COVID-19 Disease Progression Prediction via Audio Signals: A Longitudinal Study

Recent work has shown the potential of the use of audio data in screening for COVID-19. However, very little exploration has been done of monitoring disease progression, especially recovery in COVID-19 through audio. Tracking disease progression characteristics and patterns of recovery could lead to tremendous insights and more timely treatment or treatment adjustment, as well as better resources management in health care systems. The primary objective of this study is to explore the potential of longitudinal audio dynamics for COVID-19 monitoring using sequential deep learning techniques, focusing on prediction of disease progression and, especially, recovery trend prediction. We analysed crowdsourced respiratory audio data from 212 individuals over 5 days to 385 days, alongside their self-reported COVID-19 test results. We first explore the benefits of capturing longitudinal dynamics of audio biomarkers for COVID-19 detection. The strong performance, yielding an AUC-ROC of 0.79, sensitivity of 0.75 and specificity of 0.70, supports the effectiveness of the approach compared to methods that do not leverage longitudinal dynamics. We further examine the predicted disease progression trajectory, which displays high consistency with the longitudinal test results with a correlation of 0.76 in the test cohort, and 0.86 in a subset of the test cohort with 12 participants who report disease recovery. Our findings suggest that monitoring COVID-19 progression via longitudinal audio data has enormous potential in the tracking of individuals’ disease progression and recovery.