Title Wearable Devices, Smartphones, and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence in Combating COVID-19.
Author Hijazi, Haytham; Abu Talib, Manar; Hasasneh, Ahmad; Bou Nassif, Ali; Ahmed, Nafisa; Nasir, Qassim
Journal Sensors (Basel) Publication Year/Month 2021-Dec
PMID 34960517 PMCID PMC8709136
Affiliation + expend 1.Department of Informatics Engineering, CISUC-Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, University of Coimbra, P-3030-790 Coimbra, Portugal.

Physiological measures, such as heart rate variability (HRV) and beats per minute (BPM), can be powerful health indicators of respiratory infections. HRV and BPM can be acquired through widely available wrist-worn biometric wearables and smartphones. Successive abnormal changes in these indicators could potentially be an early sign of respiratory infections such as COVID-19. Thus, wearables and smartphones should play a significant role in combating COVID-19 through the early detection supported by other contextual data and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this paper, we investigate the role of the heart measurements (i.e., HRV and BPM) collected from wearables and smartphones in demonstrating early onsets of the inflammatory response to the COVID-19. The AI framework consists of two blocks: an interpretable prediction model to classify the HRV measurements status (as normal or affected by inflammation) and a recurrent neural network (RNN) to analyze users\' daily status (i.e., textual logs in a mobile application). Both classification decisions are integrated to generate the final decision as either "potentially COVID-19 infected" or "no evident signs of infection". We used a publicly available dataset, which comprises 186 patients with more than 3200 HRV readings and numerous user textual logs. The first evaluation of the approach showed an accuracy of 83.34 +/- 1.68% with 0.91, 0.88, 0.89 precision, recall, and F1-Score, respectively, in predicting the infection two days before the onset of the symptoms supported by a model interpretation using the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME).

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