Human-Centred Trustworthy AI for Digital Health: Sensing, Understanding, and Empowerment

Abstract

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has accelerated the development of personalised healthcare. However, the clinical adoption of deep learning remains constrained by a persistent “trust gap” surrounding model transparency, security, and data privacy. This talk presents a research vision for building trustworthy human-centred AI in computer audition and biosignal processing by integrating signal processing, machine learning, and healthcare. This vision is structured around three interconnected pillars: Sensing, Understanding, and Empowerment. The Sensing pillar focuses on enabling machines to perceive clinically relevant information from biosignals, transforming body sounds and physiological signals into non-invasive, accessible, and cost-effective windows into human health and well-being. The Understanding pillar addresses the black-box nature of modern AI systems, with the goal of ensuring transparency, efficiency, robustness, and security in clinical deployment. This is achieved through the development of explainable AI methods, knowledge distillation techniques, and defences against adversarial attacks, fostering AI systems that clinicians can trust and interpret. The Empowerment pillar seeks to restore natural communication for individuals with speech impairments, such as laryngectomy patients. By developing Silent Speech Interfaces (SSIs) that translate facial muscle activity (EMG) directly into audible speech, this research advances speech intelligibility, naturalness, real-time causal architectures, and multi-speaker speech synthesis. Collectively, these research directions aim to establish a foundation of trustworthy, human-centred AI that is not only accurate and secure, but also empathetic, accessible, and impactful, ultimately enhancing healthcare, communication, and quality of life.