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Impact of Ambulation in Wearable-ECG

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Abstract

Ambulatory ElectroCardioGram (ECG) analysis is adversely affected by motion artifacts induced due to body movements. Knowledge of the extent of motion artifacts could facilitate better ECG analysis. In this paper, our purpose is to determine the impact of body movement kinematics on the extent of ECG motion artifact by defining a notion called impact signal. Two approaches have been adopted in this paper to validate our experiments. One of them involves measuring local acceleration using motion sensors at appropriate body positions, in conjunction with the ECG, while performing routine activities at different intensity levels. The other method consists of ECG acquisition during Treadmill testing at controlled speeds and fixed duration. Data has been acquired from both healthy subjects as well as patients with suspected cardio-vascular disorders. In case of patients, the treadmill tests were carried out under the supervision of a cardiologist. We demonstrate that the impact signal shows a proportional increase with the increasing activity levels. The measured accelerations obtained are also found to be well correlated with the impact signal. The impact analysis thus indicates the suitability of the proposed method for quantification of body movement kinematics from the ECG signal itself, even in the absence of any accelerometer sensors. Such quantification would also help in automatic documentation of patient activity levels, which could aid in better interpretation of ambulatory ECG.

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Acknowledgments

Partial research funding under the scheme of Swarnajayanti fellowship is gratefully acknowledged. Authors are thankful to Dr. M. J. Gandhi, Dr. Mohanty and other staff at Nanavati Hospital, Mumbai for their help in collecting patient data under the Bruce Protocol. Authors are thankful to the reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Tanmay Pawar, N.S. Anantakrishnan, Subhasis Chaudhuri & Siddhartha P. Duttagupta

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  1. Tanmay Pawar
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  2. N.S. Anantakrishnan
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  3. Subhasis Chaudhuri
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  4. Siddhartha P. Duttagupta
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Correspondence to Tanmay Pawar.

Additional information

A preliminary version of the manuscript under very restrictive cases of validation with motion sensors and involving healthy subjects only has earlier been presented at IEEE EMBC (Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference)—2007 held at Lyon, France on 23–26 Aug. 2007.

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Pawar, T., Anantakrishnan, N., Chaudhuri, S. et al. Impact of Ambulation in Wearable-ECG. Ann Biomed Eng 36, 1547–1557 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-008-9526-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-008-9526-8

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