Abstract
Heart rhythm assessment is indispensable in diagnosis and management of many cardiac conditions and to study heart rate variability in healthy individuals. We present a proof-of-concept system for acquiring individual heart beats using smart speakers in a fully contact-free manner. Our algorithms transform the smart speaker into a short-range active sonar system and measure heart rate and inter-beat intervals (R-R intervals) for both regular and irregular rhythms. The smart speaker emits inaudible 18–22 kHz sound and receives echoes reflected from the human body that encode sub-mm displacements due to heart beats. We conducted a clinical study with both healthy participants and hospitalized cardiac patients with diverse structural and arrhythmic cardiac abnormalities including atrial fibrillation, flutter and congestive heart failure. Compared to electrocardiogram (ECG) data, our system computed R-R intervals for healthy participants with a median error of 28 ms over 12,280 heart beats and a correlation coefficient of 0.929. For hospitalized cardiac patients, the median error was 30 ms over 5639 heart beats with a correlation coefficient of 0.901. The increasing adoption of smart speakers in hospitals and homes may provide a means to realize the potential of our non-contact cardiac rhythm monitoring system for monitoring of contagious or quarantined patients, skin sensitive patients and in telemedicine settings.
Highlights
Heart rhythm assessment is indispensable in diagnosis and management of many cardiac conditions and to study heart rate variability in healthy individuals
We show that a smart speaker running our algorithms that is placed in front of a subject less than a meter away can identify individual heartbeats and extract heart rate and R–R intervals for both healthy participants and patients with different cardiac abnormalities
Recent work[23] computes heart rate using smart phones from 5 to 30 cm, but assumes that the heartbeats are regular and uses frequency domain analysis to extract the heart motion from the fundamental frequency and its harmonic components. This approach does not work with irregular heart rhythm since there is no well-defined peak in the frequency domain and the energy is spread across a range of frequencies
Summary
Heart rhythm assessment is indispensable in diagnosis and management of many cardiac conditions and to study heart rate variability in healthy individuals. We describe a proof-of-concept contactless system for monitoring cardiac rhythm using smart speakers that can identify individual heartbeats in both regular and irregular rhythms Our algorithms extract both heart rate and R–R intervals by transforming a smart speaker into a short-range active sonar system. We show that a smart speaker running our algorithms that is placed in front of a subject less than a meter away can identify individual heartbeats and extract heart rate and R–R intervals for both healthy participants and patients with different cardiac abnormalities. These data could be used for studying heart rhythms, detecting cardiac arrhythmias, and determining HRV
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