Is it time for a consumerized or home-based 12-lead electrocardiogram?

Signal Quality Analysis for Long-Term ECG Monitoring Using a Health Patch in Cardiac Patients

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) represent a serious health problem worldwide, of which atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common conditions. Early and timely diagnosis of CVD is essential for successful treatment. When implemented in the healthcare system this can ease the existing socio-economic burden on health institutions and government. Therefore, developing technologies and tools to diagnose CVD in a timely way and detect AF is an important research topic. ECG monitoring patches allowing ambulatory patient monitoring over several days represent a novel technology, while we witness a significant proliferation of ECG monitoring patches on the market and in the research labs, their performance over a long period of time is not fully characterized. This paper analyzes the signal quality of ECG signals obtained using a single-lead ECG patch featuring self-adhesive dry electrode technology collected from six cardiac patients for 5 days. In particular, we provide insights into signal quality degradation over time, while changes in the average ECG quality per day were present, these changes were not statistically significant. It was observed that the quality was higher during the nights, confirming the link with motion artifacts. These results can improve CVD diagnosis and AF detection in real-world scenarios.