Performance of wrist based electrocardiography with conventional ECG analysis algorithms

Wrist worn activity monitors are becoming increasingly popular and could be greatly enhanced by the inclusion of additional physiological monitors. This paper investigates integrating wrist based electrocardiography into such devices. Results show that when no motion is present techniques and algorithms developed for traditional chest ECG can be directly re-applied to the wrist with a valid analysis present more than 90% of the time. With motion artefacts from keyboard typing this falls to 50%, still allowing significant re-use of existing approaches.