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Accepted for/Published in: JMIR AI

Date Submitted: Jul 10, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 31, 2025

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Leveraging Smart Bed Technology to Detect COVID-19 Symptoms: Case Study

Garcia-Molina G, Guzenko D, DeFranco S, Aloia M, Mills R, Mushtaq F, Somers V

Leveraging Smart Bed Technology to Detect COVID-19 Symptoms: Case Study

JMIR AI 2025;4:e64018

DOI: 10.2196/64018

PMID: 40981620

PMCID: 12452045

Leveraging Smart Bed Technology to Detect Symptoms of Influenza-Like Illnesses: A Case Study Focused on COVID-19

  • Gary Garcia-Molina; 
  • Dmytro Guzenko; 
  • Susan DeFranco; 
  • Mark Aloia; 
  • Rajasi Mills; 
  • Faisal Mushtaq; 
  • Virend Somers

ABSTRACT

Background:

Pathophysiological responses to viral infections such as COVID-19 affect sleep duration, sleep quality, and concomitant cardiorespiratory function. The collection of real-world, longitudinal sleep-metric data could prove to be valuable for infectious illness detection and monitoring.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to leverage longitudinal, retrospective, biometric data captured using ballistocardiography (BCG) signals from a consumer smart bed platform along with predictive modeling to detect and monitor, at an individual level, COVID-19 symptoms.

Methods:

In this study, objective sleep metrics were obtained using a smart bed platform from survey respondents (N = 1725) reporting the outcome of a COVID-19 test. Using these sleep metrics, we developed a two-stage model detecting the presence of symptoms and the progression of illness associated with COVID-19. First, a gradient-boosted, decision-tree, “symptom detection model” was created to classify each sleep session as symptomatic or not. Second, an “influenza-like illness-symptom progression model” utilized a Gaussian Mixture Hidden Markov Model to estimate the probability of each sleep session to be symptomatic or not by leveraging the temporal dimension of the collected data.

Results:

Symptoms were detected in 104 of the 122 positive COVID-19 cases. Group level trends indicated the model could detect differences in sleep metrics during symptomatic versus reference periods. The versatility of our model extends beyond COVID-19 and can be applied to a range of respiratory illnesses.

Conclusions:

The sleep metrics measured with a smart bed platform are a unique source of longitudinal data, collected in a real-world and unobtrusive manner. In the future, this system may serve as an asset in predicting and tracking the development of symptoms associated with a wide variety of respiratory illnesses. Clinical Trial: The protocol describing this observational study # P2020/03001 NEIRB 17-1323071-1 was approved by the WCG New England Institutional Review Board (IRB).


 Citation

Please cite as:

Garcia-Molina G, Guzenko D, DeFranco S, Aloia M, Mills R, Mushtaq F, Somers V

Leveraging Smart Bed Technology to Detect COVID-19 Symptoms: Case Study

JMIR AI 2025;4:e64018

DOI: 10.2196/64018

PMID: 40981620

PMCID: 12452045

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