Smartwatch Based Atrial Fibrillation Detection from Photoplethysmography Signals

Atrial fibrillation (AF) detection from wristwatch is important as it can lead to non-invasive, long-term and continuous monitoring of AF from photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal. In this paper, we propose a novel method not only to detect AF from wristwatch PPG, but also to automatically distinguish between clean and corrupted PPG segments. We use accelerometer data as well as variable frequency complex demodulation based time-frequency analysis of the PPG signal to detect motion and noise artifacts in the PPG signal waveform. Next, root mean square of successive differences and sample entropy are extracted from the beat-to-beat intervals of the clean detected PPG signals, which we use to separate AF from normal sinus rhythm. UMass dataset consisting of 20 subjects has been used in this study to test the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. Our method achieves sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of 96.15%, 97.37% and 97.11%, respectively, which shows the potential of a practical and reliable AF monitoring scheme.