Imaging and signal analysis in the service of disability assistance and psychological state

Hermine Chatoux (Université Bourgogne Europe -Laboratoire ImViA)

Abstract:

Currently, the time spent with each patient is increasingly limited. While not addressing the staff shortage, this symposium proposes to explore systems and tools for monitoring patients throughout the day in order to provide psychological state indicators or disability support throughout the day. These elements can be invaluable in patient care.

This symposium, held in the context of the “Health at 360°” conference, aims to bring together researchers in mathematics and signal theory to establish appropriate distance/similarity measures, researchers in information theory to develop protocols for analyzing and tiling these spaces, researchers in image analysis and processing to produce more relevant attribute spaces, and researchers in data science to find decision-support solutions for these large spaces.
The proposed topic is also open to communication and exchange with clinical research regarding use cases and the production of data/measurements relevant to these scenarios.

Target audience:

Academic and clinical researchers

Keywords: multimodality, metrology, micro-expression, RPPG, motion analysis, facial analysis, human instrumentation, probability and statistics, signal processing

Call for papers:
Scientific and/or clinical presentations expected

The main theme is the digital support that can be provided in the healthcare field, such as personal assistance, disability support, and consideration of psychological state through non-invasive acquisition systems. Expected applications include:

• Fall detection
• Estimation of physiological signals from video
• Analysis of physiological signals
• Detection of a patient’s stress level
• Rehabilitation monitoring
• Data fusion

The proposed topic is also open to communication and exchanges with clinical research regarding use cases and the production of data/measurements relevant to these cases.

Keywords:

• Multimodality,
• Metrology,
• Facial expression,
• RPPG,
• Movement analysis,
• Human instrumentation,
• Signal and image processing.

Submission guidelines:

• Articles of at least two double-column pages
• French or English
• Selection committee:
  • Yannick Benezeth
  • Cyrille Migniot
  • Fan Yang
  • Maxime Ambard
  • Julien Dubois
  • Hermine Chatoux

VI. Schedule:

• Submission period: December 15, 2025
• Submission period: March 30, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026

VII. Scientific context

Currently, the time spent with each patient is increasingly limited. While not addressing the staff shortage, this symposium aims to explore systems and tools for studying patients throughout the day in order to provide psychological state assessments or disability support throughout the day. These elements can be invaluable in patient care.

Among the many possible applications, we can mention the monitoring of vulnerable individuals, for example, through fall detection or the tracking of cognitive decline in the elderly. There are also approaches that allow for the estimation of stress levels, or even emotional state, by combining several physiological signals within multimodal fusion systems. The field of disability also represents a major area of ​​application. Navigational assistance for blind people, or the monitoring of rehabilitation for patients with prostheses through gait analysis, clearly illustrate how minimally invasive devices can offer valuable daily support.

However, many scientific and technological hurdles remain. Physiological signals and their descriptors contain relevant information but are sometimes difficult to fuse, as they do not necessarily reflect the same phenomena or stimuli. Several analysis methods show strong potential, but remain limited to very specific experimental setups, which hinders their widespread adoption. Furthermore, some applications promise major advances but remain unresolved to date, such as the objective quantification of pain, for which current approaches still struggle to produce reliable and universal results.

The laboratory has been conducting exploratory studies on these topics for several years. One of the objectives of this symposium is to present this work to healthcare professionals in order to broaden the possibilities and the framework of study and to move towards more concrete cases. This also implies the development of more complex and realistic learning frameworks.