Efficient and Explainable Deep Neural Networks for Airway Symptom Detection in Support of Wearable Health Technology

Mobile health wearables are often embedded with small processors for signal acquisition and analysis. These embedded wearable systems are, however, limited with low available memory and computational power. Advances in machine learning, especially deep neural networks (DNNs), have been adopted for efficient and intelligent applications to overcome constrained computational environments. Herein, evolutionary algorithms are used to find novel DNNs that are accurate in classifying airway symptoms while allowing wearable deployment. As opposed to typical microphone‐acoustic signals, mechano‐acoustic data signals, which did not contain identifiable speech information for better privacy protection, are acquired from laboratory‐generated and publicly available datasets. The optimized DNNs had a low model file size of less than 150 kB and predicted airway symptoms of interest with 81.49% accuracy on unseen data. By performing explainable AI techniques, namely occlusion experiments and class activation maps, mel‐frequency bands up to 8,000 Hz are found as the most important feature for the classification. It is further found that DNN decisions are consistently relying on these specific features, fostering trust and transparency of the proposed DNNs. The proposed efficient and explainable DNN is expected to support edge computing on mechano‐acoustic sensing wearables for remote, long‐term monitoring of airway symptoms.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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