted PPG signals into ones with the ideal morphology. CP-PPG incorporates a novel data collection approach, a well-crafted signal processing pipeline, and an advanced deep adversarial model trained with a custom PPG-aware loss function. We validated CP-PPG through comprehensive evaluations, including 1) morphology transformation performance on our self-collected dataset, 2) downstream physiological monitoring performance on public datasets, and 3) in-the-wild performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements in signal fidelity (Mean Absolute Error: 0.09, 40% improvement over the original signal) as well as downstream performance across all evaluations in Heart Rate (HR), Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Respiration Rate (RR), and Blood Pressure (BP) estimation (on average, 21% improvement in HR; 41-46% in HRV; 6% in RR; and 4-5% in BP). These findings highlight the critical importance of addressing skin-sensor contact issues for accurate and dependable PPG-based physiological monitoring. Furthermore, CP-PPG can serve as a generic, plug-in API to enhance PPG signal quality.

mmHRR: Monitoring Heart Rate Recovery with Millimeter Wave Radar

Heart rate recovery (HRR) within the initial minute following exercise is a widely utilized metric for assessing cardiac autonomic function in individuals and predicting mortality risk in patients with cardiovascular disease. However, prevailing solutions for HRR monitoring typically involve the use of specialized medical equipment or contact wearable sensors, resulting in high costs and poor user experience. In this paper, we propose a contactless HRR monitoring technique, mmHRR, which achieves accurate heart rate (HR) estimation with a commercial mmWave radar. Unlike HR estimation at rest, the HR varies quickly after exercise and the heartbeat signal entangles with the respiration harmonics. To overcome these hurdles and effectively estimate the HR from the weak and non-stationary heartbeat signal, we propose a novel signal processing pipeline, including dynamic target tracking, adaptive heartbeat signal extraction, and accurate HR estimation with composite sliding windows. Real-world experiments demonstrate that mmHRR exhibits exceptional robustness across diverse environmental conditions, and achieves an average HR estimation error of 3.31 bpm (beats per minute), 71% lower than that of the state-of-the-art method.

Recovering Pulse Waves from Video Using Deep Unrolling and Deep Equilibrium Models

Camera-based monitoring of vital signs, also known as imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG), has seen applications in driver-monitoring, perfusion assessment in surgical settings, affective computing, and more. iPPG involves sensing the underlying cardiac pulse from video of the skin and estimating vital signs such as the heart rate or a full pulse waveform. Some previous iPPG methods impose model-based sparse priors on the pulse signals and use iterative optimization for pulse wave recovery, while others use end-to-end black-box deep learning methods. In contrast, we introduce methods that combine signal processing and deep learning methods in an inverse problem framework. Our methods estimate the underlying pulse signal and heart rate from facial video by learning deep-network-based denoising operators that leverage deep algorithm unfolding and deep equilibrium models. Experiments show that our methods can denoise an acquired signal from the face and infer the correct underlying pulse rate, achieving state-of-the-art heart rate estimation performance on well-known benchmarks, all with less than one-fifth the number of learnable parameters as the closest competing method.

Time-Series U-Net with Recurrence for Noise-Robust Imaging Photoplethysmography

Remote estimation of vital signs enables health monitoring for situations in which contact-based devices are either not available, too intrusive, or too expensive. In this paper, we present a modular, interpretable pipeline for pulse signal estimation from video of the face that achieves state-of-the-art results on publicly available datasets.Our imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) system consists of three modules: face and landmark detection, time-series extraction, and pulse signal/pulse rate estimation. Unlike many deep learning methods that make use of a single black-box model that maps directly from input video to output signal or heart rate, our modular approach enables each of the three parts of the pipeline to be interpreted individually. The pulse signal estimation module, which we call TURNIP (Time-Series U-Net with Recurrence for Noise-Robust Imaging Photoplethysmography), allows the system to faithfully reconstruct the underlying pulse signal waveform and uses it to measure heart rate and pulse rate variability metrics, even in the presence of motion. When parts of the face are occluded due to extreme head poses, our system explicitly detects such "self-occluded" regions and maintains estimation robustness despite the missing information. Our algorithm provides reliable heart rate estimates without the need for specialized sensors or contact with the skin, outperforming previous iPPG methods on both color (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR) datasets.

Adaptive Extensive Cancellation Algorithm and Harmonic Enhanced Heart Rate Estimation based on MMWave Radar

Heart rate (HR) monitoring is crucial for assessing physical fitness, cardiovascular health, and stress management. Millimeter-wave radar offers a promising noncontact solution for long-term monitoring. However, accurate HR estimation remains challenging in low signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) conditions. To deal with both respiration harmonics and intermodulation interference, this paper proposes a cancellation-before-estimation strategy. Firstly, we present the adaptive extensive cancellation algorithm (ECA) to suppress respiratory and its low-order harmonics. Then, we propose an adaptive harmonic enhanced trace (AHET) method to avoid intermodulation interference by refining the HR search region. Various experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, demonstrating improvements in accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency compared to conventional approaches based on the FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave) system

Sparse Bayesian Learning for Label Efficiency in Cardiac Real-Time MRI

Cardiac real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an emerging technology that images the heart at up to 50 frames per second, offering insight into the respiratory effects on the heartbeat. However, this method significantly increases the number of images that must be segmented to derive critical health indicators. Although neural networks perform well on inner slices, predictions on outer slices are often unreliable. This work proposes sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) to predict the ventricular volume on outer slices with minimal manual labeling to address this challenge. The ventricular volume over time is assumed to be dominated by sparse frequencies corresponding to the heart and respiratory rates. Moreover, SBL identifies these sparse frequencies on well-segmented inner slices by optimizing hyperparameters via type -II likelihood, automatically pruning irrelevant components. The identified sparse frequencies guide the selection of outer slice images for labeling, minimizing posterior variance. This work provides performance guarantees for the greedy algorithm. Testing on patient data demonstrates that only a few labeled images are necessary for accurate volume prediction. The labeling procedure effectively avoids selecting inefficient images. Furthermore, the Bayesian approach provides uncertainty estimates, highlighting unreliable predictions (e.g., when choosing suboptimal labels).

TAU: Modeling Temporal Consistency Through Temporal Attentive U-Net for PPG Peak Detection

Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors have been widely used in consumer wearable devices to monitor heart rates (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). Despite the prevalence, PPG signals can be contaminated by motion artifacts induced from daily activities. Existing approaches mainly use the amplitude information to perform PPG peak detection. However, these approaches cannot accurately identify peaks, since motion artifacts may bring random and significant amplitude variations. To improve the performance of PPG peak detection, the time information can be used. Specifically, heart rates exhibit temporal consistency that consecutive heartbeat intervals in a normal person can have limited variations. To leverage the temporal consistency, we propose the Temporal Attentive U-Net, i.e., TAU, to accurately detect peaks from PPG signals. In TAU, we design a time module that encodes temporal consistency in temporal embeddings. We integrate the amplitude information with temporal embeddings using the attention mechanism to estimate peak labels. Our experimental results show that TAU outperforms eleven baselines on heart rate estimation by more than 22.4%. Our TAU model achieves the best performance across various Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels. Moreover, we achieve Pearson correlation coefficients higher than 0.9 (p < 0.01) on estimating HRV features from low-noise-level PPG signals.