Physiological measurement
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This paper presents a new approach for evaluating predictions of oxygen saturation levels in blood ( SpO2). A performance metric based on a threshold is proposed to evaluate SpO2 predictions based on whether or not they are able to capture critical desaturations in the SpO2 time series of patients. We use linear auto-regressive models built using historical SpO2 data to predict critical desaturation events with the proposed metric. ⋯ We also show that including the PR dynamics does not improve the earliest time at which critical SpO2 levels are predicted (p-value = 0.986). Our results indicate oxygen in blood is an effective input to the PR rather than vice versa. We demonstrate that the combination of predictive models with frequent pulse oximetry measurements can be used as a warning of critical oxygen desaturations that may have adverse effects on the health of patients.