BladderFormer: A Streaming Transformer for Real-Time Urological State Monitoring

Abstract: Bladder pressure monitoring systems are increasingly vital in diagnosing and managing urinary tract dysfunction. Existing solutions rely heavily on hand-crafted features and shallow classifiers, limiting their adaptability to complex signal dynamics. We propose a one-layer streaming transformer model for real-time classification of bladder pressure states, operating on wavelet-transformed representations of raw time-series data. Our model incorporates temporal multi-head self-attention and state caching, enabling efficient online inference with high adaptability. Trained on a dataset of 91 patients with 20,000-80,000 samples each, our method demonstrates improved accuracy, higher energy- and latency-efficiency. Implementation considerations for edge deployment on low-power hardware, such as edge graphical processing units (GPU) and micro-controllers, are also discussed.