Wan-Fai Ng

Yang Bai, Yu Guan, Jian Qing Shi et al.

Fatigue is a broad, multifactorial concept that includes the subjective perception of reduced physical and mental energy levels. It is also one of the key factors that strongly affect patients' health-related quality of life. To date, most fatigue assessment methods were based on self-reporting, which may suffer from many factors such as recall bias. To address this issue, in this work, we recorded multi-modal physiological data (including ECG, accelerometer, skin temperature and respiratory rate, as well as demographic information such as age, BMI) in free-living environments and developed automated fatigue assessment models. Specifically, we extracted features from each modality and employed the random forest-based mixed-effects models, which can take advantage of the demographic information for improved performance. We conducted experiments on our collected dataset, and very promising preliminary results were achieved. Our results suggested ECG played an important role in the fatigue assessment tasks.

Yang Bai, Yu Guan, Wan-Fai Ng

Fatigue is one of the key factors in the loss of work efficiency and health-related quality of life, and most fatigue assessment methods were based on self-reporting, which may suffer from many factors such as recall bias. To address this issue, we developed an automated system using wearable sensing and machine learning techniques for objective fatigue assessment. ECG/Actigraphy data were collected from subjects in free-living environments. Preprocessing and feature engineering methods were applied, before interpretable solution and deep learning solution were introduced. Specifically, for interpretable solution, we proposed a feature selection approach which can select less correlated and high informative features for better understanding system's decision-making process. For deep learning solution, we used state-of-the-art self-attention model, based on which we further proposed a consistency self-attention (CSA) mechanism for fatigue assessment. Extensive experiments were conducted, and very promising results were achieved.