Monitoring Atrial Fibrillation using PPG Signals and a Smartphone

• Main Authors: Alejandro Estrella-Gallego, Mabel Vazquez Briseno, Juan Ivan Nieto-Hipolito, Everardo Gutierrez-Lopez, Juan de Dios Sanchez-Lopez, Armando Garcia-Berumen, Raul Rivera-Rodriguez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE) 2020-03-01
• Series: International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering
• Subjects: smartphone; sensors; arrhythmia; atrial fibrillation, photoplethysmogram
• Online Access: https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-joe/article/view/12871

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a  common type of cardiac arrhythmia. AF is associated with increased rates of death and hospitalizations. It is also related to a degraded quality of life and reduced exercise capacity. Ageing increases the risk of developing AF, as well as hypertension and obesity. Continuous ECG monitoring is required in patients with previously diagnosed AF. Studies have also demonstrated that daily ECG monitoring increases the successful detection of silent AF among older adults. In this sense facilitating AF monitoring using portable devices such as Smartphones will increase patients life quality and could help to an early diagnosis. With this in mind in this work we present a proposal to detect AF using pulsatile photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal from a fingertip using the built-in camera lens in a smartphone. We developed an algorithm intended to sense paroxysmal AF considering resource utilization capabilities in order to be used in mobile devices with constrained.