AFSense-ECG: atrial fibrillation condition sensing from single lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals

In this paper, we propose AFSense-ECG, an intelligence-embedded single lead ECG sensor that is enabled with the ability of accurate detection of Atrial Fibrillation (AF) condition, which is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia and increased risk of stroke is higher with sub-clinical AF patients. AFSense-ECG acts like an early-warning sensor for AF condition detection. A processing unit (e.g., ESP32WROVERE microcontroller) integrated with off-the-shelf single lead ECG sensor like Alivecor or AD8232 embeds intelligence to the sensing system to augment for inferential sensing for empowering automated decision-making. AFSense-ECG captures the quasi-periodic nature of typical ECG signals with repetitive P-wave, QRS complex and T-wave patterns into its feature extraction and the representation learning process of model construction and learning rate optimization. Our empirical study validates the superiority of proposed ECG signal characteristics-based hyper-parameter tuned ECG classification model construction. AFSense-ECG demonstrates F1-measure of 86.13%, where the current state-of-the-art methods report F1-measures of 83.70%, 83.10%, 82.90%, 82.60%, 82.50%, 81.00% over publicly available single lead ECG datasets of Physionet 2017 Challenge. Further, the proposed learning model for the inferential sensing is lean (approximately 25 times simpler in terms of total number of trainable parameters with reduced model size than relevant state-of-the-art model, where the state-of-the-art method with 83.70% F1-measure consists of 10474607 trainable parameters, and our proposed model consists of 433675 trainable parameters) and more effective (better F1-measure than the state-of-the-art methods), which enables us to construct affordable intelligent sensing system.