Chronic respiratory diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, are a serious health crisis, affecting a large number of people globally and inflicting major costs on the economy. Current methods for assessing the progression of respiratory symptoms are either subjective and inaccurate, or complex and cumbersome, and do not incorporate environmental factors. Lacking predictive assessments and early intervention, unexpected exacerbations can lead to hospitalizations and high medical costs. This work presents a multi-modal solution for predicting the exacerbation risks of respiratory diseases, such as COPD, based on a novel spatio-temporal machine learning architecture for real-time and accurate respiratory events detection, and tracking of local environmental and meteorological data and trends. The proposed new machine learning architecture blends key attributes of both convolutional and recurrent neural networks, allowing extraction of both spatial and temporal features encoded in respiratory sounds, thereby leading to accurate classification and tracking of symptoms. Combined with the data from environmental and meteorological sensors, and a predictive model based on retrospective medical studies, this solution can assess and provide early warnings of respiratory disease exacerbations. This research will improve the quality of patients' lives through early medical intervention, thereby reducing hospitalization rates and medical costs.
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