Toward Early Severity Assessment of Obstructive Lung Disease Using Multi-Modal Wearable Sensor Data Fusion During Walking.

Early detection of chronic diseases helps to minimize the disease impact on patient's health and reduce the economic burden. Continuous monitoring of such diseases helps in the evaluation of rehabilitation program effectiveness as well as in the detection of exacerbation. The use of everyday wearables i.e. chest band, smartwatch and smart band equipped with good quality sensor and light weight machine learning algorithm for the early detection of diseases is very promising and holds tremendous potential as they are widely used. In this study, we have investigated the use of acceleration, electrocardiogram, and respiration sensor data from a chest band for the evaluation of obstructive lung disease severity. Recursive feature elimination technique has been used to identity top 15 features from a set of 62 features including gait characteristics, respiration pattern and heart rate variability. A precision of 0.93, recall of 0.91 and F-1 score of 0.92 have been achieved with a support vector machine for the classification of severe patients from the non-severe patients in a data set of 60 patients. In addition, the selected features showed significant correlation with the percentage of predicted FEV1.Clinical Relevance- The study result indicates that wearable sensor data collected during natural walk can be used in the early evaluation of pulmonary patients thus enabling them to seek medical attention and avoid exacerbation. In addition, it may serve as a complementary tool for pulmonary patient evaluation during a 6-minute walk test.