Personalized Graph Attention Network for Multivariate Time-series Change Analysis: A Case Study on Long-term Maternal Monitoring

Internet-of-Things-based systems have recently emerged, enabling long-term health monitoring systems for the daily activities of individuals. The data collected from such systems are multivariate and longitudinal, which call for tailored analysis techniques to extract the trends and abnormalities in the monitoring. Different methods in the literature have been proposed to identify trends in data. However, they do not include the time dependency and cannot distinguish changes in long-term health data. Moreover, their evaluations are limited to lab settings or short-term analysis. Long-term health monitoring applications require a modeling technique to merge the multisensory data into a meaningful indicator. In this paper, we propose a personalized neural network method to track changes and abnormalities in multivariate health data. Our proposed method leverages convolutional and graph attention layers to produce personalized scores indicating the abnormality level (i.e., deviations from the baseline) of users' data throughout the monitoring. We implement and evaluate the proposed method via a case study on long-term maternal health monitoring. Sleep and stress of pregnant women are remotely monitored using a smartwatch and a mobile application during pregnancy and 3-months postpartum. Our analysis includes 46 women. We build personalized sleep and stress models for each individual using the data from the beginning of the monitoring. Then, we compare the two groups by measuring the data variations. The abnormality scores produced by the proposed method are compared with the findings from the self-report questionnaire data collected in the monitoring and abnormality scores generated by an autoencoder method. The proposed method outperforms the baseline methods in exploring the changes between high-risk and low-risk pregnancy groups. The proposed method's scores also show correlations with the self-report data. Consequently, the results indicate that the proposed method effectively detects the abnormality in multivariate long-term health monitoring.