Effect of temporal resolution on the detection of cardiac arrhythmias using HRV features and machine learning

Objective. Arrhythmia is an abnormal cardiac rhythm that affects the pattern and rate of the heartbeat. Wearable devices with the functionality to measure and store heart rate (HR) data are growing in popularity and enable diagnosing and monitoring arrhythmia on a large scale. The typical sampling resolution of HR data available from non-medical grade wearable devices varies from seconds to several minutes depending on the device and its settings. However, the impact of sampling resolution on the performance and quality of arrhythmia detection has not yet been quantified. Approach. In this study, we investigated the detection and classification of three arrhythmias, namely atrial fibrillation, bradycardia, tachycardia, from down-sampled HR data with various temporal resolution (5-, 15-, 30- and 60 s averages) in 1 h segments extracted from an annotated Holter ECG database acquired at the University of Virginia Heart Station. For the classification task, a total of 15 common heart rate variability (HRV) features were engineered based on the HR time series of each patient. Three different types of machine learning classifiers were evaluated, namely logistic regression, support vector machine and random forest. Main results. A decrease in temporal resolution drastically impacted the detection of atrial fibrillation but did not substantially affect the detection of bradycardia and tachycardia. A HR resolution up to 15 s average demonstrated reasonable performance with a sensitivity of 0.92 and a specificity of 0.86 for a multiclass random forest classifier. Significance. HRV features extracted from low resolution long HR recordings have the potential to increase the early detection of arrhythmias in undiagnosed individuals.