ECG quality assessment for patient empowerment in mHealth applications

State-of-the-art mobile ECG recorders are usually not intended to be used by untrained personnel or by patients themselves. For that purpose, a suitable graphical user interface that provides real-time feedback concerning the signal quality is required. We have developed a measure for mobile ECG quality assessment based on a) basic signal quality properties (amplitude, spikes, constant signal portions), b) number of crossing points in between different leads, and c) QRS-amplitude vs. noise-amplitude ratio. An advanced algorithm and a simplified Android algorithm were implemented and evaluated by taking part in the Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2011. Our advanced algorithm achieved a score of 0.916 (4^th place) in Event 1 of the Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2011. The simplified Android algorithm achieved a score of 0.834 (6^th place) in Event 2 and a score of the 0.873 (1^st place) in Event 3 of the challenge.