Knowing Your Heart Condition Anytime: User-Independent ECG Measurement Using Commercial Mobile Phones

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring has been widely explored in detecting and diagnosing cardiovascular diseases due to its accuracy, simplicity, and sensitivity. However, medical- or commercial-grade ECG monitoring devices can be costly for people who want to monitor their ECG on a daily basis. These devices typically require several electrodes to be attached to the human body which is inconvenient for continuous monitoring. To enable low-cost measurement of ECG signals with off-the-shelf devices on a daily basis, in this paper, we propose a novel ECG sensing system that uses acceleration data collected from a smartphone. Our system offers several advantages over previous systems, including low cost, ease of use, location and user independence, and high accuracy. We design a two-tiered denoising process, comprising SWT and Soft-Thresholding, to effectively eliminate interference caused by respiration, body, and hand movements. Finally, we develop a multi-level deep learning recovery model to achieve efficient, real-time and user-independent ECG measurement on commercial mobile phones. We conduct extensive experiments with 30 participants (with nearly 36,000 heartbeat samples) under a user-independent scenario. The average errors of the PR interval, QRS interval, QT interval, and RR interval are 12.02 ms, 16.9 ms, 16.64 ms, and 1.84 ms, respectively. As a case study, we also demonstrate the strong capability of our system in signal recovery for patients with common heart diseases, including tachycardia, bradycardia, arrhythmia, unstable angina, and myocardial infarction.