UniPhyNet: A Unified Network For Multimodal Physiological Raw Signal Classification

TL;DR

UniPhyNet is a neural network architecture that classifies cognitive load from multimodal physiological signals like EEG, ECG, and EDA without manual feature extraction, using advanced deep learning modules for improved accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel end-to-end neural network architecture that effectively fuses multimodal physiological data for cognitive load classification.

Findings

Achieved 80% accuracy on binary classification

Outperformed feature-based models in accuracy

Effective for real-world cognitive state monitoring

Abstract

We present UniPhyNet, a novel neural network architecture to classify cognitive load using multimodal physiological data -- specifically EEG, ECG and EDA signals -- without the explicit need for extracting hand-crafted features. UniPhyNet integrates multiscale parallel convolutional blocks and ResNet-type blocks enhanced with channel block attention module to focus on the informative features while a bidirectional gated recurrent unit is used to capture temporal dependencies. This architecture processes and combines signals in both unimodal and multimodal configurations via intermediate fusion of learned feature maps. On the CL-Drive dataset, UniPhyNet improves raw signal classification accuracy from 70% to 80% (binary) and 62% to 74% (ternary), outperforming feature-based models, demonstrating its effectiveness as an end-to-end solution for real-world cognitive state monitoring.