CovidRhythm: A Deep Learning Model for Passive Prediction of Covid-19 Using Biobehavioral Rhythms Derived From Wearable Physiological Data

<italic>Goal:</italic> To investigate whether a deep learning model can detect Covid-19 from disruptions in the human body&#x0027;s physiological (heart rate) and rest-activity rhythms (rhythmic dysregulation) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. <italic>Methods:</italic> We p...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Atifa Sarwar, Emmanuel O. Agu, Abdulsalam Almadani
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023-01-01
Series:IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10079194/
Description
Summary:<italic>Goal:</italic> To investigate whether a deep learning model can detect Covid-19 from disruptions in the human body&#x0027;s physiological (heart rate) and rest-activity rhythms (rhythmic dysregulation) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. <italic>Methods:</italic> We propose <italic>CovidRhythm</italic>, a novel Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Network with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) that combines sensor and rhythmic features extracted from heart rate and activity (steps) data gathered passively using consumer-grade smart wearable to predict Covid-19. A total of 39 features were extracted (standard deviation, mean, min/max/avg length of sedentary and active bouts) from wearable sensor data. Biobehavioral rhythms were modeled using nine parameters (mesor, amplitude, acrophase, and intra-daily variability). These features were then input to CovidRhythm for predicting Covid-19 in the incubation phase (one day before biological symptoms manifest). <italic>Results:</italic> A combination of sensor and biobehavioral rhythm features achieved the highest AUC-ROC of 0.79 [Sensitivity = 0.69, Specificity = 0.89, F<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{0.1}$</tex-math></inline-formula> = 0.76], outperforming prior approaches in discriminating Covid-positive patients from healthy controls using 24 hours of historical wearable physiological. Rhythmic features were the most predictive of Covid-19 infection when utilized either alone or in conjunction with sensor features. Sensor features predicted healthy subjects best. Circadian rest-activity rhythms that combine 24 h activity and sleep information were the most disrupted. <italic>Conclusions:</italic> CovidRhythm demonstrates that biobehavioral rhythms derived from consumer-grade wearable data can facilitate timely Covid-19 detection. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to detect Covid-19 using deep learning and biobehavioral rhythms features derived from consumer-grade wearable data.
ISSN:2644-1276