Urinary tract infection (UTI) flare-ups pose a significant health risk for older adults with chronic conditions. These infections often go unnoticed until they become severe, making early detection through innovative smart home technologies crucial. Traditional machine learning (ML) approaches relying on simple binary classification for UTI detection offer limited utility to nurses and practitioners as they lack insight into prediction uncertainty, hindering informed clinical decision-making. This paper presents a clinician-in-the-loop (CIL) smart home system that leverages ambient sensor data to extract meaningful behavioral markers, train robust predictive ML models, and calibrate them to enable uncertainty-aware decision support. The system incorporates a statistically valid uncertainty quantification method called Conformal-Calibrated Interval (CCI), which quantifies uncertainty and abstains from making predictions ("I don’t know") when the ML model's confidence is low. Evaluated on real-world data from eight smart homes, our method outperforms baseline methods in recall and other classification metrics while maintaining the lowest abstention proportion and interval width. A survey of 42 nurses confirms that our system's outputs are valuable for guiding clinical decision-making, underscoring their practical utility in improving informed decisions and effectively managing UTIs and other condition flare-ups in older adults.

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms play an increasingly critical role in remote health monitoring, automating health assessments, and extending medical professionals’ reach in caring for an aging population. However, ML models often provide predictions without quantifying uncertainty, which is essential for safe deployment in healthcare. This article presents a novel method referred to as Uncertainty Regions via Importance-Weighted Calibration (URIC) for automating the uncertainty-based prediction of multiple clinical cognitive health measures from continuous smartwatch sensor data. URIC leverages Conformal Prediction (CP), a rigorous Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) framework that guarantees user-defined coverage (e.g., ground truth is in the predicted region with 95% probability). The key innovation of URIC is constructing smaller, more interpretable prediction regions by assigning importance weights to calibration examples. It forms prediction regions by using the most relevant calibration examples, ensuring tight regions without sacrificing coverage. We evaluate URIC for predicting the cognitive health measures of 157 adults who were either cognitively healthy or experienced Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Compared to other UQ methods, our method constructs smaller prediction regions across all multi-target combinations while maintaining the user-specified coverage. This approach can be integrated into human-ML collaborative systems to improve diagnostic accuracy and interpretability in sensitive multi-target healthcare tasks.

Wearable internet of things (IoT) are transforming diverse healthcare applications including rehabilitation, vital symptom monitoring, and activity recognition. However, the small form-factor of wearable devices constrains the battery capacity and the operating lifetime, thus requiring frequent recharging or battery replacements. Frequent recharging and battery replacement leads to lower quality of service and user satisfaction. Harvesting energy from ambient sources to augment the battery has emerged as an effective solution to improving its operating lifetime. However, ambient energy sources are highly stochastic, making energy management challenging. Prior approaches typically use point predictions for estimating future energy and do not explicitly account for the uncertainty. In strong contrast to prior approaches, this paper presents a conformal predictionbased method for future energy harvest that provides small uncertainty regions with provable coverage guarantees (true output is within the uncertainty region). The uncertainty regions over energy harvest are then leveraged in an energy management algorithm that employs Monte Carlo sampling to evaluate the quality of multiple decisions with varying energy harvests. The decisions are then combined using a lightweight machine learning model to make an energy management decision that is close to the optimal. Experiments on two diverse real-world datasets with about 10 users show that conformal prediction achieves more than 90% coverage with tight prediction intervals; and the energy management algorithm produces decisions that are on average within 2 J of an optimal Oracle, thus showing its effectiveness in improving the quality of service.

Achieving good health and well-being through lower mortality rates of non-communicable diseases and early warning of health risks are key goals of United Nations (UN). Wearable internet of things (IoT) are one of the most promising technology to achieve these goals through their ubiquitous monitoring of key health indicators and in-situ data processing. However, small form-factor of wearable devices constrains the battery capacity, thus requiring frequent recharging or battery replacements, which lowers their adoption rate and benefits. Augmentation of battery energy by scavenging ambient sources, such as light, is a promising solution to improve operating lifetime of IoT devices. However, ambient energy sources are highly uncertain, making energy management (EM) challenging. To handle these challenges, this paper presents a novel uncertainty-aware EM approach. First, we develop a conformal prediction-based method for future energy harvest (EH) that provides small uncertainty regions with provable coverage guarantees (true output vector is within the region). The EH uncertainty regions are then leveraged in an EM algorithm that uses overhead-aware sampling to evaluate the quality of multiple decisions with varying EH before making a decision using a lightweight machine learning model. Experiments on two diverse real-world datasets with 10 users show that conformal prediction achieves more than 90% coverage with tight prediction intervals; and the EM algorithm produces decisions that are, on average, within 2 Joules of an optimal Oracle.

Processing-in-memory (PIM) has been proposed as an alternative computing paradigm for training Deep Neural Networks, including Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite these advancements, training GNN workloads on PIM devices necessitates off-chip memory access. This off-chip access is expensive in terms of performance and energy, thereby impacting the overall energy efficiency of the training process on PIM platforms. In this article, we propose a novel hybrid training framework called ERGo that automatically switches from a full-parameter phase to a parameter-efficient phase during the training process with negligible loss in predictive accuracy. The parameter-efficient phase employs low-rank representations of GNN weights, effectively reducing the number of trainable parameters. This helps in reducing the off-chip access during the end-to-end training process on PIM architectures, leading to notable improvements in both performance and energy efficiency. ERGo outperforms the conventional full-parameter GNN training on a PIM-based platform by up to 3.15x in speedup and enhances energy efficiency by 10.5x. Furthermore, ERGo offers additional advantages when utilized on heterogeneous architectures incorporating non-volatile memory (NVM) and static random-access memory (SRAM). Training on the heterogeneous NVM-SRAM architecture typically utilizes NVM for the forward-pass and SRAM for the backward-pass. However, NVM cells suffer from low device endurance and repeated write operations due to weight updates can lead to poor lifetime. ERGo improves the lifetime of NVM devices by freezing the weights and preventing weight updates in the parameter-efficient phase. Experimental results demonstrate that ERGo improves the lifetime of heterogeneous NVM-SRAM architecture by up to 33x in comparison to full-parameter implementation.