A Single Blinded, Cross-Sectional, Single-Center Study for the Validation of Atrial Fibrillation Detection using Spandan Smartphone ECG

The atrial fibrillation prevalence is found between 0.1% and 4% in community-based research and between 2.8% and 14% in studies conducted in hospitals; nevertheless, a large portion of AF is still misdiagnosed. Smartphone applications for diagnosing AF have been proposed given that a big portion of Indians own smartphones, although it is unknown how accurate these programs would be. The study's objectives were as follows: a) To evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of the Spandan ECG in detecting AF in a single center trial that took place in SMIH Dehradun under the supervision of the cardiologist, and b) to investigate arrhythmia detection through a smartphone-based and monitoring. This single-blinded, cross-sectional, single-center study was conducted at Shri Mahant Indresh Hospital (SMIH), Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India from August 2022 to December 2022. Patients (n=32) undergoing the electrocardiogram (ECG) at the Department of Cardiology of the SMIH, Dehradun during the study period and diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. Mean age (SD) was 59.93±13.81 years. Males (n=17/32, 53.1%) show more frequency than females. Most patients had a medical history of coronary artery disease (21.8%). True positive cases derived from confusion matrix of atrial fibrillation detected using smartphone based ECG and 12 lead standard ECG along with the cardiologist’s diagnosis was 29/32 on smartphone-based as compared to 19/32 from 12 lead gold standard. Atrial fibrillation was detected correctly in 29/32 cases and 19/32 cases by smartphone ECG and 12 lead gold standard, respectively. The study hypotheses that Spandan's ability of real-time ECG monitoring will be useful in evaluating whether a patient's discomfort is caused by recurrent arrhythmia.