An aim of the analysis of biomedical signals such as heart rate variability signals, brain signals, oxygen saturation variability (OSV) signals, etc., is for the design and development of tools to extract information about the underlying complexity of physiological systems, to detect physiological states, monitor health conditions over time, or predict pathological conditions. Entropy-based complexity measures are commonly used to quantify the complexity of biomedical signals; however novel complexity measures need to be explored in the context of biomedical signal classification. In this work, we present a novel technique that used Haar wavelets to analyze the complexity of OSV signals of subjects during COVID-19 infection and after recovery. The data used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms comprised recordings of OSV signals from 44 COVID-19 patients during illness and after recovery. The performance of the proposed technique was compared with four, scale-based entropy measures: multiscale entropy (MSE); multiscale permutation entropy (MPE); multiscale fuzzy entropy (MFE); multiscale amplitude-aware permutation entropy (MAMPE). Preliminary results of the pilot study revealed that the proposed algorithm outperformed MSE, MPE, MFE, and MMAPE in terms of better accuracy and time efficiency for separating during and after recovery the OSV signals of COVID-19 subjects. Further studies are needed to evaluate the potential of the proposed algorithm for large datasets and in the context of other biomedical signal classifications.
Keywords: COVID-19; Haar wavelet; biomedical signal processing; oxygen saturation variability; physiological systems.