Simple scoring system for ECG quality assessment on Android platform

Work presented in this paper was undertaken in response to the PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2011: Improving the quality of ECGs collected using mobile phones. For the purpose of this challenge we have developed an algorithm that uses five simple rules, detecting the most common distortions of the ECG signal in the out of hospital environment. Using five if-then rules arranges for easy implementation and reasonably swift code on the mobile device. Our results on test set B were well-outside the top ten algorithms (Best score: 0.932; Our score: 0.828). Nevertheless our algorithm placed second among those providing open-source code for evaluation on the data set C, where neither data nor scores were released to the participants before the end of the challenge. The difference in the scores of the top two algorithms was minimal (Best score: 0.873; Our score: 0.872). As a consequence, relative success of simple algorithm on undisclosed set C raises questions about the over-fitting of more sophisticated algorithms - question that is hovering above many recently published results of automated methods for medical applications.