IoT Based System for Heart Monitoring and Arrhythmia Detection Using Machine Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies allow building a digital representation of people, objects, or physical phenomena to be available on the Internet. Thus, stakeholders can access this information from remote places or computational systems could analyze this data to find patterns, make decisions, or execute actions. For instance, a doctor could diagnose patients by analyzing the received data from an IoT system even when patients are located in a remote place. This article proposes an IoT system for monitoring electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and processing heart data in order to generate an alert when an arrhythmia is present. This system involves a Polar H10 heart sensor, machine-learning models to classify heart events, and communication technology to share and store patient's information. In the first place, the architecture of the IoT monitoring system and the communication between the components are described by discussing the designing criteria. Second, the experimentation process performs the training and the assessment of three classification algorithms, random forest, convolutional neural network, and k-nearest neighbors. The results show that k-nearest neighbor has the best accuracy percentage classifying the arrhythmias under study (premature ventricular contraction 94%, fusion of ventricular beat 81%, and supraventricular premature beat 82%); also, it is able to discern normal and unclassifiable beats with 93% and 97%, respectively.