Anas Imtiaz

Imperial College London | Imperial · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

A number of automatic sleep scoring algorithms have been published in the last few years. These can potentially help save time and reduce costs in sleep monitoring. However, the use of both R&K and AASM classification, different databases and varying performance metrics makes it extremely difficult to compare these algorithms. In this paper, we des...

The push towards low-power and wearable sleep systems requires using minimum number of recording channels to enhance battery life, keep processing load small and be more comfortable for the user. Since most sleep stages can be identified using EEG traces, enormous power savings could be achieved by using a single channel of EEG. However, detection...

Automated seizure detection methods can be used to reduce time and costs associated with analyzing large volumes of ambulatory EEG recordings. These methods however have to rely on very complex, power hungry algorithms, implemented on the system backend, in order to achieve acceptable levels of accuracy. In size, and therefore power-constrained EEG...

Wearable sensor nodes monitoring the human body must operate autonomously for very long periods of time. Online and low-power data compression embedded within the sensor node is therefore essential to minimize data storage/transmission overheads. This paper presents a low-power MSP430 compressive sensing implementation for providing such compressio...

Study objective: The objective of this study was to assess the accuracy of automatic diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) with a new, small, acoustic-based, wearable technology (AcuPebble SA100), by comparing it with standard type 1 polysomnography (PSG) diagnosis. Material and methods: This observational, prospective study was carried out in...

Sleep-related breathing disorders have severe impact on the quality of lives of those suffering from them. These disorders present with a variety of symptoms, out of which snoring and groaning are very common. This paper presents an algorithm to identify and classify segments of acoustic respiratory sound recordings that contain both groaning and s...

Objective: Long-term monitoring of epilepsy patients outside of hospital settings is impractical due to the complexity and costs associated with electroencephalogram (EEG) systems. Alternative sensing modalities that can acquire, and automatically interpret signals through easy-to-use wearable devices, are needed to help with at-home management of...

Objectives Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a heavily underdiagnosed condition, which can lead to significant multimorbidity. Underdiagnosis is often secondary to limitations in existing diagnostic methods. We conducted a diagnostic accuracy and usability study, to evaluate the efficacy of a novel, low-cost, small, wearable medical device, AcuPebb...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a crucial tool in the diagnosis and management of epilepsy. The process of analyzing EEG is time consuming leading to the development of seizure detection algorithms to aid its analysis. This approach is limited since it requires seizures to occur during monitoring periods and can often lead to misdiagnosis in cases wh...

Designing wearable systems for sleep detection and staging is extremely challenging due to the numerous constraints associated with sensing, usability, accuracy, and regulatory requirements. Several researchers have explored the use of signals from a subset of sensors that are used in polysomnography (PSG), whereas others have demonstrated the feas...

Long-term sleep monitoring through the use of wearable EEG-based systems generates large volumes of data that need to be either locally stored or wireless transmitted. Compression of data can play a vital role to reduce the power consumption of these already resource-constrained systems. While compression methods can result in significantly reduced...

This paper introduces the concept of using acoustic sensing over the radial artery to extract cardiac parameters for continuous vital sign monitoring. It proposes a novel measurement principle that allows detection of the heart sounds together with the pulse wave, an attribute not possible with existing photoplethysmography (PPG)-based methods for...

Wearable devices have seen tremendous growth during the last ten years. This has been made possible with ever-shrinking electronics, cost reductions, and the rise in mobile computing, making it possible to share significant computational workloads. Recent estimates show an annual growth of 17% in wearable devices in 2017, with more than 300 million...

Epilepsy is one of the most common serious brain disorders affecting 1% of the world population. Epileptic seizure events are caused by abnormal excessive neuronal activity in the brain, which may be associated with behavioural changes that severely affect the patients’ quality of life. These events are manifested as abnormal activity in electroenc...

This paper evaluates the use of breath sound recordings to automatically determine the respiratory health status of a subject. A number of features were investigated and Wilcoxon Rank Sum statistical test was used to determine the significance of the extracted features. The significant features were then passed to a feature selection algorithm base...

Cough is a common symptom of numerous respiratory diseases. In certain cases, such as asthma and COPD, early identification of coughs is useful for the management of these diseases. This paper presents an algorithm for automatic identification of cough events from acoustic signals. The algorithm is based on only four features of the acoustic signal...

Monitoring of wheezes is an integral part of managing Chronic Respiratory Diseases such as asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Recently, there is a growing interest in automatic detection of wheezes and the use of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) have been shown to achieve encouraging detection performance. While the...

Cough is a common symptom that manifests in numerous respiratory diseases. In chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma and COPD, monitoring of cough is an integral part in managing the disease. This paper presents an algorithm for automatic detection of cough events from acoustic signals. The algorithm uses only three spectral features with a l...

Long-term monitoring of epilepsy patients require low-power systems that can record and transmit electroencephalogram data over extended periods of time. Since seizure events are rare, long-term monitoring inherently results in large amounts of data that are recorded and hence need to be reduced. This paper presents an ultra-low power integrated ci...

Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs), such as Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), are leading causes of deaths worldwide. Although both Asthma and COPD are not curable, they can be managed by close monitoring of symptoms to prevent worsening of the condition. One key symptom that needs to be monitored is the occurrence of wheezi...

Cardiovascular diseases currently pose the highest threat to human health around the world. Proper investigation of the abnormalities in heart sounds is known to provide vital clinical information that can assist in the diagnosis and management of cardiac conditions. However, despite significant advances in the development of algorithms for automat...

This paper presents a comparison between finger and neck photoplethysmography (PPG) in order to assess the potential and limitations of this, non-conventionally used, body site for application in pulse oximetry. PPG signals were recorded at both sites from healthy subjects to inspect the differences in average waveforms, as well as in oxygen satura...

Heart rate is an important physiological parameter to assess the cardiac condition of an individual and is traditionally determined by attaching multiple electrodes on the chest of a subject to record the electrical activity of the heart. The installation and handling complexities of such systems does not prove feasible for a user to undergo a long...

Understanding brain function at the cell and circuit level requires representation of neuronal activity through multiple recording sites and at high sampling rates. Traditional tethered recording systems restrict movement and limit the environments suitable for testing, while existing wireless technology is still too heavy for extended recording in...

Oxygen saturation levels are routinely monitored in clinical settings. Pulse oximetry, in transmittance operation mode, is the most common method of estimating oxygen saturation (SpO2). This is inexpensive and non-invasive and thus allows for long-term monitoring. However, it suffers from issues such as signal integrity, reliability and patient com...

Smoking is a cause of multiple health problems resulting in diseases which can also be fatal. It is well known that smoking has long-term impact on the health of an individual as well. While a number of studies have looked at the impact of smoking on health and its economic impacts, most of these rely on input from smokers in the form of questionna...

This paper presents an ultralow power system on chip (SoC) for automatic sleep staging using a single electroencephalogram (EEG) channel. The system integrates an analog front end for EEG data acquisition and a digital processor to extract spectral features from these data and classify them into one of the sleep stages. The digital processor consis...

Pertussis is a contagious respiratory disease which mainly affects young children and can be fatal if left untreated. The World Health Organization estimates 16 million pertussis cases annually worldwide resulting in over 200,000 deaths. It is prevalent mainly in developing countries where it is difficult to diagnose due to the lack of healthcare f...

Continuous patient monitoring systems acquire enormous amounts of data that is either manually analysed by doctors or automatically processed using intelligent algorithms. Sections of data acquired over long period of time can be corrupted with artefacts due to patient movement, sensor placement and interference from other sources. Owing to the lar...

Lack of proper restorative sleep can induce sleepiness at odd hours making a person drowsy. This onset of drowsiness can be detrimental for the individual in a number of ways if it happens at an unwanted time. For example, drowsiness while driving a vehicle or operating heavy machinery poses a threat to the safety and wellbeing of individuals as we...

PhysioNet Sleep EDF database has been the most popular source of data used for developing and testing many automatic sleep staging algorithms. However, the recordings from this database has been used in an inconsistent fashion. For example, arbitrary selection of start and end times from long term recordings, data-hypnogram mismatches, different pe...

Automatic sleep staging from a reduced number of channels is desirable to save time, reduce costs and make sleep monitoring more accessible by providing home-based polysomnography. This paper introduces a novel algorithm for automatic scoring of sleep stages using a combination of small decision trees driven by a state machine. The algorithm uses t...

Phonocardiography is a widely used method of listening to the heart sounds and indicating the presence of cardiac abnormalities. Each heart cycle consists of two major sounds - S1 and S2 - that can be used to determine the heart rate. The conventional method of acoustic signal acquisition involves placing the sound sensor at the chest where this so...

Sleep spindles are transient waveforms observed on the electroencephalogram (EEG) during the N2 stage of sleep. In this paper we evaluate the use of line length, an efficient and low-complexity time domain feature, for automatic detection of sleep spindles. We use this feature with a simple algorithm to detect spindles achieving sensitivity of 83.6...

Sleep spindles are the hallmark of N2 stage of sleep. They are transient waveforms observed on sleep electroencephalogram and their identification is required for sleep staging. Due to the large number of sleep spindles appearing on an overnight sleep EEG, automating the detection of sleep spindles would be desirable, not only to save specialist ti...

Seizure detection algorithms have been developed to solve specific problems, such as seizure onset detection, occurrence detection, termination detection and data selection. It is thus inherent that each type of seizure detection algorithm would detect a different EEG characteristic (feature). However most feature comparison studies do not specify...