Signal-quality-aware multisensor fusion for atrial fibrillation detection

Abstract

This letter introduces a novel method to enhance atrial fibrillation detection accuracy in healthcare monitoring. Wearable devices often face inconsistent signal quality due to noise. To address this, a multimodal data fusion technique that improves signal reliability during continuous monitoring is proposed. The method improves the precision of detecting R–R intervals by integrating wavelet coefficients from electrocardiogram, photoplethysmogram, and arterial blood pressure signals, weighted according to the quality of each signal. Furthermore, a bi-directional long short-term memory network is developed to accurately detect AF based on the derived heartrate or R–R intervals. Unlike prior studies, this work uniquely evaluates the system’s performance under noisy conditions, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements over single-channel methods. The system's generalizability is confirmed by evaluating the classifier's performance as the number of sensor inputs increases. At a signal-to-noise ratio of −10 dB, the accuracy improves by 4.51% with two sensor inputs and by 10.92% with three inputs, compared to using a single input.