Enriching Heart Monitoring with Accelerometer Data

Information communication technologies can support physicians for more effective and improved quality of diagnoses. A lot of available medical data from body sensors and advanced medical devices have to be preprocessed and analysed with efficient methods. We propose an enhancement of an existing ECG signal, e. g. from a wearable ECG device, with accelerometer data. The feasibility study aims to extract and recognise a patient’s pose and activity from accelerometer data that is added to a standard ECG body sensor. The time-aligned ECG and accelerometer data are fused to add valuable information for the interpretation program. The proposed accelerometer data processing method provides information about the patient activity, besides the ECG data. A physician or an interpretation program have further insight into whether the change in heart rate is caused by the irregular heartbeats or by the patient’s movement activity. We have validated the proposed methodology on real measurements with ECG and accelerometer data