Discovering Multidimensional Motifs in Physiological Signals for Personalized Healthcare

Personalized diagnosis and therapy requires monitoring patient activity using various body sensors. Sensor data generated during personalized exercises or tasks may be too specific or inadequate to be evaluated using supervised methods such as classification. We propose multidimensional motif (MDM) discovery as a means for patient activity monitoring, since such motifs can capture repeating patterns across multiple dimensions of the data, and can serve as conformance indicators. Previous studies pertaining to mining MDMs have proposed approaches that lack the capability of concurrently processing multiple dimensions, thus limiting their utility in online scenarios. In this paper, we propose an efficient real-time approach to MDM discovery in body sensor generated time series data for monitoring performance of patients during therapy. We present two alternative models for MDMs based on motif co-occurrences and temporal ordering among motifs across multiple dimensions, with detailed formulation of the concepts proposed. The proposed method uses an efficient hashing based record to enable speedy update and retrieval of motif sets, and identification of MDMs. Performance evaluation using synthetic and real body sensor data in unsupervised motif discovery tasks shows that the approach is effective for (a) concurrent processing of multidimensional time series information suitable for real-time applications, (b) finding unknown naturally occurring patterns with minimal delay, and