Early Identification of COVID-19 Using Dynamic Fuzzy Rule Based System

Abstract

The undergoing research aims to address the problem of COVID-19 which has turned out to be a global pandemic. Despite developing some successful vaccines, the pace has not overcome so far. Several studies have been proposed in the literature in this regard, the present study is unique in terms of its dynamic nature to adapt the rules by reconfigurable fuzzy membership function. Based on patient’s symptoms (fever, dry cough etc.) and history related to travelling, diseases/medications and interactions with confirmed patients, the proposed dynamic fuzzy rule-based system (FRBS) identifies the presence/absence of the disease. This can greatly help the healthcare professionals as well as laymen in terms of disease identification. The main motivation of this paper is to reduce the pressure on the health services due to frequent test assessment requests, in which patients can do the test anytime without the need to make reservations. The main findings are that there is a relationship between the disease and the symptoms in which some symptoms can indicate the probability of the presence of the disease such as high difficulty of breathing, cough, sore throat, and so many more. By knowing the common symptoms, we developed membership functions for these symptoms, and a model generated to distinguish between infected and non-infected people with the help of survey data collected. The model gave an accuracy of 88.78%, precision of 72.22%, sensitivity of 68.42%, specificity of 93.67%, and an f1-score of 69.28%.