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Collaborating Authors

 Tang, Chenyu


Wearable intelligent throat enables natural speech in stroke patients with dysarthria

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Wearable silent speech systems hold significant potential for restoring communication in patients with speech impairments. However, seamless, coherent speech remains elusive, and clinical efficacy is still unproven. Here, we present an AI-driven intelligent throat (IT) system that integrates throat muscle vibrations and carotid pulse signal sensors with large language model (LLM) processing to enable fluent, emotionally expressive communication. The system utilizes ultrasensitive textile strain sensors to capture high-quality signals from the neck area and supports token-level processing for real-time, continuous speech decoding, enabling seamless, delay-free communication. In tests with five stroke patients with dysarthria, IT's LLM agents intelligently corrected token errors and enriched sentence-level emotional and logical coherence, achieving low error rates (4.2% word error rate, 2.9% sentence error rate) and a 55% increase in user satisfaction. This work establishes a portable, intuitive communication platform for patients with dysarthria with the potential to be applied broadly across different neurological conditions and in multi-language support systems. This impairment drastically restricts effective communication, lowers quality of life, substantially impedes the rehabilitation process, and can even lead to severe psychological issues [1, 2, 3, 4]. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies have been developed to address these challenges, including letter-by-letter spelling systems utilizing head or eye tracking [5, 6, 7, 8] and neuroprosthetics powered by brain-computer interface (BCI) devices [9, 10, 11, 12].


A Unified Platform for At-Home Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Enabled by Wearable Technologies and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hubin Zhao (hubin.zhao@ucl.ac.uk), and Luigi G. Occhipinti (lgo23@cam.ac.uk) Abstract At-home rehabilitation for post-stroke patients presents significant challenges, as continuous, personalized care is often limited outside clinical settings. Additionally, the absence of comprehensive solutions addressing diverse rehabilitation needs in home environments complicates recovery efforts. Here, we introduce a smart home platform that integrates wearable sensors, ambient monitoring, and large language model (LLM)-powered assistance to provide seamless health monitoring and intelligent support. The system leverages machine learning enabled plantar pressure arrays for motor recovery assessment (94% classification accuracy), a wearable eye-tracking module for cognitive evaluation, and ambient sensors for precise smart home control (100% operational success, <1 s latency). Additionally, the LLM-powered agent, Auto-Care, offers real-time interventions, such as health reminders and environmental adjustments, enhancing user satisfaction by 29%. This work establishes a fully integrated platform for long-term, personalized rehabilitation, offering new possibilities for managing chronic conditions and supporting aging populations. Stroke is the third leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting more than 101 million people [1, 2]. Post-stroke recovery is not only a prolonged process but also a resource-intensive one, imposing significant economic and caregiving burdens on families and healthcare systems--a challenge exacerbated by global aging [5]. For many patients, the home becomes a critical environment for rehabilitation, as opportunities for continuous and personalized care are limited outside of clinical settings [6].


Deep Learning for Motion Classification in Ankle Exoskeletons Using Surface EMG and IMU Signals

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ankle exoskeletons have garnered considerable interest for their potential to enhance mobility and reduce fall risks, particularly among the aging population. The efficacy of these devices relies on accurate real-time prediction of the user's intended movements through sensor-based inputs. This paper presents a novel motion prediction framework that integrates three Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and eight surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensors to capture both kinematic and muscular activity data. A comprehensive set of activities, representative of everyday movements in barrier-free environments, was recorded for the purpose. Our findings reveal that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) slightly outperform Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks on a dataset of five motion tasks, achieving classification accuracies of $96.5 \pm 0.8 \%$ and $87.5 \pm 2.9 \%$, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate the system's proficiency in transfer learning, enabling accurate motion classification for new subjects using just ten samples per class for finetuning. The robustness of the model is demonstrated by its resilience to sensor failures resulting in absent signals, maintaining reliable performance in real-world scenarios. These results underscore the potential of deep learning algorithms to enhance the functionality and safety of ankle exoskeletons, ultimately improving their usability in daily life.


Dissociation of Faithful and Unfaithful Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. Our research investigates how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought, reaching the correct final answer despite mistakes in the reasoning text. Through analysis of these error recovery behaviors, we find evidence for unfaithfulness in Chain of Thought, but we also identify many clear examples of faithful error recovery behaviors. We identify factors that shift LLM recovery behavior: LLMs recover more frequently from obvious errors and in contexts that provide more evidence for the correct answer. However, unfaithful recoveries show the opposite behavior, occurring more frequently for more difficult error positions. Our results indicate that there are distinct mechanisms driving faithful and unfaithful error recoveries. Our results challenge the view that LLM reasoning is a uniform, coherent process.


Diagnosis of Multiple Fundus Disorders Amidst a Scarcity of Medical Experts Via Self-supervised Machine Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Fundus diseases are major causes of visual impairment and blindness worldwide, especially in underdeveloped regions, where the shortage of ophthalmologists hinders timely diagnosis. AI-assisted fundus image analysis has several advantages, such as high accuracy, reduced workload, and improved accessibility, but it requires a large amount of expert-annotated data to build reliable models. To address this dilemma, we propose a general self-supervised machine learning framework that can handle diverse fundus diseases from unlabeled fundus images. Our method's AUC surpasses existing supervised approaches by 15.7%, and even exceeds performance of a single human expert. Furthermore, our model adapts well to various datasets from different regions, races, and heterogeneous image sources or qualities from multiple cameras or devices. Our method offers a label-free general framework to diagnose fundus diseases, which could potentially benefit telehealth programs for early screening of people at risk of vision loss.


SSVT: Self-Supervised Vision Transformer For Eye Disease Diagnosis Based On Fundus Images

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning-based fundus image diagnosis technologies trigger worldwide interest owing to their benefits such as reducing medical resource power and providing objective evaluation results. However, current methods are commonly based on supervised methods, bringing in a heavy workload to biomedical staff and hence suffering in expanding effective databases. To address this issue, in this article, we established a label-free method, name 'SSVT',which can automatically analyze un-labeled fundus images and generate high evaluation accuracy of 97.0% of four main eye diseases based on six public datasets and two datasets collected by Beijing Tongren Hospital. The promising results showcased the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised learning method, and the strong application potential in biomedical resource shortage regions to improve global eye health.


Intelligent machines work in unstructured environments by differential neuromorphic computing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Efficient operation of intelligent machines in the real world requires methods that allow them to understand and predict the uncertainties presented by the unstructured environments with good accuracy, scalability and generalization, similar to humans. Current methods rely on pretrained networks instead of continuously learning from the dynamic signal properties of working environments and suffer inherent limitations, such as data-hungry procedures, and limited generalization capabilities. Herein, we present a memristor-based differential neuromorphic computing, perceptual signal processing and learning method for intelligent machines. The main features of environmental information such as amplification (>720%) and adaptation (<50%) of mechanical stimuli encoded in memristors, are extracted to obtain human-like processing in unstructured environments. The developed method takes advantage of the intrinsic multi-state property of memristors and exhibits good scalability and generalization, as confirmed by validation in two different application scenarios: object grasping and autonomous driving. In the former, a robot hand experimentally realizes safe and stable grasping through fast learning (in ~1 ms) the unknown object features (e.g., sharp corner and smooth surface) with a single memristor. In the latter, the decision-making information of 10 unstructured environments in autonomous driving (e.g., overtaking cars, pedestrians) is accurately (94%) extracted with a 40*25 memristor array. By mimicking the intrinsic nature of human low-level perception mechanisms, the electronic memristive neuromorphic circuit-based method, presented here shows the potential for adapting to diverse sensing technologies and helping intelligent machines generate smart high-level decisions in the real world.