Atrial fibrillation detection using a smart phone

We hypothesized that an iPhone 4s can be used to detect atrial fibrillation (AF) based on its ability to record a pulsatile photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal from a fingertip using the built-in camera lens. To investigate the capability of the iPhone 4s for AF detection, 25 prospective subjects with AF pre- and post-electrical cardioversion were recruited. Using an iPhone 4s, we collected 2-minute pulsatile time series. We investigated 3 statistical methods consisting of the Root Mean Square of Successive Differences (RMSSD), the Shannon entropy (ShE) and the Sample entropy (SampE), which have been shown to be useful tools for AF assessment. The beat-to-beat accuracy for RMSSD, ShE and SampE was found to be 0.9844, 0.8494 and 0.9552, respectively. It should be recognized that for clinical applications, the most relevant objective is to detect the presence of AF or normal sinus rhythm (NSR) in the data. Using this criterion, we achieved an accuracy of 100% for both detecting the presence of either AF or NSR.