The preliminary study on the clinical application of the WHAM (Wearable Heart Activity Monitor)

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the validity of the WHAM (wearable heart activity monitor) in the clinical applications, which has been implemented as a wearable ambulatory device for continuously and long-term monitoring user's cardiac conditions. To this end, using the WHAM and the conventional Holter monitor the ECG signals over 24 hours were recorded during daily activities. The signal from the WHAM was compared with that from the conventional Holter monitor in terms of the readability of the signal, the quality of the signal, and the accuracy of arrhythmia detection. The performance of the WHAM was a little lower as compared with the conventional Holter monitor, although showing no significant difference (the readability of the signal: 97.2% vs 99.3%; the quality of the signal: 0.97 vs 0.98; the accuracy of arrhythmia detection: 96.2% vs 98.1%). From these results, it is likely that the WHAM shows the performance enough to be used in the clinical application as a wearable ambulatory monitoring device.