A Novel Multi-Centroid Template Matching Algorithm and Its Application to Cough Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-tuning multi-centroid template matching algorithm for cough detection using head motion data from IMU sensors, demonstrating improved accuracy and efficiency over traditional methods in real-world and synthetic datasets.

Contribution

It proposes a novel self-tuning multi-centroid algorithm that automatically adjusts clusters for improved cough detection accuracy from inertial sensor data.

Findings

Outperforms traditional KNN and centroid-based classifiers in accuracy.

Effective in real-world cough detection with earbud sensors.

Balances accuracy and inference time through automatic clustering.

Abstract

Cough is a major symptom of respiratory-related diseases. There exists a tremendous amount of work in detecting coughs from audio but there has been no effort to identify coughs from solely inertial measurement unit (IMU). Coughing causes motion across the whole body and especially on the neck and head. Therefore, head motion data during coughing captured by a head-worn IMU sensor could be leveraged to detect coughs using a template matching algorithm. In time series template matching problems, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) combined with elastic distance measurement (esp. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)) achieves outstanding performance. However, it is often regarded as prohibitively time-consuming. Nearest Centroid Classifier is thereafter proposed. But the accuracy is comprised of only one centroid obtained for each class. Centroid-based Classifier performs clustering and averaging for each cluster, but requires manually setting the number of clusters. We propose a novel self-tuning multi-centroid template-matching algorithm, which can automatically adjust the number of clusters to balance accuracy and inference time. Through experiments conducted on synthetic datasets and a real-world earbud-based cough dataset, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm and present the result of cough detection with a single accelerometer sensor on the earbuds platform.