A novel single-lead handheld atrial fibrillation detection system

Objective. The single-lead handheld atrial fibrillation (AF) detection device is suitable for daily monitoring or early screening of AF in the hospital. However, the signal quality and the reliability of AF detection algorithm still need to be improved. This study proposed a novel AF detection system with a user-friendly interaction and a lightweight and accurate AF detection algorithm.Approach. The system consisted of a single-lead handheld electrocardiogram device with a novel appearance like a gaming handle and a smartphone terminal embedded with AF detection. After feature optimization, the rule-based multi-feature AF detection algorithm had relatively good AF detection ability. Three types of experiments were designed to test the performance of the system. (1) Test the accuracy and time/memory cost of the AF detection algorithm. (2) Compare the proposed device with the standard device Shimmer. (3) Use the simulator to test the effectiveness of the system.Main results.The percentage of differences of successive RR intervals larger than 50 ms (PNN50), minimum value of RR intervals (minRR), and coefficient of sample entropy (COSEn) were features chosen for AF detection. (1) The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 96.00%, 99.75%, 97.88% on the MIT-BIH AF database, and 98.50%, 94.50%, 96.50% on the clinical database we founded. The time/memory cost of the proposed algorithm was much smaller than that of support vector machine. (2) The mean correlation coefficient of RR was 0.9950, indicating a high degree of consistency. (3) This system showed the effectiveness of AF detection.Significance. The proposed single-lead handheld AF detection system is demonstrated to be accurate, lightweight, consistent with the standard device, and efficient for AF detection.