Analysis of Autonomic Regulation in Cancer Survivors During Daily Physical Activity: A Real-World Wearable ECG Study

This study investigates heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) responses to physical activity in breast cancer survivors using wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected in real-world settings. Reliable HRV analysis in such environments is challenging due to motion artifacts and activity-related signal degradation. To address this, we use an approach that combines accelerometer and gyroscope data for activity intensity segmentation (light, moderate, vigorous) with a robust ECG processing pipeline incorporating R-peak detection and annotation-free signal quality assessment. Because vigorous activity produced unreliable HRV estimates, analyses focused on light and moderate activity levels. Using 30 s, 1 min, and 2 min windows, HR and HRV metrics were computed and compared between breast cancer survivors and healthy controls. Cancer survivors consistently exhibited elevated HR and reduced HRV across activity levels. During light activity, HR increased from 95.7 bpm in controls to 103.4 bpm in cancer survivors. Differences became more pronounced during moderate activity, where RMSSD decreased from 39.7 ms to 22.1 ms and SDNN from 42.6 ms to 25.1 ms. Statistical analyses showed significant group differences with strong and consistent effects across observations. In addition, the proposed ECG quality assessment framework reliably identified high-quality signal segments, achieving near-perfect valid RR ratios (0.99) without manual annotations. Overall, these findings demonstrate impaired and activity-dependent autonomic regulation in cancer survivors and highlight the importance of motion-aware activity segmentation and robust ECG quality control for accurate physiological monitoring in real-world wearable settings.

Shift-Invariant Feature Attribution in the Application of Wireless Electrocardiograms

Assigning relevance scores to the input features of a machine learning model enables to measure the contributions of the features in achieving a correct outcome. It is regarded as one of the approaches towards developing explainable models. For biomedical assignments, this is very useful for medical experts to comprehend machine-based decisions. In the analysis of electro cardiogram (ECG) signals, in particular, understanding which of the electrocardiogram samples or features contributed most for a given decision amounts to understanding the underlying cardiac phases or conditions the machine tries to explain. For the computation of relevance scores, determining the proper baseline is important. Moreover, the scores should have a distribution which is at once intuitive to interpret and easy to associate with the underline cardiac reality. The purpose of this work is to achieve these goals. Specifically, we propose a shift-invariant baseline which has a physical significance in the analysis as well as interpretation of electrocardiogram measurements. Moreover, we aggregate significance scores in such a way that they can be mapped to cardiac phases. We demonstrate our approach by inferring physical exertion from cardiac exertion using a residual network. We show that the ECG samples which achieved the highest relevance scores (and, therefore, which contributed most to the accurate recognition of the physical exertion) are those associated with the P and T waves. Index Terms Attribution, baseline, cardiovascular diseases, electrocardiogram, activity recognition, machine learning

Detection of Intelligent Tampering in Wireless Electrocardiogram Signals Using Hybrid Machine Learning

With the proliferation of wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) systems for health monitoring and authentication, protecting signal integrity against tampering is becoming increasingly important. This paper analyzes the performance of CNN, ResNet, and hybrid Transformer-CNN models for tamper detection. It also evaluates the performance of a Siamese network for ECG based identity verification. Six tampering strategies, including structured segment substitutions and random insertions, are emulated to mimic real world attacks. The one-dimensional ECG signals are transformed into a two dimensional representation in the time frequency domain using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The models are trained and evaluated using ECG data from 54 subjects recorded in four sessions 2019 to 2025 outside of clinical settings while the subjects performed seven different daily activities. Experimental results show that in highly fragmented manipulation scenarios, CNN, FeatCNN-TranCNN, FeatCNN-Tran and ResNet models achieved an accuracy exceeding 99.5 percent . Similarly, for subtle manipulations (for example, 50 percent from A and 50 percent from B and, 75 percent from A and 25 percent from B substitutions) our FeatCNN-TranCNN model demonstrated consistently reliable performance, achieving an average accuracy of 98 percent . For identity verification, the pure Transformer-Siamese network achieved an average accuracy of 98.30 percent . In contrast, the hybrid CNN-Transformer Siamese model delivered perfect verification performance with 100 percent accuracy.

Cross-Technology Interference: Detection, Avoidance, and Coexistence Mechanisms in the ISM Bands

A large number of heterogeneous wireless networks share the unlicensed spectrum designated as the ISM (Industry, Scientific, and Medicine) radio band. These networks do not adhere to a common medium access rule and differ in their specifications considerably. As a result, when concurrently active, they cause cross-technology interference (CTI) on each other. The effect of this interference is not reciprocal, the networks using high transmission power and advanced transmission schemes often causing disproportionate disruptions to those with modest communication and computation resources. CTI corrupts packets, incurs packet retransmission cost, introduces end-to-end latency and jitter, and make networks unpredictable. The purpose of this paper is to closely examine its impact on low-power networks which are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It discusses latest developments on CTI detection, coexistence and avoidance mechanisms as well on messaging schemes which attempt to enable heterogeneous networks directly communicate with one another to coordinate packet transmission and channel assignment.