Tiny-BioMoE: a Lightweight Embedding Model for Biosignal Analysis

Abstract: Pain is a complex and pervasive condition that affects a significant portion of the population. Accurate and consistent assessment is essential for individuals suffering from pain, as well as for developing effective management strategies in a healthcare system. Automatic pain assessment systems enable continuous monitoring, support clinical decision-making, and help minimize patient distress while mitigating the risk of functional deterioration. Leveraging physiological signals offers objective and precise insights into a person's state, and their integration in a multimodal framework can further enhance system performance. This study has been submitted to the \textit{Second Multimodal Sensing Grand Challenge for Next-Gen Pain Assessment (AI4PAIN)}. The proposed approach introduces \textit{Tiny-BioMoE}, a lightweight pretrained embedding model for biosignal analysis. Trained on $4.4$ million biosignal image representations and consisting of only $7.3$ million parameters, it serves as an effective tool for extracting high-quality embeddings for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments involving electrodermal activity, blood volume pulse, respiratory signals, peripheral oxygen saturation, and their combinations highlight the model's effectiveness across diverse modalities in automatic pain recognition tasks. \textit{\textcolor{blue}{The model's architecture (code) and weights are available at https://github.com/GkikasStefanos/Tiny-BioMoE.