Organizations: Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan · Department of Biomedical Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan · Institute of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan · Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taiwan · Department of Electrical Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan
sEMG is vulnerable to various contaminants that distort signal morphology and spectral content. Accurate signal quality assessment (SQA) is essential for identifying such degradation and ensuring reliable clinical analyses and decisions. Recent neural network-based SQA methods achieve accurate quality estimation by learning complex contamination patterns, yet their black-box nature prevents clinicians from understanding or validating the reported scores and limits adaptability to application-specific quality definitions without retraining. To address these limitations, we propose Prism-SQA, an interpretable and adaptable neural framework that reformulates SQA as a physiology-aware source-separation and verification process. Prism-SQA decomposes each input signal into a clean sEMG component and five contaminant-specific components using a U-Net with bidirectional long short-term memory. Each separated contaminant component is examined by a Contaminant Fingerprint Verifier, which enforces physiological plausibility by comparing its temporal and spectral structure with canonical contaminant signatures. This design allows clinicians to inspect how each contaminant affects signal quality, grounding the assessment in transparent, signal-level evidence rather than opaque latent representations. Quality indices computed from the verified components further enable customization of quality criteria across clinical contexts without retraining. We evaluate Prism-SQA on continuous quality-score estimation using synthesized noisy sEMG from public Ninapro datasets and on binary quality classification using a clinical dysphagia dataset. Results show that Prism-SQA achieves competitive or better performance than contemporary black-box neural methods while providing explicit interpretability and adaptability, advancing toward practical and clinically aligned sEMG SQA.
Rehabilitation scoring systems are most useful when their outputs can be reviewed and interpreted within clinical workflows. This study presents PhaseAware, a compact framework for continuous rehabilitation quality assessment that combines a temporal backbone with phase- and body-group descriptors through a backbone-conditioned gated residual pathway. The model was evaluated on the UI-PRMD deep-squat protocol and further tested on the KIMORE squatting subset. On UI-PRMD, PhaseAware achieved an RMSE of 0.0230, corresponding to an 88.9% reduction relative to the accepted baseline. It also maintained favorable performance on KIMORE, suggesting that the phase-aware design transfers across related squatting protocols. In addition to score prediction, PhaseAware generates structured review cues based on phase- and body-level sensitivity, highlighting the movement stages and body regions most relevant to each prediction. The architecture employs a backbone-conditioned gated residual mechanism to stabilize feature representation, supporting use in resource-constrained settings. These cues are intended to support clinician review, boundary-case monitoring, and human-in-the-loop triage rather than autonomous decision-making. Overall, PhaseAware offers a practical and interpretable approach to rehabilitation scoring that may help integrate automated assessment into information systems while preserving clinician oversight.
Reliable seizure prediction is a prerequisite for closed-loop neurostimulation therapy, yet existing methods rarely account for the variability in EEG signal quality encountered in real-world deployment, and the overwhelming majority adopt non-strict evaluation protocols that overestimate generalisation performance. We propose CLSP-REQA (Closed-Loop Seizure Prediction with Real-time EEG Quality Assessment), a unified framework that embeds a lightweight signal quality estimator directly within the prediction pipeline. A Real-time EEG Quality Assessment (REQA) module runs in parallel with a Mamba-BiLSTM backbone, producing a scalar quality score q in [0,1] that modulates output confidence through a tiered non-linear fusion function (ECLO). Under strict cross-patient evaluation on the CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database (n = 23 subjects, 198 seizures), CLSP-REQA achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.7426 +- 0.0199, outperforming the unadapted cross-patient baseline of 0.69 reported by Jemal et al., using only 16 EEG channels compared to 23 in prior work, and without requiring any target-patient data or domain adaptation. On the SIENA Scalp EEG Database (n = 14 subjects, 47 seizures), CLSP-REQA achieves AUC 0.7012 +- 0.0249, substantially surpassing the best domain-adapted cross-patient result of 0.61 on the same dataset, demonstrating strong cross-dataset generalisation. The framework outputs a structured four-tuple (p, q, c, Phi_SHAP) directly compatible with closed-loop neurostimulator interfaces.
Detecting muscle fatigue via surface electromyography (sEMG) is essential for applications in sports, rehabilitation, and wearable health monitoring. Accurate and timely detection of fatigue is crucial for preventing injuries, optimizing physical performance, and ensuring user safety during prolonged activity. However, existing deep learning models are often unsuitable for this task due to their high computational cost and dependence on large-scale data. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient framework for muscle fatigue detection based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which exploit sparse, event-driven computation and temporal modeling. We further introduce a quantization-compatible training scheme (SDH) that combines multiple regularization terms to improve robustness under noisy conditions. Evaluated on two public sEMG datasets against a broad set of baselines and under seven noise conditions including physically motivated perturbations, our quantized SNNs match or exceed strong baselines while remaining more stable under diverse noise and reducing estimated energy consumption by up to 201.77x. These results demonstrate the framework's strong potential for real-time deployment in low-power wearable systems.