A Novel Bio-Sensing Technology for Detection of Atrial Fibrillaiton

Background. Atrial fibrillation of recent onset is particularly risky for the development of stroke. It is therefore crucial to accurately detect asymptomatic atrial fibrillation as early as possible after its onset, so that appropriate anticoagulation therapy can be initiated. We therefore studied a new portable photo-plethysmograph (PPG) wrist-watch sensor, designed for continuous heart rate monitoring, and tested its ability to automatically detect atrial fibrillation.

Methods. We studied 20 patients with atrial fibrillation who were admitted with atrial fibrillation and underwent cardioversion during simultaneous electrocardiographic (ECG) and PPG recording. We measured the correlation between RR intervals recorded by ECG and by PPG using the custom-made CardiacSense wrist-watch sensor. The secondary efficacy endpoint was the ability of a custom-made algorithm to automatically recognize atrial fibrillation from the PPG signals.

Results. During 315 minutes of simultaneous ECG/PPG recordings including 26,571 RR intervals, the PPG RR intervals significantly correlated with ECG RR intervals [R=0.963, p

Conclusions. CardiacSense can monitor and diagnose atrial fibrillation with high accuracy using PPG technology.