A Wearable ECG Device for Differentiating Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy from Acquired Left Ventricular Hypertrophy
A new wearable device and algorithm can screen for a leading cause of sudden cardiac death with 99% specificity.
A research team led by Jiachen Li has developed a novel, low-cost wearable system designed to screen for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a genetic heart condition and a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes. The system combines a custom-built, portable 3-lead ECG device with a specialized AI classification algorithm. The hardware integrates an AD8232 signal conditioning module and an Arduino Nano 33 BLE microcontroller, making it a practical, battery-powered tool. The core innovation is the algorithm, which extracts two novel quantitative metrics—HCM Index 1 and HCM Index 2—from each heartbeat and classifies patients using dual statistical thresholds.
The team validated their system on a combined dataset of 483 patients with left ventricular hypertrophy from PhysioNet and 29 HCM patients from digitized clinical records. The results are promising: the model achieved a sensitivity of 75.86%, a specificity of 99.17%, and an F1-score of 80.00%. Leave-one-out cross-validation confirmed the model's generalizability, and further analysis proved the classification is based on genuine physiological features, not data source artifacts. This wearable solution directly addresses the limitations of current diagnostic methods like cardiac MRI and echocardiography, which are expensive, operator-dependent, and often inaccessible. It represents a significant step toward affordable, widespread screening, particularly in resource-limited settings.
- The system combines a custom 3-lead wearable ECG device (using Arduino Nano 33 BLE) with a novel AI algorithm that extracts two quantitative indices per heartbeat.
- Validated on 512 patients, it differentiates HCM from acquired heart thickening with 75.86% sensitivity and 99.17% specificity, outperforming standard ECG analysis.
- It targets Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a genetic disease affecting ~1 in 500 people and a top cause of sudden cardiac death in athletes, offering a low-cost screening alternative.
Why It Matters
Provides an affordable, accessible screening tool for a deadly genetic heart condition, potentially saving lives through early detection in clinics and communities.