Graph Neural Network-Based Modeling of Multisensor Physiological Interactions During Physical Activity
Keywords:
graph neural networks, multisensor physiological interactions, physical activity monitoring, wearable systems, edge intelligence, health data governanceAbstract
Continuous monitoring of physiological dynamics during physical activity has become central to precision health, athletic performance, and remote rehabilitation. However, conventional multisensor fusion models often treat sensor channels as independent streams or grid-like inputs, thereby ignoring the relational and time-varying interactions among cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal, and motion-related modalities. Graph neural networks provide a principled framework for representing these multisensor physiological interactions as graph-structured data, enabling learned relational inference under motion artifacts and nonstationary conditions. This paper develops a system-level perspective on graph neural network-based modeling of multisensor physiological interactions during physical activity. It examines architectural arrangements spanning wearable acquisition, edge preprocessing, graph construction, inference, and closed-loop feedback. The discussion foregrounds structural trade-offs among centralized and distributed processing, model expressiveness and interpretability, energy efficiency, communication overhead, and resilience to missing or degraded sensor data. Attention is also given to governance, fairness, privacy, standardization, and policy implications in deployments across heterogeneous populations and regulatory contexts. Rather than focusing on specific equations or training procedures, the paper articulates how system design decisions shape the viability and trustworthiness of graph-based physiological monitoring. Case illustrations from wearable activity recognition, remote patient monitoring, and ambient assisted living are used to clarify deployment considerations. The paper concludes with forward-looking perspectives on sustainable, accountable, and adaptive graph-based multisensor infrastructures.
References
1. Atzori, L., Iera, A., & Morabito, G. (2010). The Internet of Things: A survey. Computer Networks, 54(15), 2787–2805. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2010.05.010
2. Ordóñez, F. J., & Roggen, D. (2016). Deep convolutional and LSTM recurrent neural networks for multimodal wearable activity recognition. Sensors, 16(1), 115. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16010115
3. Wu, Z., Pan, S., Chen, F., Long, G., Zhang, C., & Yu, P. S. (2021). A comprehensive survey on graph neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 32(1), 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2020.2978386
4. Veličković, P., Cucurull, G., Casanova, A., Romero, A., Liò, P., & Bengio, Y. (2018). Graph attention networks. In International Conference on Learning Representations. https://openreview.net/forum?id=rJXMpikCZ
5. Shuman, D. I., Narang, S. K., Frossard, P., Ortega, A., & Vandergheynst, P. (2013). The emerging field of signal processing on graphs: Extending high-dimensional data analysis to networks and other irregular domains. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 30(3), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2012.2235192
6. Bronstein, M. M., Bruna, J., LeCun, Y., Szlam, A., & Vandergheynst, P. (2017). Geometric deep learning: Going beyond Euclidean data. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 34(4), 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2017.2693418
7. McMahan, H. B., Moore, E., Ramage, D., Hampson, S., & Agüera y Arcas, B. (2017). Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 54, 1273–1282. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v54/mcmahan17a.html
8. Wiens, J., Saria, S., Sendak, M., Ghassemi, M., Liu, V. X., Doshi-Velez, F., ... & Goldenberg, A. (2019). Do no harm: A roadmap for responsible machine learning for health care. Nature Medicine, 25(9), 1337–1340. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0548-6
9. Obermeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., & Mullainathan, S. (2019). Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Science, 366(6464), 447–453. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax2342
10. Zheng, X., Hu, S., Dwyer, V., Barrett, L., & Derakhshani, M. (2026). Joint attention mechanism learning to facilitate opto-physiological monitoring during physical activity. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 113, 108949.
11. He, J., Baxter, S. L., Xu, J., Xu, J., Zhou, X., & Zhang, K. (2019). The practical implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in medicine. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 30–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0307-0
12. Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: The convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0300-7
13. Radu, V., Tong, C., Bhattacharya, S., Lane, N. D., Mascolo, C., Marina, M. K., & Kawsar, F. (2018). Multimodal deep learning for activity and context recognition. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 1(4), 157. https://doi.org/10.1145/3161174
14. Zhang, C., Patras, P., & Haddadi, H. (2019). Deep learning in mobile and wireless networking: A survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 21(3), 2224–2287. https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2019.2904897
15. Sze, V., Chen, Y.-H., Yang, T.-J., & Emer, J. S. (2017). Efficient processing of deep neural networks: A tutorial and survey. Proceedings of the IEEE, 105(12), 2295–2329. https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2017.2761740
16. Mittelstadt, B. D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S., & Floridi, L. (2016). The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716679679
17. Islam, S. M. R., Kwak, D., Kabir, M. H., Hossain, M., & Kwak, K.-S. (2015). The Internet of Things for health care: A comprehensive survey. IEEE Access, 3, 678–708. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2015.2437951
18. Barocas, S., & Selbst, A. D. (2016). Big data's disparate impact. California Law Review, 104(3), 671–732. https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38BG31
19. Dwork, C. (2008). Differential privacy: A survey of results. In M. Agrawal, D. Du, Z. Duan, & A. Li (Eds.), Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, 4978, 1–19. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79228-4_1
20. Rieke, N., Hancox, J., Li, W., Milletarì, F., Roth, H. R., Albarqouni, S., ... & Cardoso, M. J. (2020). The future of digital health with federated learning. NPJ Digital Medicine, 3, 119. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-00323-1
21. Liu, X., Faes, L., Kale, A. U., Wagner, S. K., Fu, D. J., Bruynseels, A., ... & Denniston, A. K. (2019). A comparison of deep learning performance against health-care professionals in detecting diseases from medical imaging: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Digital Health, 1(6), e271–e297. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2589-7500(19)30123-2
22. Lundberg, S. M., & Lee, S.-I. (2017). A unified approach to interpreting model predictions. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 4765–4774. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/hash/8a20a8621978632d76c43dfd28b67767-Abstract.html
23. Chen, M., Hao, Y., Hwang, K., Wang, L., & Wang, L. (2017). Disease prediction by machine learning over big data from healthcare communities. IEEE Access, 5, 8869–8879. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2694446
24. Vest, J. R., & Gamm, L. D. (2010). Health information exchange: Persistent challenges and new strategies. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 17(3), 288–294. https://doi.org/10.1136/jamia.2010.003673
25. Amershi, S., Weld, D., Vorvoreanu, M., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Collisson, P., ... & Horvitz, E. (2019). Guidelines for human-AI interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300233
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of Engineering Systems and Digital Innovation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.