Breathing New Life into COPD Assessment: Multisensory Home-monitoring for Predicting Severity

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a significant public health issue, affecting more than 100 million people worldwide. Remote patient monitoring has shown great promise in the efficient management of patients with chronic diseases. This work presents the analysis of the data from a monitoring system developed to track COPD symptoms alongside patients’ self-reports. In particular, we investigate the assessment of COPD severity using multisensory home-monitoring device data acquired from 30 patients over a period of three months. We describe a comprehensive data pre-processing and feature engineering pipeline for multimodal data from the remote home-monitoring of COPD patients. We develop and validate predictive models forecasting i) the absolute and ii) differenced COPD Assessment Test (CAT) scores based on the multisensory data. The best obtained models achieve Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.93 and 0.37 for absolute and differenced CAT scores. In addition, we investigate the importance of individual sensor modalities for predicting CAT scores using group sparse regularization techniques. Our results suggest that feature groups indicative of the patient’s general condition, such as static medical and physiological information, date, spirometer, and air quality, are crucial for predicting the absolute CAT score. For predicting changes in CAT scores, sleep and physical activity features are most important, alongside the previous CAT score value. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of remote patient monitoring for COPD management and investigates which sensor modalities are most indicative of COPD severity as assessed by the CAT score. Our findings contribute to the development of effective and data-driven COPD management strategies.