How Accurate are ECG Parameters from Wearable Single-lead ECG System for 24-hours Monitoring

Abstract

Wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) devices have been quickly developed for convenient long-term monitoring. To further verify the accuracy of textile electrode based long-term wearable ECG analysis, a wearable ECG device was used to record 24-hours long-term ECGs simultaneously with a Holter monitor. Clinical parameters were derived from the wearable ECGs, and were compared with the reports from the Holter monitor. Specifically, ECG parameters of the measured total time, the beat number, the slowest heart rate, the mean heart rate, the fastest heart rate, the beat number of tachycardia, the beat number of bradycardias, Heart rate variability (HRV) parameters of SDNN, SDANN, RMSSD, PNN50, as well as the detection of premature atrial contraction (PAC) and premature ventricular contraction (PVC), were analysed and compared. Mean relative errors (MREs) of ECG parameters between the wearable ECG analysis and Holter report were all less than 10 % except the times of bradycardias (13.97 %). MREs for HRV parameters were all less than 14 %, and MREs for counting premature atrial contraction (PAC) and premature ventricular contraction (PVC) were 61.60 and 395.95 %, respectively. The results showed that ECG and HRV parameters from wearable ECGs were comparable to the Holter monitor, while there was large bias for PAC and PVC detection.