Deep Learning-Based Signal Quality Assessment for Wearable ECGs

Nowadays, use of the dynamic electrocardiogram (ECG) has developed rapidly because of the wide application of wearable devices [1]–[3]. Most ECG-based diagnostic algorithms require that the ECG signal have a clear waveform and accurate feature points. However, the collected wearable ECG signal usually contains a certain amount of noise and causes many false alarms in the ECG analysis system [4], [5]. Thus, signal quality assessment (SQA) plays a prominent role in ruling out the ECG segments with poor signal quality [6]. Compared with traditional static ECG signals, dynamic wearable ECGs contain more noise, which brings greater challenges to disease detection algorithms [7]–[9]. These artifacts and noises in dynamic ECG signals can seriously affect the R-peaks detection, ECG beat extraction, ECG morphological feature extraction and the detection of noise peaks, resulting in frequent false alarms [10]. In 2008, Li et al. [11] proposed the bSQI signal quality indexes: comparison of two beat detectors on a single ECG lead. Liu et al. [12] generalized the two QRS wave complex (QRS) detectors-based bSQI to multiple QRS detectors-based bSQI (GbSQI) to improve the SQA performance. Liu et al. [8] proposed an efficient real-time SQA method for healthy subjects.