A simple and effective algorithm for R-wave detection using smartphones

Developing simple and effective algorithms for detecting cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) using smartphones has been the trend of research in pervasive healthcare. This paper proposes an efficient R-wave detection algorithm and tested it in an Android Smartphone. We use the complete datasets of MIT-BIH arrhythmia database to verify its relative performance with three other algorithms. Our results show that it can obtain an average error rate of 0.22%, a sensitivity of 99.88% and a predictive accuracy of 99.90%; while, only takes 12ms to process 10 seconds data in a smartphone; thus, it is more suitable for use at mobile devices.