Continuous speech monitoring using smartphones and smartwatches offers numerous opportunities to detect and predict health deterioration. However, the algorithms used to deliver these benefits must account for the realities of periodic audio recording in the wild, including other voices and overlapping noise. To address the former without clean sample voice recordings, we use speaker diarization to identify the person who speaks the most throughout a given day. To address the latter without compromising the validity of extracted speech features, we leverage the intuition that a reliable feature should remain unaltered by a noise-reduction technique when background noise is minimal. We examine both techniques in the context of a longitudinal dataset collected from 16 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) over roughly 3 months. Our best model achieved an AUROC of 0.86 when predicting the presence of respiratory symptoms, outperforming baseline models that rely solely on voice activity detection and noise reduction.

Remote patient monitoring is becoming increasingly instrumental to healthcare delivery but can substantially hamper the interpersonal communication that underlies standard clinical practice. In this work, we explore the benefits imparted to patients, clinicians, and researchers by an asynchronous messaging feature within a platform called COVIDFree@Home. We created COVIDFree@Home to assist the healthcare system in a large metropolitan city in North America during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians used COVIDFree@Home to monitor the self-reported symptoms and vital signs of over 350 COVID-19 patients post-infection. Using thematic analysis of user-initiated messages, we found the messaging feature helped maintain protocol adherence while allowing patients to ask questions about their health and clinicians to convey empathetic care. This feedback cycle also led to higher quality data for hospitalization prediction, as the revisions significantly improved the AUROC of a machine learning model trained on demographic variables, vital signs data, and self-reported symptoms from 0.53 to 0.59.

Continuous monitoring of cough may provide insights into the health of individuals as well as the effectiveness of treatments. Smart-watches, in particular, are highly promising for such monitoring: they are inexpensive, unobtrusive, programmable, and have a variety of sensors. However, current mobile cough detection systems are not designed for smartwatches, and perform poorly when applied to real-world smartwatch data since they are often evaluated on data collected in the lab.In this work we propose CoughWatch, a lightweight cough detector for smartwatches that uses audio and movement data for in-the-wild cough detection. On our in-the-wild data, CoughWatch achieves a precision of 82% and recall of 55%, compared to 6% precision and 19% recall achieved by the current state-of-the-art approach. Furthermore, by incorporating gyroscope and accelerometer data, CoughWatch improves precision by up to 15.5 percentage points compared to an audio-only model.

Containers are an emerging approach for application deployment on the edge, as they are modular, lightweight, and easy to use for development and maintenance. However, deploying containers in an edge computing environment brings new challenges: high latency links, limited resources, and user mobility. This work proposes a new edge deployment architecture that accelerates deployment and updates for edge applications. By overcoming the design limitations of current registries, the accelerator would reduce the deployment, start-up, and update times of container-based applications.

No abstract available.

Applications that perform continuous sensing on mobile phones have the potential to revolutionize everyday life. Examples range from medical and health monitoring applications, such as pedometers and fall detectors, to participatory sensing applications, such as noise pollution, traffic and seismic activity monitoring. Unfortunately, current mobile devices are a poor match for continuous sensing applications as they require the device to remain awake for extended periods of time, resulting in poor battery life. This paper presents Sidewinder, a new approach towards offloading sensor data processing to a low-power processor and waking up the main processor when events of interest occur. This approach differs from other heterogeneous architectures in that developers are presented with a programming interface that lets them construct application specific wake-up conditions by linking together and parameterizing predefined sensor data processing algorithms. Our experiments indicate performance that is comparable to approaches that provide fully programmable offloading, but do so with a much simpler programming interface that facilitates deployment and portability.