Virtual reality exposure aided-diagnosis system for anxiety disorders: Long short-term memory architecture for three levels of anxiety recognition.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in increased psychological pressure on mental health since 2019. The resulting anxiety and stress have permeated every aspect of life during confinement. OBJECTIVE: To provide psychologists with an unbiased measure that can aid in the preliminary diagnosis of anxiety disorders and be used as an initial treatment in cognitive-behavioral therapy, this article introduces automated recognition of three levels of anxiety. METHODS: Anxiety was elicited by exposing participants to virtual environments inspired by social situations in reference to the Liebowitz social anxiety scale. Relevant parameters, such as heart rate variability and vasoconstriction were derived from the measurement of the blood volume pulse (BVP) signal. RESULTS: A long short-term memory architecture achieved an accuracy of approximately 98% on the training and test set. CONCLUSION: The generated model allowed for careful study of the state of seven phobic participants during virtual reality exposure (VRE).

iPPG 2 cPPG: Reconstructing contact from imaging photoplethysmographic signals using U-Net architectures.

Imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) is an optical technique dedicated to the assessment of several vital functions using a simple camera. Significant efforts have been made to reliably estimate heart and respiratory rates. Currently, research is focusing on the remote estimation of oxygen saturation and blood pressure (BP). The limited number of publicly available data tends to restrict the advancements related to BP estimation. To overcome this limit, we propose to split the problem in a two-stage processing chain: (i) converting iPPG to contact PPG (cPPG) signals using available video dataset and (ii) estimate BP from converted cPPG signals by exploiting large existing databases (e.g. MIMIC). This article presents the first developments where a method for converting iPPG signals measured using a camera into cPPG signals measured by contact sensors is proposed. Real and imaginary parts of the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) of cPPG and iPPG signals are passed to various deep pre-trained U-shaped architectures. Conventional metrics and specific waveform estimators have been implemented to validate the relevance of the predictions. The results exhibit good agreements towards a large portion of metrics, showing that the neural architectures properly estimated cPPG from iPPG signals through their CWT representations. The performance indicates that BP estimation from iPPG signals converted to cPPG signals can now be envisaged. Consequently, future work will focus on the integration of models dedicated to BP estimation trained on MIMIC. This is the first demonstration of a method for accurate reconstruction of cPPG from iPPG signals satisfying pulse waveform criteria.

Remote detection of mental workload changes using cardiac parameters assessed with a low-cost webcam.

We introduce a new framework for detecting mental workload changes using video frames obtained from a low-cost webcam. Image processing in addition to a continuous wavelet transform filtering method were developed and applied to remove major artifacts and trends on raw webcam photoplethysmographic signals. The measurements are performed on human faces. To induce stress, we have employed a computerized and interactive Stroop color word test on a set composed by twelve participants. The electrodermal activity of the participants was recorded and compared to the mental workload curve assessed by merging two parameters derived from the pulse rate variability and photoplethysmographic amplitude fluctuations, which reflect peripheral vasoconstriction changes. The results exhibit strong correlation between the two measurement techniques. This study offers further support for the applicability of mental workload detection by remote and low-cost means, providing an alternative to conventional contact techniques.