Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common sustained chronic cardiac arrhythmia in elderly population, associated with a high mortality and morbidity in stroke, heart failure, coronary artery disease, systemic thromboembolism, etc. The early detection of AF is necessary for averting the possibility of disability or mortality. However, AF detection remains problematic due to its episodic pattern. In this paper, a multiscaled fusion of deep convolutional neural network (MS-CNN) is proposed to screen out AF recordings from single lead short electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. The MS-CNN employs the architecture of two-stream convolutional networks with different filter sizes to capture features of different scales. The experimental results show that the proposed MS-CNN achieves 96.99% of classification accuracy on ECG recordings cropped/padded to 5 s. Especially, the best classification accuracy, 98.13%, is obtained on ECG recordings of 20 s. Compared with artificial neural network, shallow single-stream CNN, and VisualGeometry group network, the MS-CNN can achieve the better classification performance. Meanwhile, visualization of the learned features from the MS-CNN demonstrates its superiority in extracting linear separable ECG features without hand-craft feature engineering. The excellent AF screening performance of the MS-CNN can satisfy the most elders for daily monitoring with wearable devices.

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Existing methods for arterial blood pressure (BP) estimation directly map the input physiological signals to output BP values without explicitly modeling the underlying temporal dependencies in BP dynamics. As a result, these models suffer from accuracy decay over a long time and thus require frequent calibration. In this work, we address this issue by formulating BP estimation as a sequence prediction problem in which both the input and target are temporal sequences. We propose a novel deep recurrent neural network (RNN) consisting of multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which are incorporated with (1) a bidirectional structure to access larger-scale context information of input sequence, and (2) residual connections to allow gradients in deep RNN to propagate more effectively. The proposed deep RNN model was tested on a static BP dataset, and it achieved root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.90 and 2.66 mmHg for systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) prediction respectively, surpassing the accuracy of traditional BP prediction models. On a multi-day BP dataset, the deep RNN achieved RMSE of 3.84, 5.25, 5.80 and 5.81 mmHg for the 1st day, 2nd day, 4th day and 6th month after the 1st day SBP prediction, and 1.80, 4.78, 5.0, 5.21 mmHg for corresponding DBP prediction, respectively, which outperforms all previous models with notable improvement. The experimental results suggest that modeling the temporal dependencies in BP dynamics significantly improves the longterm BP prediction accuracy.

Continuously monitoring the ECG signals over hours combined with activity status is very important for preventing cardiovascular diseases. A traditional ECG holter is often inconvenient to carry because it has many electrodes attached to the chest and because it is heavy. This work proposes a wearable, low power context-aware ECG monitoring system integrated built-in kinetic sensors of the smartphone with a self-designed ECG sensor. The wearable ECG sensor is comprised of a fully integrated analog front-end (AFE), a commercial micro control unit (MCU), a secure digital (SD) card, and a Bluetooth module. The whole sensor is very small with a size of only 58 × 50 × 10 mm for wearable monitoring application due to the AFE design, and the total power dissipation in a full round of ECG acquisition is only 12.5 mW. With the help of built-in kinetic sensors of the smartphone, the proposed system can compute and recognize user’s physical activity, and thus provide context-aware information for the continuous ECG monitoring. The experimental results demonstrated the performance of proposed system in improving diagnosis accuracy for arrhythmias and identifying the most common abnormal ECG patterns in different activities. In conclusion, we provide a wearable, accurate and energy-efficient system for long-term and context-aware ECG monitoring without any extra cost on kinetic sensor design but with the help of the widespread smartphone.

Continuous blood pressure (BP) estimation using pulse transit time (PTT) is a promising method for unobtrusive BP measurement. However, the accuracy of this approach must be improved for it to be viable for a wide range of applications. This study proposes a novel continuous BP estimation approach that combines data mining techniques with a traditional mechanism-driven model. First, 14 features derived from simultaneous electrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram signals were extracted for beat-to-beat BP estimation. A genetic algorithm-based feature selection method was then used to select BP indicators for each subject. Multivariate linear regression and support vector regression were employed to develop the BP model. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed approach were validated for static, dynamic, and follow-up performance. Experimental results based on 73 subjects showed that the proposed approach exhibited excellent accuracy in static BP estimation, with a correlation coefficient and mean error of 0.852 and -0.001 ± 3.102 mmHg for systolic BP, and 0.790 and -0.004 ± 2.199 mmHg for diastolic BP. Similar performance was observed for dynamic BP estimation. The robustness results indicated that the estimation accuracy was lower by a certain degree one day after model construction but was relatively stable from one day to six months after construction. The proposed approach is superior to the state-of-the-art PTT-based model for an approximately 2-mmHg reduction in the standard derivation at different time intervals, thus providing potentially novel insights for cuffless BP estimation.

Ambulatory blood pressure (BP) provides valuable information for cardiovascular risk assessment. The present cuff-based devices are intrusive for longterm BP monitoring, whereas cuff-less BP measurement methods based on pulse transit time or multi-parameter are inferior in robustness and reliability by using electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram signals. This study examined a multi-sensor fusion-based platform and algorithm for systolic BP (SBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP), and diastolic BP (DBP) estimation. The proposed multisensor platform was comprised of one ECG sensor and two pulse pressure wave sensors for simultaneous signal collection. After extracting 35 features from the collected signals, a weakly supervised feature selection method was proposed for dimension reduction because the reference oscillometric technique-based BP are intermittent and can be redeemed as coarse-grained labels. BP models were then established using a multi-instance regression algorithm. A total of 85 participants including 17 hypertensive and 12 hypotensive patients were enrolled. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach exhibited good accuracy for diverse population with an estimation error of 1.62 ± 7.76 mmHg for SBP, 1.53 ± 6.03 mmHg for MAP, and 1.49 ± 5.52 for DBP, which complied with the association for the advancement of medical instrumentation standards in BP estimation. Moreover, the estimation accuracy is with random daily fluctuations rather than long-term degradation through a maximum two-month follow-up period indicated good robustness performance. These results suggest that the proposed approach is with high reliability and robustness and thus provides a novel insight for cuff-less BP measurement.

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BackgroundTraditional activity recognition solutions are not widely applicable due to a high cost and inconvenience to use with numerous sensors. This paper aims to automatically recognize physical activity with the help of the built-in sensors of the widespread smartphone without any limitation of firm attachment to the human body.MethodsBy introducing a method to judge whether the phone is in a pocket, we investigated the data collected from six positions of seven subjects, chose five signals that are insensitive to orientation for activity classification. Decision trees (J48), Naive Bayes and Sequential minimal optimization (SMO) were employed to recognize five activities: static, walking, running, walking upstairs and walking downstairs.ResultsThe experimental results based on 8,097 activity data demonstrated that the J48 classifier produced the best performance with an average recognition accuracy of 89.6% during the three classifiers, and thus would serve as the optimal online classifier.ConclusionsThe utilization of the built-in sensors of the smartphone to recognize typical physical activities without any limitation of firm attachment is feasible.