Progressive neurological conditions like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) require regular and detailed monitoring to track functional decline and support timely clinical decisions. Traditional in-clinic assessments, however, can be burdensome and infrequent, often missing daily symptom variability. Smartphones and wearables offer a promising alternative for remote data collection. We present HomeSenseALS, a smartphone-based digital phenotyping application developed for ALS patients and caregivers, using a user-centered design approach involving patients, caregivers, and clinicians. HomeSenseALS collects multimodal data, including self-reported data from the Revised Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Functional Rating Scale (ALSFRS-R), speech and respiratory recordings, and human movement passive data. To assess its potential for tracking ALS progression, we conducted a cross-sectional in-clinic study with 27 ALS patients and a longitudinal at-home study with 11 ALS patients over 21 weeks. Self-reported ALSFRS-R scores showed a strong correlation with in-clinic assessments. High-level physical activity features, such as time spent indoors, were associated with gross motor function. Speech analysis differentiated patients with and without bulbar dysfunction and correlated with respiratory parameters. Home spirometry aligned with clinical respiratory measures. These findings support the feasibility of using HomeSenseALS for remote, multimodal monitoring of ALS progression, potentially reducing patient burden while enabling more continuous and granular tracking of functional decline.

In this article we propose a conceptual framework to study ensembles of conformal predictors (CP), that we call Ensemble Predictors (EP). Our approach is inspired by the application of imprecise probabilities in information fusion. Based on the proposed framework, we study, for the first time in the literature, the theoretical properties of CP ensembles in a general setting, by focusing on simple and commonly used possibilistic combination rules. We also illustrate the applicability of the proposed methods in the setting of multivariate time-series classification, showing that these methods provide better performance (in terms of both robustness, conservativeness, accuracy and running time) than both standard classification algorithms and other combination rules proposed in the literature, on a large set of benchmarks from the UCR time series archive.

In this paper, we study human-AI collaboration protocols, a design-oriented construct aimed at establishing and evaluating how humans and AI can collaborate in cognitive tasks. We applied this construct in two user studies involving 12 specialist radiologists (the knee MRI study) and 44 ECG readers of varying expertise (the ECG study), who evaluated 240 and 20 cases, respectively, in different collaboration configurations. We confirm the utility of AI support but find that XAI can be associated with a "white-box paradox", producing a null or detrimental effect. We also find that the order of presentation matters: AI-first protocols are associated with higher diagnostic accuracy than human-first protocols, and with higher accuracy than both humans and AI alone. Our findings identify the best conditions for AI to augment human diagnostic skills, rather than trigger dysfunctional responses and cognitive biases that can undermine decision effectiveness.

Nowadays, manufacturing industries still face difficulties applying traditional Work-related MusculoSkeletal Disorders (WMSDs) risk assessment methods due to the high effort required by a continuous data collection when using observational methods. An interesting solution is to adopt Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to automate the data collection, thus supporting occupational health professionals. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to predict human motion based on IMU data with the goal of preventing industrial worker problematic movements that can arise during repetitive actions. The proposed system includes an initial Madgwick filter to merge the raw inertial tri-axis sensor data into a single angle orientation time series. Then, a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm is trained with the obtained time series, allowing to build a forecasting model. The effectiveness of the developed system was validated by using an open-source dataset composed of different motions for the upper body collected in a laboratory environment, aiming to monitor the abduction/adduction angle of the arm. Firstly, distinct ML algorithms were compared for a single angle orientation time series prediction, including: three Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) methods - a one layer, a stacked layer and a Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model; and three non deep learning methods - a Multiple Linear Regression, a Random Forest and a Support Vector Machine. The best results were provided by the Seq2Seq LSTM model, which was further evaluated for WMSD prevention by considering 11 human subject datasets and two evaluation procedures (single person and multiple person training and testing). Overall, interesting results were achieved, particularly for multiple person evaluation, where the proposed Seq2Seq LSTM has shown an excellent capability to anticipate problematic movements.

Nowadays, data scientists are capable of manipulating and extracting complex information from time series data, given the current diversity of tools at their disposal. However, the plethora of tools that target data exploration and pattern search may require an extensive amount of time to develop methods that correspond to the data scientist's reasoning, in order to solve their queries. The development of new methods, tightly related with the reasoning and visual analysis of time series data, is of great relevance to improving complexity and productivity of pattern and query search tasks. In this work, we propose a novel tool, capable of exploring time series data for pattern and query search tasks in a set of 3 symbolic steps: Pre-Processing, Symbolic Connotation and Search. The framework is called SSTS (Symbolic Search in Time Series) and uses regular expression queries to search the desired patterns in a symbolic representation of the signal. By adopting a set of symbolic methods, this approach has the purpose of increasing the expressiveness in solving standard pattern and query tasks, enabling the creation of queries more closely related to the reasoning and visual analysis of the signal. We demonstrate the tool's effectiveness by presenting 9 examples with several types of queries on time series. The SSTS queries were compared with standard code developed in Python, in terms of cognitive effort, vocabulary required, code length, volume, interpretation and difficulty metrics based on the Halstead complexity measures. The results demonstrate that this methodology is a valid approach and delivers a new abstraction layer on data analysis of time series.

When a comparison between time series is required, measurement functions provide meaningful scores to characterize similarity between sequences. Quite often, time series appear warped in time, i.e, although they may exhibit amplitude and shape similarity, they appear dephased in time. The most common algorithm to overcome this challenge is the Dynamic Time Warping, which aligns each sequence prior establishing distance measurements. However, Dynamic Time Warping takes only into account amplitude similarity. A distance which characterizes the degree of time warping between two sequences can deliver new insights for applications where the timing factor is essential, such well-defined movements during sports or rehabilitation exercises. We propose a novel measurement called Time Alignment Measurement, which delivers similarity information on the temporal domain. We demonstrate the potential of our approach in measuring performance of time series alignment methodologies and in the characterization of synthetic and real time series data acquired during human movement.