Accuracy evaluation of an ECG device for heart failure patients self-monitoring: a preliminary study

Nowadays, wearable wireless devices represent an exciting challenge both for controlling one's lifestyle and for specific applications like telemedicine and at-home healthcare monitoring. Many low-cost sensors and sensor systems are currently on the market, but only a limited number of them are validated and certified for clinical applications. This paper presents preliminary results of the accuracy assessment of an electrocardiography (ECG) device for cardiovascular disease monitoring that will be applied by the patients for self-checking. In particular, the analog front end integrated circuit MAX30001 is proposed and tested, while the principal features of MAX30001 evaluation board software were described, as well as three cardiac pathologies which require in-depth and continuous ECG monitoring. An accuracy setup was realized to evaluate the acquisition fidelity; it is based on a high-quality waveform generator that imposes to the MAX30001 two different periodic signals: a sine and a sinc with the frequency of 1 Hz to 10 Hz with a 5 Hz step. The accuracy evaluation shows how the integrated circuit provides a normalized root mean square error in the chosen frequency range, lower than 0.01 and lower than 0.20, respectively, for the sine and sinc waveform. Moreover, it presents for sinc signal a peak detection rate of 80%.