CovidRhythm: A Deep Learning Model for Passive Prediction of Covid-19 using Biobehavioral Rhythms Derived from Wearable Physiological Data
This work addresses timely Covid-19 detection for public health using passive wearable monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and rhythm analysis methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of detecting Covid-19 by analyzing disruptions in physiological and rest-activity rhythms from wearable data, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.79 with sensitivity of 0.69 and specificity of 0.89.
To investigate whether a deep learning model can detect Covid-19 from disruptions in the human body's physiological (heart rate) and rest-activity rhythms (rhythmic dysregulation) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We propose CovidRhythm, 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). A combination of sensor and biobehavioral rhythm features achieved the highest AUC-ROC of 0.79 [Sensitivity = 0.69, Specificity=0.89, F$_{0.1}$ = 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 24h activity and sleep information were the most disrupted. 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.