In this paper a multiple classifier machine learning methodology for Predictive Maintenance (PdM) is presented. PdM is a prominent strategy for dealing with maintenance issues given the increasing need to minimize downtime and associated costs. One of the challenges with PdM is generating so called 'health factors' or quantitative indicators of the status of a system associated with a given maintenance issue, and determining their relationship to operating costs and failure risk. The proposed PdM methodology allows dynamical decision rules to be adopted for maintenance management and can be used with high-dimensional and censored data problems. This is achieved by training multiple classification modules with different prediction horizons to provide different performance trade-offs in terms of frequency of unexpected breaks and unexploited lifetime and then employing this information in an operating cost based maintenance decision system to minimise expected costs. The effectiveness of the methodology is demonstrated using a simulated example and a benchmark semiconductor manufacturing maintenance problem.

Abstract-Biosignal measurement and processing is increasingly being deployed in ambulatory situations particularly in connected health applications. Such an environment dramatically increases the likelihood of artifacts which can occlude features of interest and reduce the quality of information available in the signal. If multichannel recordings are available for a given signal source then there are currently a considerable range of methods which can suppress or in some cases remove the distorting effect of such artifacts. There are however considerably fewer techniques available if only a single channel measurement is available and yet single channel measurements are important where minimal instrumentation complexity is required. This paper describes a novel artifact removal technique for use in such a context. The technique known as ensemble empirical mode decomposition with canonical correlation analysis (EEMD-CCA) is capable of operating on single channel measurements. The EEMD technique is first used to decompose the single channel signal into a multi-dimensional signal. The CCA technique is then employed to isolate the artifact components from the underlying signal using second order statistics. The new technique is tested against the currently available Wavelet denoising and EEMD-ICA techniques using both electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data and is shown to produce significantly improved results.

The combination of reducing birth rate and increasing life expectancy continues to drive the demographic shift toward an aging population. This, in turn, places an ever-increasing burden on healthcare due to the increasing prevalence of patients with chronic illnesses and the reducing income-generating population base needed to sustain them. The need to urgently address this healthcare "time bomb" has accelerated the growth in ubiquitous, pervasive, distributed healthcare technologies. The current move from hospital-centric healthcare toward in-home health assessment is aimed at alleviating the burden on healthcare professionals, the health care system and caregivers. This shift will also further increase the comfort for the patient. Advances in signal acquisition, data storage and communication provide for the collection of reliable and useful in-home physiological data. Artifacts, arising from environmental, experimental and physiological factors, degrade signal quality and render the affected part of the signal useless. The magnitude and frequency of these artifacts significantly increases when data collection is moved from the clinic into the home. Signal processing advances have brought about significant improvement in artifact removal over the past few years. This paper reviews the physiological signals most likely to be recorded in the home, documenting the artifacts which occur most frequently and which have the largest degrading effect. A detailed analysis of current artifact removal techniques will then be presented. An evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the proposed artifact detection and removal techniques, with particular application to the personal healthcare domain, is provided.

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