Explainable AI for Event and Anomaly Detection and Classification in Healthcare Monitoring Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by automating the detection and classification of events and anomalies. In the scope of this work, events and anomalies are abnormalities in the patient’s data, where the former are due to a medical condition, such as a seizure or a fall, and the latter are erroneous data due to faults or malicious attacks. AI-based event and anomaly detection (EAD) and their classification can improve patient outcomes by identifying problems earlier, enabling more timely interventions while minimizing false alarms caused by anomalies. Moreover, the advancement of Medical Internet of Things (MIoT), or wearable devices, and their high processing capabilities facilitated the gathering, AI-based processing, and transmission of data, which enabled remote patient monitoring, and personalized and predictive healthcare. However, it is fundamental in healthcare to ensure the explainability of AI systems, meaning that they can provide understandable and transparent reasoning for their decisions. This article proposes an online EAD approach using a lightweight autoencoder (AE) on the MIoT. The detected abnormality is explained using KernelSHAP, an explainable AI (XAI) technique, where the explanation of the abnormality is used, by an artificial neural network (ANN), to classify it into an event or anomaly. Intensive simulations are conducted using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) data set for various physiological data. Results showed the robustness of the proposed approach in the detection and classification of events, regardless of the percentage of the present anomalies.