Empowering Remote Healthcare With Federated Learning for Early Diagnosis of Pulmonary Disease

Recently, the field of healthcare has experienced remarkable technological advancements. However, a considerable challenge persists in providing state-of-the-art healthcare services to individuals in tribal and remote areas. To solve health issues in remote areas, this article introduces a federated learning framework for the early diagnosis of multivariate pulmonary diseases based on cough (voice) samples collected from tribal regions. The proposed framework performs model training on connected local devices, including those living in remote or tribal regions with limited connectivity to centralized servers. The proposed framework ensures the early diagnosis of multivariate lung diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), to obtain accurate prediction using ensemble learning techniques. The framework applies a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract discriminatory features from generated spectrograms of cough (voice) samples to classify COPD and non-COPD (healthy) using transfer learning techniques. The proposed framework demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed framework in minimizing resource utilization and model complexity, achieving an impressive accuracy of up to 98.62% with reduced communication rounds and latency, thus facilitating the early diagnosis of COPD. The prototype model of the proposed framework offers an alternative way of a fast diagnosis of respiratory diseases based on cough samples collected from tribal people, which is used with the support of pulmonary and tuberculosis experts (doctors and professionals) for statistical analysis of critical cases of COPD for early diagnosis. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.