Detection of Respiratory Infections Using RGB-Infrared Sensors on Portable Device

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronaviruses 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become a serious global pandemic in the past few months and caused huge loss to human society worldwide. For such a large-scale pandemic, early detection and isolation of potential virus carriers is essential to curb the spread of the pandemic. Recent studies have shown that one important feature of COVID-19 is the abnormal respiratory status caused by viral infections. During the pandemic, many people tend to wear masks to reduce the risk of getting sick. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a portable non-contact method to screen the health conditions of people wearing masks through analysis of the respiratory characteristics from RGB-infrared sensors. We first accomplish a respiratory data capture technique for people wearing masks by using face recognition. Then, a bidirectional GRU neural network with an attention mechanism is applied to the respiratory data to obtain the health screening result. The results of validation experiments show that our model can identify the health status of respiratory with 83.69% accuracy, 90.23% sensitivity and 76.31% specificity on the real-world dataset. This work demonstrates that the proposed RGB-infrared sensors on portable device can be used as a pre-scan method for respiratory infections, which provides a theoretical basis to encourage controlled clinical trials and thus helps fight the current COVID-19 pandemic. The demo videos of the proposed system are available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12028032.