Multi-Modal Point-of-Care Diagnostics for COVID-19 Based on Acoustics and Symptoms

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to invent alternative respiratory health diagnosis methodologies which provide improvement with respect to time, cost, physical distancing and detection performance. In this context, identifying acoustic bio-markers of respiratory diseases has received renewed interest. Objective: In this paper, we aim to design COVID-19 diagnostics based on analyzing the acoustics and symptoms data. Towards this, the data is composed of cough, breathing, and speech signals, and health symptoms record, collected using a web-application over a period of twenty months. Methods: We investigate the use of time-frequency features for acoustic signals and binary features for encoding different health symptoms. We experiment with use of classifiers like logistic regression, support vector machines and long-short term memory (LSTM) network models on the acoustic data, while decision tree models are proposed for the symptoms data. Results: We show that a multi-modal integration of inference from different acoustic signal categories and symptoms achieves an area-under-curve (AUC) of 96.3%, a statistically significant improvement when compared against any individual modality ( $p < 0.05$ ). Experimentation with different feature representations suggests that the mel-spectrogram acoustic features performs relatively better across the three kinds of acoustic signals. Further, a score analysis with data recorded from newer SARS-CoV-2 variants highlights the generalization ability of the proposed diagnostic approach for COVID-19 detection. Conclusion: The proposed method shows a promising direction for COVID-19 detection using a multi-modal dataset, while generalizing to new COVID variants.