Prediction of short-acting beta-agonist usage in patients with asthma using temporal-convolutional neural networks

Changes in short-acting beta-agonist (SABA) use are an important signal of asthma control and risk of asthma exacerbations. Inhaler sensors passively capture SABA use and may provide longitudinal data to identify at-riskpatients. We evaluate the performance of several ML models in predicting daily SABA use for participants with asthma and determine relevant features for predictive accuracy.

Participants with self-reported asthma enrolled in a digital health platform (Propeller Health, WI), which included a smartphone application and inhaler sensors that collected the date and time of SABA use. Linear regression, random forests, and temporal convolutional networks (TCN) were applied to predict expected SABA puffs/person/day from SABA usage and environmental triggers. The models were compared with a simple baseline model using explained variance (R²), as well as using average precision (AP) and area under the receiving operator characteristic curve (ROC AUC) for predicting days with ≥1-10 puffs.

Data included 1.2 million days of data from 13 202 participants. A TCN outperformed other models in predicting puff count (R² = 0.562) and day-over-day change in puff count (R² = 0.344). The TCN predicted days with ≥10 puffs with an ROC AUC score of 0.952 and an AP of 0.762 for predicting a day with ≥1 puffs. SABA use over the preceding 7 days had the highest feature importance, with a smaller but meaningful contribution from air pollutant features.

Predicted SABA use may serve as a valuable forward-looking signal to inform early clinical intervention and self-management. Further validation with known exacerbation events is needed.