Piotr Augustyniak

• professor
• Head of Department at AGH University of Kraków

The design of artificial limbs is a research topic that has, over time, attracted considerable interest from researchers in various fields of study, such as mechanics, electronics, robotics, and neuroscience. Continuous efforts are being made to build electromechanical systems functionally equivalent to the original limbs and to develop strategies...

Over the last few years, a large number of studies have been conducted on the monitoring of human behavior remaining beyond conscious control. One area of application for such monitoring systems is lie detection. The most popular method currently used for this purpose is polygraph examination, which has proven its usefulness in the field and in lab...

Motivation: The advancement of preventive medicine and, subsequently, telemedicine drives the need for noninvasive and remote measurements in patients’ natural environments. Heart rate (HR) measurements are particularly promising and extensively researched due to their quick assessment and comprehensive representation of patients’ conditions. Howev...

Background: The purpose of this paper is to present the spatial navigation system prototype for localizing the distal tip of the cannula–guide assembly. This assembly is shifted through the channel of a bronchoscope, which is fixed in relation to the patient. The navigation is carried out in the bronchial tree, based on maneuvers of the aforementio...

Noninvasive monitoring of human vital parameters is a widely studied topic. The scientists and engineers create many devices with telemedicine applications. Also in everyday functioning people use gadgets that contain noninvasive measurements (e.g. heart rate measurements in a smart watch). In addition to medical diagnostics, they are also used to...

Multimodal sensing and data processing have become a common approach in modern assisted living systems. This is widely justified by the complementary properties of sensors based on different sensing paradigms. However, all previous proposals assume data fusion to be made based on fixed criteria. We proved that particular sensors show different perf...

A non-uniform distribution of diagnostic information in the electrocardiogram (ECG) has been commonly accepted and is the background to several compression, denoising and watermarking methods. Gaze tracking is a widely recognized method for identification of an observer’s preferences and interest areas. The statistics of experts’ scanpaths were fou...

Videoplethysmography (VPG) has been studied for more than a decade and recently found useful as a tool for touchless measurement of the human pulse. The principle of measurement lies in subtle changes of skin color due to filling of subcutaneous capillary vessels with blood and emptying in the rhythm of pulse. Most authors assume the measurement vi...

This review reveals and briefly discusses problems of capturing, archiving and analyzing the human behavior in a natural dwelling environment. Ambient assisted living systems are defined and justified with current social needs. Sensing paradigms and various examples of sensors are presented with a focus to their imperceptibility and data safety. Tw...

Digital watermarking has been widely recognized as an effective tool for embedment of auxiliary data in the host record. This paper presents a new method of watermarking using lead-to-lead difference of values in the baseline of the host electrocardiogram. The method starts with delineation of the baseline and uses Kirchoff voltage law or interpola...

Adaptive sampling is an interesting alternative for biosignal acquisition, transmission and storage, however further processing of non uniform representations is still waiting for development. In this paper a direct non-uniform to time-scale (NUTS) transform is presented and applied to the ECG signal. Well accepted limits of bandwidth in particular...

Noise of certain characteristics can efficiently be extracted from a multilead physiological record. This paper presents a novel method for distilling random components of electrocardiogram. First, the algorithm calculates first principal component of the record as a noise-reduced reference. Next, a multiplication-addition network is trained and us...

Watermarking is currently investigated as an efficient and safe method of embedding additional patient or environment-related data into the electrocardiogram. This paper presents experimental work on the assessment of the loss of ECG (electrocardiogram signal) diagnostic quality from the industrial standard EN60601-2-25:2015 point of view. We imple...

Electrophysiological recordings from brain, heart, stomach or muscles usually contain noise, which decreases the clarity of desired signal. The term ‘noise’ is commonly applied to a variety of extrinsic factors: spontaneous muscle activation, skin response, interferences or limitations in electrical circuits. Usually the noise is identified by its...

The evaluation of eye movement patterns during the analysis of medical images could be especially helpful in assessing the efficiency of this process. It could further influence the improvement and duration of the analysis as well as the learning pathways. In the presented study Eye-Tracker was used to evaluate analysts’ eye-paths during assessment...

Computerized recognition of human emotions enriches the man-machine interaction with a new personal and behavioral aspect. Firstly, because the influence of emotions on the human performance can be objectively assessed and predicted using standardized stimuli, secondly, because an emotion-sensitive computer system can be programmed to react adequat...

Aging of population and increasing complexity of domestic equipment justify the growth of scientific interest in surveillance of independent older adults at home. Our proposal focuses on imperceptibility of a sensing network which, besides detection of complex actions, analyses their irregularity and issues control commands to a safety-oriented act...

Various surveillance systems capture signs of human activities of daily living (ADLs) and store multimodal information as time line behavioral records. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the analysis of a behavioral record used in a surveillance system designed for use in elderly smart homes. The description of a subject's activity is fi...

Various sensors were found adequate to monitor human behavior in natural habitat. Besides metrological factors they were adopted to specific conditions of unobtrusive acquisition in human (e.g. an elder or child). An initial approach focused on use of a single sensor to detect a particular event evolved to behavioral studies based on complex record...

Introduction: Neurophysiologic monitoring can improve autonomic nerve sparing during critical phases of rectal cancer surgery. Objectives: To develop a system for extracorporeal stimulation of sacral nerve roots. Methods: Dedicated software controlled a ten-electrode stimulation array by switching between different electrode configurations and...

Videoplethysmography is currently recognized as a promising noninvasive heart rate measurement method advantageous for ubiquitous monitoring of humans in natural living conditions. Although the method is considered for application in several areas including telemedicine, sports and assisted living, its dependence on lighting conditions and camera p...

Wearable recording devices are widely used in home care monitoring or follow-up of high-risk or chronic patients. This paper presents a flexible architecture of multi-purpose physiological signal recorder. The recorder supports wired and wireless body sensor networks and features remote programmability of a wide-range of hardware settings, data pro...

Monitoring of human behavior in the natural living habitat requires a hidden yet accurate measurement. Several previous attempts showed, that this can be achieved by recording and analysing interactions of the supervised human with sensorized equipment of his or her household. We propose an imperceptible single-sensor measurement, already applied f...

Correct and accurate classification of ECG patterns in a long-term record requires optimal selection of feature vector. We propose a machine learning algorithm that learns from short randomly selected signal strips and, having an approval from a human operator, classifies all remaining patterns. We applied a genetic algorithm with aggressive mutati...

Smart sensors provide a support for turning a typical household Into a technology fitted environment for elderly or disabled who need tracking or assistance with activities of daily life. This paper presents a design of inhouse infrastructure of sensorized appliances making a measurement context for long-term studies of behavior and early detection...

Recently presented new QRS detection algorithm uses a detection function based on the value of angle between two regression segments adjacent in a given point. The optimization of these segments, representing long-term and short-term acceleration of heart activity, is presented in this paper.

All ECG processing algorithms start with heart beat detection, making the reliability of this step crucial for the quality of the whole interpretation. This paper presents a regression-based QRS detector that is robust to singular outliers and high frequency noise present in real signals. Our algorithm consists of three steps: best fitted segments...

Academic teaching of a new discipline, besides its contents and formal issues, requires participation of the university in development of a target job market. This was the case of biomedical engineering in Poland ten years ago. This paper presents examples of activities, taken up by our university in cooperation with prospective employers, and eval...

Surveillance of elderly and disabled in their habitat needs acquisition of behavioral information by various interfaces. This paper presents a concept and design of intelligent environment for such users. The proposed solution consists in using sensorized appliances typical to a household, reporting their operation via wireless network. The network...

Currently, a disabled person can participate in social life and proceed with independent individual development with the assistance of intelligent support from modern technology. This paper reviews various approaches and recent achievements in designing and prototyping of interfaces for tetraplegic people originating from Biocybernetics Laboratory...

With recent advances in microprocessor chip technology, wireless communication, and biomedical engineering it is possible to develop miniaturized ubiquitous health monitoring devices that are capable of recording physiological and movement signals during daily life activities. The aim of the research is to implement and test the prototype of health...

Achievements of today telemedicine and surveillance techniques offer exciting possibilities for developing intelligent assisted living systems for elderly or disabled. This chapter presents an universal sketch of multimodal health monitoring systems complying with regard to a paradigm of ubiquitous and personalized medicine. The proposed design com...

This paper presents a multimodal system for seamless surveillance of elderly people in their living environment. The system uses simultaneously a wearable sensor network for each individual and premise-embedded sensors specific for each environment. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using complementary information from two types of mobility se...

This paper presents a new method of subject-dependent optimization of ECG feature set for heart beats classification. The algorithm learns from randomly selected strips of the signal and preliminarily classifies the example beats. After an approval from a human operator, these classified beats are distributed to a learning and testing sets, and a g...

The paper presents results of interactive hidden survey of disease-related relevance of standard rest ECG diagnostic parameters. The interactive interface methodology revealed human expert preferences for a particular subset of diagnostic results in context of actual patient disease. We applied a custom-build software randomizing the appearance of...

In this paper we propose using the ECG bandgap storage area for coding high frequency details of the signal. Authorization-dependent access to these details allows privileged users for high precision analysis, while regular users with an access to standard resolution signal are still able to correctly calculate essential parameters. The proposed al...

Recently available surveillance systems for assisted living of disabled or elderly are offspring of traditional home care solutions used for remote monitoring of predefined parameters. The commonly used closed architecture design, makes extensions or modification of such systems very difficult. An alternative approach is presented in this paper. Th...

Recent achievements of telemedicine and surveillance techniques open new challenges for development of assisted living systems for elderly or disabled. This paper presents an universal approach to designing of multimodal health monitoring systems with regard to a paradigm of ubiquitous and personalized medicine. The design combines advantages of in...

This paper presents a coherence-based method for estimation of spatial or temporal variability of leads quality in a multichannel ECG record. The method is dedicated to stress test or Holter analyzers and aimed at providing an objective criterion for local assessment of data reliability (e.g. ST-segment elevation or depression) in presence of varia...

Human activity is a subject of tracking and recognition in various aspects including: public security, health lifestyle or home monitoring of elderly. A multimodal surveillance system is proposed to recognize the action and to assess the similarity of temporal behavioral patterns. The system uses sensor networks, automatic measurement module and de...

The Multidisciplinary School of Engineering in Biomedicine was founded in AGH University of Science and Technology for the purpose of education of biomedical engineering students. This paper discusses the extensions of the MSIB’s mission and impact to the local society resulted from independent information policy. Broadening of awareness of the new...

Advanced developments in existing information technologies are extending the range of treatment and health services available at patient's home. Recent technological advances in integrated circuits, wireless communications, and physiological sensing allow miniature, lightweight, ultra-low power, intelligent monitoring devices. A number of these dev...

Health monitoring and body area network (BAN) applications require wireless intelligent monitoring devices and information system. The aim of our research is to propose a prototype of wearable wireless monitoring device optimized to supervising the patient ECG, GPS and movement signals. Main purpose of the proposed system consists in simultaneous a...

With the rapid advancements of biomedical engineering and wireless communication it is possible to develop body sensor networks (BSN) which support a range of applications including medical and healthcare systems. The aim of the research is to propose a prototype of BSN-based wearable wireless monitoring system optimized to monitor patient's activi...

This paper presents the use of bandwidth gap for embedding supplementary digital data into the ECG record without changing its ability to diagnose. The gap results from overestimation of the constant sampling frequency which is greater than the local bandwidth of cardiac components in large parts of the ECG record. The proposed algorithm starts wit...

This paper presents the concept and prototype of a compound infrastructure for ubiquitous human health monitoring. Growing range of mobile health care applications raises the question of their possible interference and cooperation. Particular benefit is expected from integration of personal and residential solutions, because of their complementary...

Assisted living systems for elderly or disabled combine offsprings of telemedicine and surveillance techniques. This report presents a layer-based design of multimodal health monitoring system complying with a paradigm of ubiquitous and personalized medicine. The input layer consists of intelligent sensors issuing a context-based semantic descripti...

Problems concerning the data queuing in non-uniformly reporting telemedical surveillance systems are investigated in this paper. Unlike the regular systems, where the data continuity is guaranteed by the common reporting interval and unified report content, the adaptive systems must implement a reservation procedure managing the content of every pa...

Proper measurement of signal quality is a common problem in biomedical applications, including the electrocardiogram interpretation. The need for a reliable signal-to-noise estimate raises with the common use of telemedical recordings performed in the home care conditions and interpreted automatically. The currently used techniques perform noise me...

Prototyping of a home care system for activity surveillance and sleep assessment targeted to elderly people involves the compromise of wearing comfort and measurement performance. We propose a wearable heart rate variability monitor connected via wireless digital link to a home-embedded infrastructure of multimodal health surveillance system. The c...

Common use of telemedical recordings performed in home care conditions and interpreted automatically justifies the need for a reliable signal-to-noise estimate. We propose new noise measurement technique based on a time-frequency model of noise computed in a quasi-continuous way. The proposed method is dedicated to ECG and uses automatically recogn...

This paper presents a personal system and software architecture dedicated for cardiac telerehabilitation. The key idea of the hardware configuration and the software implementation is the integration of a mobile device and an ECG recorder with the application of wireless technologies: Bluetooth, GPS and GPRS. The main goal of the system is the reli...

Health monitoring and body area network (BAN) applications require wireless intelligent monitoring devices and information systems. The aim of our research is to propose a prototype of wearable wireless monitoring device optimized to supervising the patient and examine the influence of movement on the heart rate during normal daily activities. Main...

This paper presents the usage of purposely adapted ECG interpretation software as a classroom tool providing reliable reference values of most diagnostic parameters for ECG records from any source. The software maintains the commercial reliability and no part of its source code is disclosed. Additional checkpoints and data switches between the inte...

Assisted living applications are commonly understoo d as technical environment for disabled or elderly people providing the care in the user-specific range. We a re going to present the data capture methodology an d design of a home care system for medical-based surveillance and man-machine communication. The proposed system consists of the video-b...

In this paper we describe a wearable ubiquitous healthcare monitoring system that integrates electrocardiogram (ECG device) and an accelerometer sensor with a mobile device in a Bluetooth-based body surface network (BSN). Our research focused on the right connection of the hardware units, combination of the detection of QRS complexes, calculation o...

This paper presents the survey of multimodal data distance metrics applied to identify the subject's status in a personal and house-embedded surveillance system. The circadian repetitive status time series (behavioral patterns) are a background for learning of the subject's habits and for automatic detection of unusual behavior or emergency. We app...

Advanced developments in existing information technologies are extending the range of treatment and health services available at patient’s home. This paper proposes a mobile monitoring system that integrates wearable ECG and ACC mobile sensors. We present an algorithm determining the correlation between the heart rate and movements based on automat...

The aim of the research was to implement a remote heart rate monitoring system. The monitoring system integrates the wireless ECG signal recorder with a mobile device in a Bluetooth-based body surface network (BSN). The main goal of the work was to achieve high QRS detection performance and calculation of the heart rate as the main ECG exercise-dep...

In this paper we present methodology used in a non-invasive, easy-to-use and low-cost monitoring system for nightlong human sleep quantification. Our system uses simultaneous measurement of three different signals representing the activity of the human body: infrared video-recorded subject motion, audio-recorded acoustic effects and the three-leads...

Our research concerns the problem of data queuing in telemedical non-uniformly reporting surveillance systems, recently introduced to cardiology. Automatic scheduling of reports was achieved with taking into consideration of two auxiliary data attributes in the information structure: the validity period and the priority, set individually for each E...

In this paper we postulate a replacement for the averaging of successive waves spectra, by the concatenation of selected type waves (P, QRS or T) in a moving time window. The window size is selected as a result of compromise between the spectrum resolution (high for long window) and temporal response (fast for short window). To avoid the influence...

This paper presents the design, prototype implementation and results of two cooperating infrastructures for a vital sign-based multimodal monitoring. The building-embedded and wearable systems provide complementary measurements in human and share a data transfer channel where possible. Managed by the common server, both systems are configurable in...

This paper describes the concept and application of the organizational culture of a BME teaching institute, based on the specificity of biomedical engineering. Selected values and behavioral patterns typical for this profession were endorsed to reinforce the mutual cooperation and understanding of students, university staff and employers as partner...

Body area networks (BANs) are recently an innovative proposal for integrating data from wearable sensors in multimodal health and behavior surveillance systems. To allow unlimited subject's mobility, they commonly use wireless long-distance transmission (e.g. GPRS) requiring considerable amount of power, particularly in buildings, where the radio c...

Disability is one of the major problems of the contemporary world. There are new technical means, methods of work and education for people with disabilities, making it possible to use a computer. The aim of this work is to allow people with upper limb dysfunction to use a computer. This aim was implemented by creating a system controlled by moving...

This paper focuses on the design of wearable system operation modes in context of cooperation between personal healthcare systems. The patient is currently provided with telemedical solutions for home care and seamless diagnosis based on selected vital parameters. When two or more specialized systems are applied for monitoring of the same subject,...

Clinical examples are widely used as learning and testing sets for newly proposed artificial intelligence-based classifiers of signals and images in medicine. The results obtained from testing are usually taken as an estimate of the behavior of automatic recognition system in presence of unknown input in the future. This paper investigates and disc...

This paper addresses principles of discrete nonlinear control performed towards the diagnostic quality-based interpretive software optimization for cardiology-based monitoring system. Thanks to the pervasive access to wireless digital communication, distributed biosignal interpretation networks may not only optimally solve difficult medical cases,...

The influence of sleep conditions to human health and performance is currently well known but still underestimated and monitoring devices are not widespread. This paper describes measurement methodology and prototype design of a home-care sleep scoring device. The proposed solution is oriented towards low-cost equipment and easy-to-use data capture...

This paper presents the data capture methodology and design of a home care system for medical-based surveillance and man-machine communication. The proposed system consists of the video-based subject positioning, monitoring of the heart and brain electrical activity and eye tracking. The multimodal data are automatically interpreted and translated...

This paper addresses principal issues of the ECG interpretation adaptivity in a distributed surveillance network. In the age of pervasive access to wireless digital communication, distributed biosignal interpretation networks may not only optimally solve difficult medical cases, but also adapt the data acquisition, interpretation, and transmission...

The paper presents aims and organizational backgrounds of the Multidisciplinary School of engineering In Biomedicine founded in AGH-University in Krakow. In the context of current issues concerning the education of biomedical engineering in Poland, the advantages of multidisciplinary approach are highlighted. The School organization resembles well...

This paper presents the BME educational program implemented in AGH University of Science and Technology in context of history and current state of biomedical engineering and medical physics education in Poland. A particular attention is paid to program adaptation procedures. This aspect is an often discussed factor increasing the efficiency of educ...

In this paper the control theory approach to the auto-adaptive telemedical ECG-based surveillance system is presented. The control is implemented as dynamic linking of alternative procedures and aims at optimization of diagnostic result quality. It faces several limitations in a discrete, nonlinear environment, where results cannot be reliably pred...

This paper is devoted to the tranform-based methods for decorrelation of simultaneously recorded ECG channels. The conventional 12-lead ECG recordings, due to the non-optimal lead positioning, contain highly redundant data. Eliminating this redundancy yields new possibilities for lossless coding of the ECG, meeting the most severe expectations abou...

The Internet and other technological developments are now playing increasing roles in consumer health and the delivery of health services. Ubiquitous Cardiology: Emerging Wireless Telemedical Applications provides developmental solutions and explanations for cardiovascular diagnostics. Useful to field researchers, academicians, and healthcare pract...

This chapter defines the set of standard diagnostic parameters and metadata expected from cardiac examinations. Rest ECG, exercise ECG, and long-term recording techniques are compared with regard to method-appropriate hierarchies of diagnostic results. This summary is approaching the idea of high redundancy in the dataset influencing data transmiss...

This chapter deals with various aspects of improvements in the typical ECG processing chain. Particular procedures designed for the computation of specified diagnostic results are usually developed in long research projects and rarely disclosed as a source code. Without challenging well-established calculation methods, we aimed at optimizing the da...

This chapter is a summary of the book and attempts to evaluate the social impact of the general idea of ubiquitous cardiology. The project discussed in the book is in fact oriented toward designing wireless bidirectional cooperation of two programmable ECG interpreting devices used for permanent heart monitoring and semi-automatic medical diagnosis...

This chapter is about the idea of medical information interchange networks providing signal and possibly image interpretation services. Technically, the issue is similar to Web-accessible services: document conversion, searching the Web, photo development, video on demand, electronic booking of hotels or airline ticketing. Various services use stat...

After an introduction and three chapters highlighting the present state of the art in computerized electrocardiography (Chapter 2), methodological issues of medical and technical nature (Chapter 3), and electronic management of medical data storage and exchange (Chapter 4), this chapter is a midway summary. This book might end here if it were a rev...

This chapter presents a proposal of medically justified modulations of the frequency of cardiac reporting, implemented in a client-server distant cooperation model. The supervising center analyzes incoming messages and other conditions, and issues the desired reporting interval back to the remote device. As a result of the authors’ tests and simula...

This chapter presents an investigation of the distribution of medically relevant information in ECG signal timelines. ECG records clearly represent a cycle of heart evolution; its components, although partly superimposed, follow the time-related dependencies of heart function. During the initial inspection of the ECG, the cardiologist focuses his o...

This chapter first presents the description of a common approach to ECG interpretation triggering, assuming that the parameters are updated each time the input data is available. The heartbeat detector runs for each acquired sample, and all heartbeat-based diagnostic parameters (e.g., arrhythmias) are calculated immediately after a positive detecti...

This chapter is a summary of the book and attempts to evaluate the social impact of the general idea of ubiquitous cardiology. The project discussed in the book is in fact oriented toward designing wireless bidirectional cooperation of two programmable ECG interpreting devices used for permanent heart monitoring and semi-automatic medical diagnosis...

This chapter defines the set of standard diagnostic parameters and metadata expected from cardiac examinations. Rest ECG, exercise ECG, and long-term recording techniques are compared with regard to method-appropriate hierarchies of diagnostic results. This summary is approaching the idea of high redundancy in the dataset influencing data transmiss...