Towards Opportunistic Electrocardiography (ECG) Sensing in Mobile Devices

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, which leads to a demand in new diagnostic tools for heart health monitoring
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Santo, K. and Redfern, J. (2020) “Digital Health Innovations to improve cardiovascular disease care,” Current Atherosclerosis Reports, 22(12). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11883-020-00889-x. The main solution offered for personal monitoring has been based on wearable devices focused on heart rate and ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signal, in the form of smartwatches and wrist-worn bands. However, with a global smartphone penetration of 83% there is space for a smart phone integrated device. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of a prototype smartphone cover with a built in ECG sensor, using conductive polymeric electrodes. To test the device a concurrent evaluation comparatively to a reference device was made with the help of 12 volunteers. The numerical analysis presented an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.824 and, analyzing individual heartbeats, a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.915.