Transformer-Based Physiological Signal Analysis for Continuous Health Monitoring
Keywords:
transformer architectures; physiological signal analysis; continuous health monitoring; system deployment; data governance; fairness; robustness; clinical infrastructureAbstract
Continuous health monitoring systems increasingly depend on high-frequency physiological signals collected from wearable, clinical, and ambient sensing infrastructures. The ability to extract clinically meaningful patterns from electrocardiograms, photoplethysmograms, electroencephalograms, and respiratory signals is central to early detection, remote care, and long-term disease management. Transformer-based architectures have attracted substantial attention in this domain because they can model long-range dependencies, integrate heterogeneous channels, and support transferable representations across different physiological modalities. However, translating these modeling advances into reliable continuous health monitoring requires careful consideration of system architecture, data governance, deployment constraints, robustness, fairness, and sustainability. This paper presents a system-level analysis of transformer-based physiological signal analysis. It examines architectural trade-offs between representational capacity and computational efficiency, discusses the role of data infrastructure and signal acquisition, and evaluates deployment patterns from cloud-centric to edge-assisted architectures. It further considers regulatory, ethical, and operational challenges that arise when machine learning systems are embedded in clinical and home settings. The discussion emphasizes that technical performance alone is insufficient for effective continuous health monitoring. Instead, sustainable deployment depends on integrated design choices that balance accuracy, latency, privacy, energy consumption, interpretability, and equity. The paper concludes by identifying directions for future research that align transformer-based physiological analysis with the broader requirements of health systems and long-term sociotechnical infrastructure.
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