Android-based ECG monitoring system for atrial fibrillation detection using a BITalino® ECG sensor

Cardiac arrhythmias are disorders that affect the rate and/or rhythm of the heartbeats. The diagnosis of most arrhythmias is made through the analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG), which consists of a graphical representation of the electrical activity of the heart. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most present type of arrhythmia in the world population. In this context, this work deals with the implementation of a system for automatic analysis of ECG signals aiming to identify AF episodes. The system consists of a signal acquisition step performed by an ECG sensor connected to an acquisition platform. The acquired signal is transmitted via bluetooth to a smartphone with Android™ operating system. The signal processing is carried out through an application developed using the IDE Android™ Studio. When assessed over signals from the MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation database, the R-wave peak detection algorithm showed mean values of sensitivity and positive predictivity of 98.99% and 95.95%, respectively. The classification model used is based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and had an average accuracy of 94.94% for identifying AF episodes.This work has supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UIDB/05757/2020, and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020), under Portugal 2020 in the framework of the NanoID (NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-046985) Project.