J Infect Dis . Wearable sensor-based detection of influenza in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals

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J Infect Dis


. 2022 Jun 27;jiac262.
doi: 10.1093/infdis/jiac262. Online ahead of print.
Wearable sensor-based detection of influenza in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals


Dorota S Temple ¹ , Meghan Hegarty-Craver ¹ , Robert D Furberg ¹ , Edward A Preble ¹ , Emma Bergstrom ² , Zoe Gardener ² , Peter Dayananda ² , Lydia Taylor ² , Nana Marie Lemm ² , Lukas Papargyris ² , Micah T McClain ³ , Bradly P Nicholson ^{3 4} , Aleah Bowie ³ , Maria Miggs ⁴ , Elizabeth Petzold ³ , Christopher W Woods ^{4 5} , Christopher Chiu ² , Kristin H Gilchrist ¹



Affiliations

• PMID: 35759279
• DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jiac262

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for early detection of viral infections in symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals to allow for timely clinical management and public health interventions.
Methods: Twenty healthy adults were challenged with an influenza A (H3N2) virus and prospectively monitored from 7 days before through 10 days after inoculation, using wearable electrocardiogram and physical activity sensors (Clinical Trial: NCT04204493; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04204993). This framework allowed for responses to be accurately referenced to the infection event. For each participant, we trained a semi-supervised multivariable anomaly detection model on data acquired before inoculation and used it to classify the post-inoculation dataset.
Results: Inoculation with this challenge virus was well-tolerated with an infection rate of 85%. With the model classification threshold set so that no alarms were recorded in the 170 healthy days recorded, the algorithm correctly identified 16 of 17 (94%) positive presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, on average 58 hours post inoculation and 23 hrs before the symptom onset.
Conclusion: The data processing and modeling methodology show promise for the early detection of respiratory illness. The detection algorithm is compatible with data collected from smartwatches using optical techniques but needs to be validated in large heterogeneous cohorts in normal living conditions.

Keywords: COVID-19; ECG; heart rate monitoring; heart rate variability; influenza; viral respiratory infection; wearable sensors.