Detection of Hypoglycemia and Hyperglycemia Using Noninvasive Wearable Sensors: Electrocardiograms and Accelerometry

Monitoring glucose excursions is important in diabetes management. This can be achieved using continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). However, CGMs are expensive and invasive. Thus, alternative low-cost noninvasive wearable sensors capable of predicting glycemic excursions could be a game changer to manage diabetes.

In this article, we explore two noninvasive sensor modalities, electrocardiograms (ECGs) and accelerometers, collected on five healthy participants over two weeks, to predict both hypoglycemic and hyperglycemic excursions. We extract 29 features encompassing heart rate variability features from the ECG, and time- and frequency-domain features from the accelerometer. We evaluated two machine learning approaches to predict glycemic excursions: a classification model and a regression model.

The best model for both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia detection was the regression model based on ECG and accelerometer data, yielding 76% sensitivity and specificity for hypoglycemia and 79% sensitivity and specificity for hyperglycemia. This had an improvement of 5% in sensitivity and specificity for both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia when compared with using ECG data alone.

Electrocardiogram is a promising alternative not only to detect hypoglycemia but also to predict hyperglycemia. Supplementing ECG data with contextual information from accelerometer data can improve glucose prediction.