Quantification of Active Visual Attention using RGB camera.

Active visual attention (AVA) is the cognitive ability that helps to focus on important visual information while responding to a stimulus and is important for human-behavior and psychophysiological research. Existing eye-trackers/camera-based methods are either expensive or impose privacy issues as face videos are recorded for analysis. Proposed approach using blink-rate variability (BRV), is inexpensive, easy to implement, efficient and handles privacy issues, making it amenable to real-time applications. Our solution uses laptop camera/webcams and a single blink feature, namely BRV. First, we estimated participant's head pose to check camera alignment and detect if he is looking at the screen. Next, subject-specific threshold is computed using eye aspect ratio (EAR) to detect blinks from which BRV signal is constructed. Only EAR values are saved, and participant's face video is NOT saved or transmitted. Finally, a novel AVA score is computed. Results shows that the proposed score is robust across participants, ambient light conditions and occlusions like spectacles.

An approach to a wrist wearable based Covid-19 prediction system to protect Health Care Professionals.

With healthcare professionals being the frontline warriors in battling the Covid pandemic, their risk of exposure to the virus is extremely high. We present our experience in building a system, aimed at monitoring the physiology of these professionals 24/7, with the hope of providing timely detection of infection and thereby better care. We discuss a machine learning approach and model using signals from a wrist wearable device to predict infection at a very early stage. In a double-blind test on a small group of patients, our model could successfully identify the infected versus non-infected cases with near 100% accuracy. We also discuss some of the challenges we faced, both technical and non-technical, to get this system off the ground as well as offer some suggestions that could help tackle these hurdles.

Surface Potential Simulation and Electrode Design for in-Ear EEG Measurement.

The need for everyday-real-time EEG sensing has resulted in the development of minimalistic and discreet wearable EEG measuring devices. A front runner in this race is in-ear worn device. However, the position of the ear as well as its restricted accessibility poses certain challenges in the design of such devices - from the type of materials used to the placement of electrodes. These choices are important as they will determine the quality of the EEG signal available and in turn the accuracy of the application. We therefore create a simulation model of the human ear, allowing us to understand the impact of these choices on our design of an In-Ear EEG wearable. We first study the signal acquisition characteristics of a proposed gold-plated electrode against two other state-of-the-art electrode materials for in-ear EEG data collection. We further validate this electrode choice by fabricating a personalized silicone-based earpiece and collecting in-situ EEG data. This work explores the properties of using gold plated electrodes in capturing in-ear EEG signals enabling unobtrusive collection of the brain physiology data in real world setting.

Design of a Realtime Photoplethysmogram Signal Quality Checker for Wearables and Edge Computing.

Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal is extensively used for deducing health parameters of patients in order to infer about physiological conditions of heart, blood pressure, respiratory patterns, and so on. Such analysis and estimations can be done accurately only on high quality PPG signals with very minimal artifacts. PPG signals collected from fitness grade and smart phone scenarios are prone to muscle artifacts and hence there is a need to assess the signal quality before using the signal. Although there are approaches available in the realm of machine learning and deep learning, they are computationally expensive and may not be suitable for a wearable or edge computing scenario. In this paper, we propose the design of a quality checker to check the quality of the signal that can be directly implemented on edge devices like smartwatch. The algorithm is tested on PPG data collected from wearable, ICU and medical grade devices. In the wearable scenario where the noise levels are very high, our algorithm has performed significantly better with a Fscore of over 0.92. Further we show that by applying the proposed quality checker, the accuracy of the computed heart rate from a smart phone PPG-application significantly improves.

A Novel Optimization Algorithm Leveraging a Three-Dimensional Approach of Periscopic, Pheromonic and Fractal Search.

This paper focuses on a new algorithm for solving optimization problems using the nature of food search behaviour of caterpillars. The paper describes how the periscopic, pheromonic and fractal search properties analogous to the caterpillars, can aid in designing a new optimization algorithm. The performance characteristics of the new method is compared using 26 standard test functions and the area under the curve of the fitness evaluations is used to validate and compare the proposed algorithms against existing related works. The proposed algorithm is found to be efficient when compared with the existing methods. The proposed algorithm is then tested on a real world problem to remove signal noise from eye gaze data, effectively.

Single feature spatio-temporal architecture for EEG Based cognitive load assessment.

The study of electroencephalography (EEG) data for cognitive load analysis plays an important role in identification of stress-inducing tasks. This can be useful in applications such as optimal work allocation, increasing efficiency in the workplace and ensuring safety in difficult work environments. In order for such systems to be realistically deployable, easy acquisition and processing of the data on a wearable device is imperative. Current techniques primarily perform offline processing to analyse a multi-channel EEG to make a post facto assessment. This work focusses on building a new deep learning architecture that performs a single feature based spatio-temporal analysis of EEG data. This is achieved by creating a brain topographic map based on a single feature followed by spatio-temporal analysis using the developed network architecture. Data from two cognitive load experiments on the Physionet EEGMAT dataset were used to validate the performance. The network achieves an accuracy of 98.3% which is better than similar state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the proposed approach facilitates analysis of the spatial propagation of a signal, which is not possible through conventional EEG signal representations.

Cost Effective Real-time System for cognitive computing using Personalized Eye Blink Detection from Camera.

Eye blink is indicative of various mental states. Generally, vision based approaches are used for detecting eye blinks. However, performance of such approaches varies across participants. Standard eye tracker or eye glasses used for detecting blinks, are very costly. Here, we are proposing a personalized vision based eye blink detector system. Proposed approach is ubiquitous and unobtrusive in nature and can be implemented using standard webcams/mobile camera, making it deployable for real world scenarios. Our approach has been validated on a set of data collected from our lab and on an open data set. Results show that in both cases, our system performs well for various conditions like natural/artificial light, with or without spectacles. We achieved a Fscore of 0.98 for own collected data and 0.91 for open dataset, which outperform state of the art approaches.