An ECG monitoring system for prediction of cardiac anomalies using WBAN

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are known to be the most widespread causes to death. Therefore, detecting earlier signs of cardiac anomalies is of prominent importance to ease the treatment of any cardiac complication or take appropriate actions. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is used by doctors as an important diagnosis tool and in most cases, it's recorded and analyzed at hospital after the appearance of first symptoms or recorded by patients using a device named holter ECG and analyzed afterward by doctors. In fact, there is a lack of systems able to capture ECG and analyze it remotely before the onset of severe symptoms. With the development of wearable sensor devices having wireless transmission capabilities, there is a need to develop real time systems able to accurately analyze ECG and detect cardiac abnormalities. In this paper, we propose a new CVD detection system using Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) technology. This system processes the captured ECG using filtering and Undecimated Wavelet Transform (UWT) techniques to remove noises and extract nine main ECG diagnosis parameters, then the system uses a Bayesian Network Classifier model to classify ECG based on its parameters into four different classes: Normal, Premature Atrial Contraction (PAC), Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC) and Myocardial Infarction (MI). The experimental results on ECGs from real patients databases show that the average detection rate (TPR) is 96.1% for an average false alarm rate (FPR) of 1.3%.