Abstract: Mind-heart-body is tightly intertwined. Anxiety is one of the most prevalent mental health issues during the COVID pandemic. Lyfas is a smartphone-based biomarker instrument that has been used as a CovidAnxiety Detector (LAD) where SD2/SD1 has been considered the key optical biomarker of anxiety and its other adverse health consequences. The objective of this study is to validate the efficacy of LAD with that of two gold-standard anxiety rating instruments – (i) 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) and (ii) 14-item Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A). A total of 1454 Indian adults (Male 955, Female 499) within the age group of 18-87 years (median and average age of 39.56 and 37 years respectively), divided into three age groups: 18-30 years, 31-50 years, and >50 years who were RTPCR positive took (i) GAD-7, (ii) HAM-A, and (iii) Lyfas tests daily till they became RTPCR negative (average span of 14 days). Internal consistency (α), Spearman’s rank correlation (r), Classification metric - sensitivity, specificity, precision, accuracy, fscore, and Youden’s index of LAD has been computed and finally, the inter-rater reliability between (a) LAD and GAD-7 and (b) LAD and HAM-A is measured with Bland-Altman Reliability Assessment. LAD shows high inter-rater reliability (i.e., the minimum proportional bias) around the mean difference with the Bland-Altman test, good-to-excellent internal consistency (>0.8 and >0.9, respectively), and high correlations (r>0.6) of LAD with GAD-7 and HAM-A in the 18-30 years age group. LAD shows high average accuracy (0.9953 and 0.9764 in males and females respectively), precision (>0.9), and Youden’s index (0.9976 and 0.8633), for males and females. Hence, LAD is a reliable and novel smartphone-based non-invasive and ubiquitous biomarker clinical instrument to screen and monitor GAD and its adverse consequences such as sudden cardiac death and suicide in adults, especially in the ongoing pandemic situations.
Keywords: COVID-19, Lyfas CovidAnxiety Detector, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Hamilton Anxiety rating scale, Sudden cardiac death, Suicide.
Title: Validating A Smartphone-based Biomarker Instrument Lyfas CovidAnxiety Detector (LAD) in the Indian Population
Author: Subhagata Chattopadhyay, Rupam Das
International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Innovations
ISSN 2348-1218 (print), ISSN 2348-1226 (online)
Vol. 10, Issue 2, April 2022 - June 2022
Page No: 61-76
Research Publish Journals
Website: www.researchpublish.com
Published Date: 10-June-2022
