Towards Personalized Healthcare in Cardiac Population: The Development
of a Wearable ECG Monitoring System, an ECG Lossy Compression Schema, and a
ResNet-Based AF Detector
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one cause of death worldwide.
While there is growing evidence that the atrial fibrillation (AF) has strong
associations with various CVDs, this heart arrhythmia is usually diagnosed
using electrocardiography (ECG) which is a risk-free, non-intrusive, and
cost-efficient tool. Continuously and remotely monitoring the subjects' ECG
information unlocks the potentials of prompt pre-diagnosis and timely
pre-treatment of AF before the development of any life-threatening
conditions/diseases. Ultimately, the CVDs associated mortality could be
reduced. In this manuscript, the design and implementation of a personalized
healthcare system embodying a wearable ECG device, a mobile application, and a
back-end server are presented. This system continuously monitors the users' ECG
information to provide personalized health warnings/feedbacks. The users are
able to communicate with their paired health advisors through this system for
remote diagnoses, interventions, etc. The implemented wearable ECG devices have
been evaluated and showed excellent intra-consistency (CVRMS=5.5%), acceptable
inter-consistency (CVRMS=12.1%), and negligible RR-interval errors (ARE<1.4%).
To boost the battery life of the wearable devices, a lossy compression schema
utilizing the quasi-periodic feature of ECG signals to achieve compression was
proposed. Compared to the recognized schemata, it outperformed the others in
terms of compression efficiency and distortion, and achieved at least 2x of CR
at a certain PRD or RMSE for ECG signals from the MIT-BIH database. To enable
automated AF diagnosis/screening in the proposed system, a ResNet-based AF
detector was developed. For the ECG records from the 2017 PhysioNet CinC
challenge, this AF detector obtained an average testing F1=85.10% and a best
testing F1=87.31%, outperforming the state-of-the-art