ABSTRACT
At present, COVID-19 is spreading widely around the world. It causes many health problems, namely, respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Wearable devices have gained popularity by allowing remote COVID-19 detection, contact tracing, and monitoring. In this study, the correlation of photoplethysmogram (PPG) morphology between patients with COVID-19 infection and healthy subjects was investigated. Then, machine learning was used to classify the extracted features between 43 cases and 43 control subjects. The PPG data were collected from 86 subjects based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The systolic-onset amplitude was 3.72% higher for the case group. However, the time interval of systolic-systolic was 7.69% shorter in the case than in control subjects. In addition, 12 out of 20 features exhibited a significant difference. The top three features included dicrotic-systolic time interval, onset-dicrotic amplitude, and systolic-onset time interval. Nine features extracted by heatmap based on the correlation matrix were fed to discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, support vector machine, and artificial neural network (ANN). The ANN showed the best performance with 95.45% accuracy, 100% sensitivity, and 90.91% specificity by using six input features. In this study, a COVID-19 prediction model was developed using multiple PPG features extracted using a low-cost pulse oximeter.
