Covid-19 Automatic Test through Human Breathing

Abstract

A classifier using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to identify human beings infected with Covid-19 is proposed in this work. This classifier has significant advantages over current testing methods: it is fast, contactless, and requires few monetary resources. The data considered for this study was extracted from the Coswara dataset using 140 individuals (70 healthy and 70 infected with Covid-19). This dataset contains respiratory signals, such as people counting numbers, coughing, or breathing. The classifier uses non-linear time sequence features extracted from the signals after a preprocessing stage. The classifier was able to discriminate whether a human is infected with Covid-19 with an accuracy of 92.1%, specificity of 85.7%, and sensitivity of 98.6% using 5-fold Cross-Validation. Based on the results obtained, the classifier can be used as an alternative for the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests.