Machine Learning Solutions Integrated in an IoT Healthcare Platform for Heart Failure Risk Stratification

Abstract: The management of chronic Heart Failure (HF) presents significant challenges in modern healthcare, requiring continuous monitoring, early detection of exacerbations, and personalized treatment strategies. In this paper, we present a predictive model founded on Machine Learning (ML) techniques to identify patients at HF risk. This model is an ensemble learning approach, a modified stacking technique, that uses two specialized models leveraging clinical and echocardiographic features and then a meta-model to combine the predictions of these two models. We initially assess the model on a real dataset and the obtained results suggest that it performs well in the stratification of patients at HR risk. Specifically, we obtained high sensitivity (95\%), ensuring that nearly all high-risk patients are identified. As for accuracy, we obtained 84\%, which can be considered moderate in some ML contexts. However, it is acceptable given our priority of identifying patients at risk of HF because they will be asked to participate in the telemonitoring program of the PrediHealth research project on which some of the authors of this paper are working. The initial findings also suggest that ML-based risk stratification models can serve as valuable decision-support tools not only in the PrediHealth project but also for healthcare professionals, aiding in early intervention and personalized patient management. To have a better understanding of the value and of potentiality of our predictive model, we also contrasted its results with those obtained by using three baseline models. The preliminary results indicate that our predictive model outperforms these baselines that flatly consider features, \ie not grouping them in clinical and echocardiographic features.