Comprehensive Signal Quality Evaluation of a Wearable Textile ECG Garment: A Sex-Balanced Study

We introduce a novel wearable textile-garment featuring an innovative electrode placement aimed at minimizing noise and motion artifacts, thereby enhancing signal fidelity in Electrocardiography (ECG) recordings. We present a comprehensive, sex-balanced evaluation involving 15 healthy males and 15 healthy female participants to ensure the device's suitability across anatomical and physiological variations. The assessment framework encompasses distinct evaluation approaches: quantitative signal quality indices to objectively benchmark device performance; rhythm-based analyzes of physiological parameters such as heart rate and heart rate variability; machine learning classification tasks to assess application-relevant predictive utility; morphological analysis of ECG features including amplitude and interval parameters; and investigations of the effects of electrode projection angle given by the textile / body shape, with all analyzes stratified by sex to elucidate sex-specific influences. Evaluations were conducted across various activity phases representing real-world conditions. The results demonstrate that the textile system achieves signal quality highly concordant with reference devices in both rhythm and morphological analyses, exhibits robust classification performance, and enables identification of key sex-specific determinants affecting signal acquisition. These findings underscore the practical viability of textile-based ECG garments for physiological monitoring as well as psychophysiological state detection. Moreover, we identify the importance of incorporating sex-specific design considerations to ensure equitable and reliable cardiac diagnostics in wearable health technologies.

Combining Scatter Transform and Deep Neural Networks for Multilabel Electrocardiogram Signal Classification

An essential part for the accurate classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is the extraction of informative yet general features, which are able to discriminate diseases. Cardiovascular abnormalities manifest themselves in features on different time scales: small scale morphological features, such as missing P-waves, as well as rhythmical features apparent on heart rate scales. For this reason we incorporate a variant of the complex wavelet transform, called a scatter transform, in a deep residual neural network (ResNet). The former has the advantage of being derived from theory, making it well behaved under certain transformations of the input. The latter has proven useful in ECG classification, allowing feature extraction and classification to be learned in an end-to-end manner. Through the incorporation of trainable layers in between scatter transforms, the model gains the ability to combine information from different channels, yielding more informative features for the classification task and adapting them to the specific domain. For evaluation, we submitted our model in the official phase in the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2020. Our (Team Triage) approach achieved a challenge validation score of 0.640, and full test score of 0.485, placing us 4th out of 41 in the official ranking.