Deep Transfer Learning for Communicable Disease Detection and Recommendation in Edge Networks

Considering the increasing number of communicable disease cases such as COVID-19 worldwide, the early detection of the disease can prevent and limit the outbreak. Besides that, the PCR test kits are not available in most parts of the world, and there is genuine concern about their performance and reliability. To overcome this, in this paper, we develop a novel edge-centric healthcare framework integrating with wearable sensors and advanced machine learning (ML) model for timely decisions with minimum delay. Through wearable sensors, a set of features have been collected that are further preprocessed for preparing a useful dataset. However, due to limited resource capacity, analyzing the features in resource-constrained edge devices is challenging. Motivated by this, we introduce an advanced ML technique for data analysis at edge networks, namely Deep Transfer Learning (DTL). DTL transfers the knowledge from the well-trained model to a new lightweight ML model that can support the resource-constraint nature of distributed edge devices. We consider a benchmark COVID-19 dataset for validation purposes, consisting of 11 features and 2 Million sensor data. The extensive simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed DTL technique over the existing ones and achieve 99.8% accuracy while diseases prediction.