Signal Quality of Smart Shirts Recording Electrocardiography

Smart shirts help transform reactive into preventive medicine. However, accurate and reliable health prognostics require high-quality data. In this study, 48 subjects sit, stand, walk, and run for 10 min while wearing smart shirts recording electrocardiograms. We cut the recordings into 10 s windows. Based on the signal quality and the amount of noise, three raters label the windows into four classes. From the total of 10 856 windows, 213 recordings are missing. At least two raters rank 96.61 % windows equally showing high agreement. We convert the labels into a score and accept the recording quality if the score is positive. Accordingly, 26.01 % of the recordings are useful for preventive medicine. The averages for sitting, standing, walking, and running are 46.68 %, 44.80 %, 11.05 %, and 1.51 %. As motion significantly affects quality, current smart shirts are unsuitable for continuous health monitoring.