This is so fucking cool, but it is having patients diagnose themselves similar to having to diagnose yourself having a stroke. So your doctor will probably pooh-pooh the idea. I will probably do it.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=167324&CultureCode=en
Smartphones can be used to detect atrial fibrillation with existing
hardware, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2016 today.1 A
low-cost application (app) has been developed that uses the phone’s own
accelerometer and gyroscope to check for atrial fibrillation.
“Atrial fibrillation is a dangerous medical condition present in 2%
of the global population and accounting for up to seven million strokes
per year,” said lead author Tero Koivisto, a vice-director of the
Technology Research Centre (TRC), University of Turku, Finland. “In the
European Union alone this heart rhythm disorder costs approximately USD
$19 billion every year.”
Around 70% of strokes due to atrial fibrillation could be avoided
with pre-emptive medication. However, atrial fibrillation often occurs
randomly on/off and is difficult to detect by visiting a doctor. There
are relatively large and costly electrocardiogram (ECG) devices that
patients can take home for long-term monitoring but they require a patch
or wires that are clumsy to use and continuous contact with electrodes
tends to irritate the skin.
Due to the above constraints, current methods for detection of atrial
fibrillation are infeasible for wide-scale screening of populations or
higher risk age groups (60 years and above).
The current study tested the ability of a smartphone to detect atrial
fibrillation without any add-on hardware. The study included 16
patients with atrial fibrillation from the Turku Heart Centre. In
addition, 20 recordings from healthy people were used as control group
data to validate the developed algorithm.
To detect atrial fibrillation, a smartphone was placed on the chest
of the patient, and accelerometer and gyroscope recordings were taken.
Patients were advised to lie in a prone or supine position during the
measurements.
Mr Koivisto said: “We use the accelerometer and gyroscope of the
smartphone to acquire a heart signal from the patient. A measurement
recording is taken, and the acquired data is pre-processed by signal
processing methods. Multiple features such as autocorrelation and
spectral entropy are then extracted from the pre-processed data.
Finally, a machine learning algorithm (KSVM) is used to determine if the
patient suffers from atrial fibrillation.”
Using this technology the investigators detected atrial fibrillation with a sensitivity and specificity of more than 95%.
“We measure the actual motion of the heart via miniature
accelerometers and gyroscopes that are already installed in today’s
smartphones,” said Mr Koivisto. “No additional hardware is needed and
people just need to install an app with the algorithm we developed.”
He continued: “If people feel odd and want to check their cardiac
status, they can simply lie down, place the phone on their chest, take
an accelerometer and gyroscope measurement, then use the app to analyse
the result. They will get a simple yes/no answer as to whether they have
atrial fibrillation or not.”
Mr Koivisto concluded: “This is a low cost, non-invasive way to
detect atrial fibrillation that people can do themselves without any
help from medical staff. Given the widespread use of smartphones, it has
the potential to be used by large populations worldwide. In future, a
secure cloud service could be created to store and analyse larger masses
of data.”
Full bibliographic information1Mr
Tero Koivisto will present the abstract “Detecting atrial fibrillation
via existing smartphones without any add-ons” during:
• The press conference “Stroke and Arrhythmia: Life or Death” on 27 August at 15:00 to 16:00
• The session “Mobile health for cardiac monitoring” on 29 August at 16:30 to 18:00 in room Budapest – Village 6
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