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The past decade has seen an explosion of the amount of digital information generated within the healthcare domain. Digital data exist in the form of images, video, speech, transcripts, electronic health records, clinical records, and free-text. Analysis and interpretation of healthcare data is a daunting task, and it demands a great deal of time, resources, and human effort. In this paper, we focus on the problem of co-morbidity recognition from patient’s clinical records. To this aim, we employ both classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. We use word embeddings and bag-of-words representations, coupled with feature selection techniques. The goal of our work is to develop a classification system to identify whether a certain health condition occurs for a patient by studying his/her past clinical records. In more detail, we have used pre-trained word2vec, domain-trained, GloVe, fastText, and universal sentence encoder embeddings to tackle the classification of sixteen morbidity conditions within clinical records. We have compared the outcomes of classical machine learning and deep learning approaches with the employed feature representation methods and feature selection methods. We present a comprehensive discussion of the performances and behaviour of the employed classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. Finally, we have also used ensemble learning techniques over a large number of combinations of classifiers to improve the single model performance. For our experiments, we used the n2c2 natural language processing research dataset, released by Harvard Medical School. The dataset is in the form of clinical notes that contain patient discharge summaries. Given the unbalancedness of the data and their small size, the experimental results indicate the advantage of the ensemble learning technique with respect to single classifier models. In particular, the ensemble learning technique has slightly improved the performances of single classification models but has greatly reduced the variance of predictions stabilizing the accuracies (i.e., the lower standard deviation in comparison with single classifiers). In real-life scenarios, our work can be employed to identify with high accuracy morbidity conditions of patients by feeding our tool with their current clinical notes. Moreover, other domains where classification is a common problem might benefit from our approach as well.

The full comprehension of how topics change within psychotherapeutic conversation is key for assessment and therapeutic strategies to adopt by the counselor to the patients. That might enable artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to recommend the most suitable strategy for a new patient. Basically, understanding the topics dynamics of previous cases allows choosing the best therapy to perform for new patients depending on their current conversations.

In connected health services automatic discovery of recurring patterns and correlations, or insights, provides many interesting opportunities for the personalization of the services. In this paper the focus is on insight mining for a health coaching service. The basic idea in the proposed method is to generate a large number of insight candidates which have been pre-validated with domain experts and to score them using the data. The dynamic performance of the scoring is studied with a collection of lifestyle sensor data from volunteers. The proposed method is compared to a conventional data mining approach based on the Apriori algorithm. We demonstrate that the proposed method gives significantly more variability among the subjects and types of insights it finds which may reflect better the underlying statistics of individual lifestyle patterns of the different subjects.

The majority of approaches to activity recognition in sensor environments are either based on manually constructed rules for recognizing activities or lack the ability to incorporate complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, in many cases, the rather unrealistic assumption is made that the subject carries out only one activity at a time. In this paper, we describe the use of Markov logic as a declarative framework for recognizing interleaved and concurrent activities incorporating both input from pervasive lightweight sensor technology and common-sense background knowledge. In particular, we assess its ability to learn statistical-temporal models from training data and to combine these models with background knowledge to improve the overall recognition accuracy. We also show the viability and the benefit of exploiting both qualitative and quantitative temporal relationships like the duration of the activities and their temporal order. To this end, we propose two Markov logic formulations for inferring the foreground activity as well as each activities' start and end times. We evaluate the approach on an established dataset where it outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for activity recognition.

A major challenge of ubiquitous computing resides in the acquisition and modelling of rich and heterogeneous context data, among which, ongoing human activities at different degrees of granularity. In a previous work, we advocated the use of probabilistic description logics (DLs) in a multilevel activity recognition framework. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of activity modeling and reasoning within that framework, as well as an experimental evaluation with a large real-world dataset. Our solution allows us to cope with the uncertain nature of ontological descriptions of activities, while exploiting the expressive power and inference tools of the OWL 2 language. Targeting a large dataset of real human activities, we developed a probabilistic ontology modeling nearly 150 activities and actions of daily living. Experiments with a prototype implementation of our framework confirm the viability of our solution.

A majority of the approaches to activity recognition in sensor environments are either based on manually constructed rules for recognizing activities or lack the ability to incorporate complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, in many cases, the rather unrealistic assumption is made that the subject carries out only one activity at a time. In this paper, we describe the use of Markov logic as a declarative framework for recognizing interleaved and concurrent activities incorporating both input from pervasive light-weight sensor technology and common-sense background knowledge. In particular, we assess its ability to learn statistical-temporal models from training data and to combine these models with background knowledge to improve the overall recognition accuracy. To this end, we propose two Markov logic formulations for inferring the foreground activity as well as each activities' start and end times. We evaluate the approach on an established dataset. where it outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for activity recognition.

Smart environments with ubiquitous sensing technologies are a promising perspective for reliable and continuous healthcare systems with reduced costs. A primary challenge for such assisted living systems is the automated recognition of everyday activities carried out by humans in their own home. In this work, we investigate the use of Markov Logic Networks as a framework for activity recognition within intelligent home-like environments equippedwith pervasive light-weight sensor technologies. In particular, we explore the ability of MLNs to capture temporal relations and background knowledge for improving the recognition performance.