Allergy detection with statistical modelling of HRV-based non-reaction baseline features

This paper investigates the automated classification of oral food challenges ('allergy tests'). The electrocardiograms (ECG) of the subjects being tested for allergies were recorded via a wireless mote, and the QRS complexes were manually annotated and 18 features were extracted from the signals. Principal component analysis was used for feature decorelation and dimensionality reduction and diagonal covariance Gaussian mixture models were used to model non-reaction baseline patient condition. The generated subject independent log likelihood plots were used to separate allergic reaction by means of subject adaptive thresholding. The platform resulted in 87% accuracy of classification with 100% specificity. The algorithm presented can detect allergy up to 30 minutes sooner than the current state of the clinical art allergy detection (7minutes ± 9).