Leveraging Audio Biomarkers for Enriching the Tele-Monitoring of Patients

Remote patient monitoring is a form of telehealth that allows medical centres to monitor and manage their patients’ chronic conditions. Often, depending on the severity of the disease, patients can experience either temporary or permanent home hospitalization. Although the classical medical approach involves continuous monitoring of vital parameters through specialized medical devices, it does not allow observation of patient’s behaviours, which may provide additional information of interest to physicians. In this context, digital biomarkers represent the next frontiers towards precision medicine. In this paper, we explore the possible adoption of Audio Biomarkers for monitoring the behaviours of long-term home hospitalized patients. In particular, we trained and tested several Machine Learning (ML) models to recognise different sounds (i.e., sneezing, breathing, coughing, snoring, teeth brushing, and toilet flush). The results show that, even with a few audio samples, the considered models provide good performance.