Advance Warning for Heart Arrhythmia

Cardiac heart rhythm disorder (arrhythmia) is an abnormality of heart rhythm which can lead to increased morbidity and sudden cardiac death (SDC). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated rates at 610,000/year in USA, that is one in 4 deaths. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the primary tool for monitoring heart rhythm. Recent advances in heart monitoring systems rely on past abnormal beats to train classifiers to detect abnormal beats. Unfortunately there are no robust solutions to detect abnormalities from healthy individuals, for whom symptoms have not emerged. We proposes ground-breaking solutions for an early warning system that can alert a person the instant the heart deviates from its normal rhythm using a multitude of well-rooted fields of science. We target an ambitiously high detection accuracy with a marginally low false alarm rate. This will lead to breakthrough results of transformative nature for the important challenge of advance warning of heart arrhythmia.