• Bio

    check My NOW page

    For a more detailed CV ask me for my CV in pdf. My ORCID 0000-0003-3485-0874

    I have just defended my PhD at Tampere University, Finland, I specialized in sleep monitoring and signal processing. I develop algorithms for unobtrusive sensors—like mattress sensors and wearables—to detect physiological signals such as snoring, breathing patterns, and heart rate. With a background in telecommunications and biomedical engineering, I bring a multidisciplinary approach to my work. I’m passionate about simple, effective solutions and am currently seeking opportunities in AI development, wearable technologies, or related fields. I’m open to remote work (or on-site roles in Finland) and enjoy collaborating with teams or working independently.

    Outside research, I play piano and explore how music and technology intersect, often inspiring my signal processing projects.

    Research

    The topic of my doctoral thesis is centered on sleep, unobtrusive sensors and mattress sensors (such as Beddit, Emfit (electromechanical film transducer) mattress , Fitbit, Firstbeat, raw accelerometers like traxmeet). The thesis proposes several state-of-the-art methods for detecting snoring, breathing efforts, breathing patterns, and heart rate detection algorithms.

    Research Lines

    Community projects

    • locally-informed, this is the only community project I have participated back in 2020. Updating information from Finland.

    Hobby Audio / Sound projects

    • Spatial sound and Sound Synthesis using Csound: This is a super old project done in Csound about Spatial Sound and sound synthesis, from an old course of "Sound and Wave Engineering back in 2003/2004, with my super-cool classmate Ariana. It is funny to see how much interest I still have in Sound, Biosignals...1D signals/timeseries. Still remember Richard Boulanger!! The project was about using Csound, documenting it. And finally we created two examples made by ourselves. The original site is still on! but does not work properly in modern html... so I made some changes and put it here. Old page... it is in this link from the Image Processing Laboratory (LPI-UVa) here.
    • Sound localization:

      Here is the link to the Github Project. In short the project is about sound source Localization using an eight-microphone Array (UMA-8 from MiniDSP).

    Resources

    People Science Books Tools
    Publications Research group

    Publications

    PhD Thesis (2025)

  • Methods for Snoring and Heart Pulse Detection Using Unobtrusive Mattress Sensor (2025), Doctoral Dissertation, Tampere University, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, Tampere University, 2025. ISBN 978-952-03-2952-0 (print), ISBN 978-952-03-2953-7 (pdf), URN: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-2953-7
    Related news: //www.tuni.fi/en/news/jose-maria-perez-macias-bed-mattress-wearables-enable-early-detection-sleep-disorders

    • Journals

    1. Nokelainen P, Perez-Macias JM, Himanen SL, Hakala A, Tenhunen M. Methods for Detecting Abnormal Ventilation in Children - the Case Study of 13-Years old Pitt-Hopkins Girl.,Child Neurol Open. 2023 Feb 20;10:2329048X231151361. doi: 10.1177/2329048X231151361. PMID: 36844470; PMCID: PMC9944179
    2. S. Friman, A. Vehkaoja and J. M. Perez-Macias. The Use of Wrist EMG Increases the PPG Heart Rate Accuracy in Smartwatches, in IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 22, no. 24, pp. 24197-24204, 15 Dec.15, 2022, doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2022.3219297
    3. Detection of snores using source separation on an Emfit signal JM Perez-Macias, M Tenhunen, A Värri, SL Himanen, J Viik. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
    4. Spectral analysis of snoring events from an Emfit mattress. JM Perez-Macias, J Viik, A Varri, SL Himanen, M TenhunenPhysiological measurement 37 (12), 2130 3 2016
    5. Snoring detection with emfit sleep mattress. JM Perez-Macias, SL Himanen, J Viik, M Tenhunen. JOURNAL OF SLEEP RESEARCH 25, 159-160 2016
    6. The use of crowdsourcing for dietary self-monitoring: crowdsourced ratings of food pictures are comparable to ratings by trained observers. GM Turner-McGrievy, EE Helander, K Kaipainen, JM Perez-Macias, ...Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 22 (e1), e112-e119 9 2014
    7. Spectral changes in spontaneous MEG activity across the lifespan. C Gómez, JM Pérez-Macías, J Poza, A Fernández, R HorneroJournal of neural engineering 10 (6), 066006 10 2013

    Conferences

    1. Heart pulse demodulation from Emfit mattress sensor using spectral and source separation techniques.. JM Perez-Macias, M Tenhunen, A Värri, SL Himanen, J Viik. 2022 Computing in Cardiology (CinC)
    2. Time characteristics of prolonged partial obstruction periods using an Emfit mattress. JM Perez-Macias, J Viik, A Värri, SL Himanen, M Tenhunen EMBEC & NBC 2017, 775-778 2017
    3. Detection and Assessment of Sleep-Disordered Breathing with Emfit Mattress. M Tenhunen, J Hyttinen, J Viik, JM Perez-Macias, SL HimanenEMBEC & NBC 2017, 173-176 2017
    4. Assessment of support vector machines and convolutional neural networks to detect snoring using Emfit mattress
      Jose M. Perez-Macias, Sharath Adavanne, Jari Viik, Alpo Värri, Sari-Leena Himanen, and Mirja Tenhunen, The Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC 2017) (old draft here)
    5. Comparative assessment of sleep quality estimates using home monitoring technology. JM Perez-Macias, H Jimison, I Korhonen, M PavelEngineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2014 Annual ... 9 2014
    6. Sleep monitoring data validation using a linear discriminant classifier. JM Perez-Macias, M Pavel, I Korhonen, H Jimison7th annual Canadian Student Conference on Biomedical Computing and ... 2014

    Honors & Awards

    • Award 2017
    • Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Scholarship awards 2015, 2016, 2017
    • University of Valladolid Fellowship 2011–2015
    • Erasmus Scholarship award for studying at Chalmers School of Technology (2007)

    Patents

    Membership

    Research Grants

    • Nokia Award 2017
    • Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Scholarship awards 2015
    • Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Scholarship awards 2016
    • Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Scholarship awards 2017

    Organizing scientific activities

    • Best MSc and PhD thesis 2024 Ceremony (event organizer)
    • Best MSc and PhD thesis 2023 Ceremony (event organizer)

    Invited Journal reviewer

    • NPJ digital Medicine - Nature (since 2020)
    • IEEE sensors Journal - IEEE (since 2023)
    • Biomedical physics & engineering express - IOP Publishing (since 2024)
    • Measurement Science and Technology - IOP Publishing (since 2024)

    Invited Conference reviewer

    • EMBEC17, NBC17

    Teaching

    • Have not taught besides private lessons.

    Research Projects

    Heart pulse demodulation from Emfit mattress sensor using spectral and source separation techniques.
    JM Perez-Macias, M Tenhunen, A Värri, SL Himanen, J Viik.
    2022 Computing in Cardiology (CinC)
    Paper Code Project Page
    Detection of snores using source separation on an Emfit signal.
    JM Perez-Macias, M Tenhunen, A Värri, SL Himanen, J Viik.
    IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
    Paper Code Project Page
    Spectral analysis of snoring events from an Emfit mattress
    JM Perez-Macias, J Viik, A Varri, SL Himanen, M Tenhunen
    Physiological measurement 37 (12), 2130 3 2016
    Paper Code Project Page
    Comparative assessment of sleep quality estimates using home monitoring technology
    JM Perez-Macias, H Jimison, I Korhonen, M Pavel
    The Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC 2014)
    Paper Code Project Page
    Heart pulse demodulation from Emfit mattress sensor using spectral and source separation techniques.
    JM Perez-Macias, M Tenhunen, A Värri, SL Himanen, J Viik.
    2022 Computing in Cardiology (CinC)
    Paper Code Project Page
    Project 1
    Project Title 1 Best Paper Award
    Author One, Author Two, Author Three
    Conference/Journal Name 2023
    Paper Code Project Page

    Random Projects

    Comsol Simulation of a Neuron

    This project was part of a course I took in TUT where I simulated a neuron using the FitzHugh-Naguno model

    TimeLapse with a Raspberry Pi

    Project Title 1 Best Paper Award
    Author One, Author Two, Author Three
    Conference/Journal Name 2023
    Paper Code Project Page

    This is a timelapse from my house. Note how everything is already dark (winter in Finland), but also, how the goods are arriving to Sale (a supermarket). Gym (GoGo), is opening a bit before 6:00am. It was fun to set it up... I might put the code up (it is rather simple) when I find some time.You can see the super-dupper simple code in my Github. What can I say, sometimes things are that simple. The video was put together using Photoshop.

    RaspFX

    RaspFX

    A great project using a Raspberry Pi (link). This is my personal webserver, hosting this project where you can upload music and add effects from PureData. The server is at home, so it might not always work (for now). This was part of a project from MediaServices with members Carita Logrén, Enrico Manuzzato, Jose Maria Perez-Macias, and Ugur Kar. I also leave some .wav files for testing since I remember they needed to have an specific sampling rate.

    File1, File2, File3

    Watering my plants when I am away

    Plants

    Hoping to stop killing my plants when I go on holiday (soon to be uploaded). I basically have a basic script in a RaspBerry Pi for the lights. I bought some special medical pumps to water them and control the doses, but has proven a bit more complicated than that.

    Animals

    This is a game for kids. Developed in Meteor. It can be used on the phone, or iPad, as long it is not a very old iPad (iPad 1) because it becomes very slow (soon to be uploaded on a server).

    Microcontroller House alarm with Keypad

    Project from back in 2006 usign an Intel Microcontroller Github Link

    Bus ticket Project

    My first program in C++ (with my classmate Alberto Leon), we got an awesome grade! It is a bus ticket software to buy tickets to different destinations. Using Linked Lists and OO programing. Github Link

    Wireless sensor monitor

    Realtime Control

    Me and a colleage developed a wireless sensor monitor that is deployed in TUT, pretty cool honestly (soon to be uploaded, well maybe not so soon). Programmed in C. These were the same guys as

    Real Time Control

    Realtime Control

    This is a realtime control using a realtime operating system (Xenomai) me and my classmate developed (Github Link). In Chalmers, they were developing leading research to solve a problem of control over networks (nowadays everything is a network).

    Csound 2003/2004

    Sound localization

    This is a super old project done in Csound about Sound of Localization, from an old course of "Sound and Wave Engineering back in 2003/2004. It is funny to see how much interest I still have in Sound, Biosignals...1D signals/timeseries. Still remember Richard Boulanger!!
    The project was about using Csound, documenting it. And finally we created two examples made by ourselves.
    The original site is still on! but does not work properly in moder html... so I made a some changes and put it here.
    Old page... it is here.

    Sound localization

    Project from Advanced Audio Processing

    GitHub

    Other projects

    I have been working on different projects as a copywriter, and also another one more dedicated to divulation.

    This one is about sensors and promoting sensors. There is also a project of educating and reference material for the public based on research. Sensor Salud

    This other was meant to promote what it another, but a bit abbandoned at the moment. Sleep Coaching and Research