Lightweight Deep Autoencoder for ECG Denoising with Morphology Preservation and Near Real-Time Hardware Deployment

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are often degraded by various noise sources such as baseline wander, motion artifacts, and electromyographic interference, posing a major challenge in clinical settings. This paper presents a lightweight deep learning-based denoising framework, forming a compact autoencoder architecture. The model was trained under severe noise conditions (-5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)) using a rigorously partitioned dataset to ensure no data leakage and robust generalization. Extensive evaluations were conducted across seven noise configurations and three SNR levels (-5 dB, 0 dB, and +5 dB), showing consistent denoising performance with minimal morphological distortion, critical for maintaining diagnostic integrity. In particular, tests on clinically vital rhythms such as ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) confirm that the proposed model effectively suppresses noise without altering arrhythmic features essential for diagnosis. Visual and quantitative assessments, including SNR improvement, RMSE, and correlation metrics, validate the model's efficacy in preserving waveform fidelity. To demonstrate real-world applicability, the model was deployed on a Raspberry Pi 4 using TensorFlow Lite with float16 precision. Inference latency was measured at just 1.41 seconds per 14-second ECG segment, indicating feasibility for near-real-time use in edge devices. Overall, this study introduces a lightweight, hardware-validated, and morphologically reliable ECG denoising solution suitable for integration into portable or wearable healthcare systems.

Generalizable Blood Pressure Estimation from Multi-Wavelength PPG Using Curriculum-Adversarial Learning

Accurate and generalizable blood pressure (BP) estimation is vital for the early detection and management of cardiovascular diseases. In this study, we enforce subject-level data splitting on a public multi-wavelength photoplethysmography (PPG) dataset and propose a generalizable BP estimation framework based on curriculum-adversarial learning. Our approach combines curriculum learning, which transitions from hypertension classification to BP regression, with domain-adversarial training that confuses subject identity to encourage the learning of subject-invariant features. Experiments show that multi-channel fusion consistently outperforms single-channel models. On the four-wavelength PPG dataset, our method achieves strong performance under strict subject-level splitting, with mean absolute errors (MAE) of 14.2mmHg for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and 6.4mmHg for diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Additionally, ablation studies validate the effectiveness of both the curriculum and adversarial components. These results highlight the potential of leveraging complementary information in multi-wavelength PPG and curriculum-adversarial strategies for accurate and robust BP estimation.

Towards Continuous Skin Sympathetic Nerve Activity Monitoring: Removing Muscle Noise

Continuous monitoring of non-invasive skin sympathetic nerve activity (SKNA) holds promise for understanding the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) dynamics in various physiological and pathological conditions. However, muscle noise artifacts present a challenge in accurate SKNA analysis, particularly in real-life scenarios. This study proposes a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) approach to detect and remove muscle noise from SKNA recordings obtained via ECG electrodes. Twelve healthy participants underwent controlled experimental protocols involving cognitive stress induction and voluntary muscle movements, while collecting SKNA data. Power spectral analysis revealed significant muscle noise interference within the SKNA frequency band (500-1000 Hz). A 2D CNN model was trained on the spectrograms of the data segments to classify them into baseline, stress-induced SKNA, and muscle noise-contaminated periods, achieving an average accuracy of 89.85% across all subjects. Our findings underscore the importance of addressing muscle noise for accurate SKNA monitoring, advancing towards wearable SKNA sensors for real-world applications.