Sinabro: A Smartphone-Integrated Opportunistic Electrocardiogram Monitoring System.

Sungjun Kwon,Seungwoo Kang,Sangwon Seo,Kwangsuk Park,Jeehoon Kim,Youngki Lee,Dongseok Lee

doi:10.3390/s16030361

Abstract

In our preliminary study, we proposed a smartphone-integrated, unobtrusive electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system, Sinabro, which monitors a user’s ECG opportunistically during daily smartphone use without explicit user intervention. The proposed system also monitors ECG-derived features, such as heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), to support the pervasive healthcare apps for smartphones based on the user’s high-level contexts, such as stress and affective state levels. In this study, we have extended the Sinabro system by: (1) upgrading the sensor device; (2) improving the feature extraction process; and (3) evaluating extensions of the system. We evaluated these extensions with a good set of algorithm parameters that were suggested based on empirical analyses. The results showed that the system could capture ECG reliably and extract highly accurate ECG-derived features with a reasonable rate of data drop during the user’s daily smartphone use.

Highlights

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring provides pervasive healthcare applications with new opportunities
We improved the extraction process, which intelligently removes noisy signals caused by motion artifacts and interpolates missing data, if possible. It drops data with consecutively long, missed features to guarantee the reliability of the extracted features. We evaluated these extensions using a good set of algorithm parameters suggested based on empirical analyses
The analysis focused on three smartphone use cases: (1) calling without using earphones, a headset or speakerphone; (2) text typing; and (3) gaming and taking pictures in landscape orientation

Summary

Introduction

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring provides pervasive healthcare applications with new opportunities. It enables heart diseases, such as arrhythmias, to be detected and can prevent sudden death caused by heart attack [1,2]. ECG monitoring in various life situations is compelling, in order to bring these applications to reality. ECG sensing requires more than two body parts (with a sufficient electric potential difference) that are stably attached to the electrodes of a sensor. With this requirement, users of existing ECG monitoring systems need to intentionally touch the sensor electrodes continuously or wear uncomfortable wearable devices

Results

Discussion

Conclusion