Can a smartphone-integrated ECG sensor system accurately measure heart rate variability during daily smartphone use?
A smartphone-integrated ECG sensor system demonstrates feasibility for unobtrusive daily monitoring of heart rate variability with low average errors.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is known to be one of the representative ECG-derived features that are useful for diverse pervasive healthcare applications. The advancement in daily physiological monitoring technology is enabling monitoring of HRV in people's everyday lives. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of measuring ECG-derived features such as HRV, only using the smartphone-integrated ECG sensors system named Sinabro. We conducted the evaluation with 13 subjects in five predetermined smartphone use cases. The result shows the potential that the smartphone-based sensing system can support daily monitoring of ECG-derived features; The average errors of HRV over all participants ranged from 1.65% to 5.83% (SD: 2.54~10.87) for five use cases. Also, all of individual HRV parameters showed less than 5% of average errors for the three reliable cases.
Kwon et al. (Fri,) studied this question.