Researchers at the University of Mississippi have developed a chip that could be fitted in a smartwatch and detect heart attacks faster and more accurately than traditional methods.

They used artificial intelligence and mathematics to design a chip that can analyse electrocardiograms (ECGs) and detect a heart attack in real-time.

The resulting technology is lightweight and energy efficient enough to be embedded in wearable devices while still being 92.4% accurate, higher than many current methods.

The research was published in Intelligent Systems, Blockchain & Communication Technologies (link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-82377-0_44) by electrical and computer engineering professor Kasem Khalil. It shows that the technology developed at his lab could improve heart attack detection methods without sacrificing accuracy.

“For this issue, a few minutes or even a few extra seconds is going to give this person the care they need before it becomes worse,” Khalil said. “Compared with traditional methods, our technology is up to two times faster, while still highly accurate. Our target was not only to increase performance for classifying heart attacks, we are also focusing on the design. If we want to make this device a usable machine for any person, that means it has to be something lightweight and economic.”

In the USA, someone dies from a heart attack every 40 seconds. Heart disease – a collection of underlying conditions that can lead to a heart attack – is the country’s leading cause of death.

“We wanted to be able to implement this in a way that is real,” said Tamador Mohaidat, a doctoral student in Khalil’s lab at the University of Mississippi (olemiss.edu) and co-author of the publication. “This is portable hardware that can be in wearable or monitoring devices. This method will save lives because we can monitor the heart in real time.”

Mohaidat focused on creating the artificial neural network, while Rahat Kader Khan focused on building the software for the device. Khan, a second-year computer engineering graduate student, said the Khalil lab was unique in that it focused on all aspects of the technology they hoped to create.

“Some labs only focus on the software part, and they don’t think about the hardware that’s needed,” Khan said. “But in our lab, we focus on the whole product. Each of us has a responsibility, but we work together. That’s how we optimise the whole system, by focusing on the overall architecture.”

Current methods of heart attack detection often must happen in a medical facility. A patient experiencing chest pain or who suspects they’re having a heart attack must first go through an ECG or blood tests to diagnose their condition.

All that takes time that a patient might not have, the researchers said. If a wearable device such as a watch or a phone can cut down on diagnosis time, patients could get faster treatment.

“When a patient is having a heart attack, the sooner you can treat them, the less likely they are to have permanent damage,” Khalil said. “There’s a huge time-sensitive element to heart attacks.”

While Khalil and his team continue developing the technology, he said he saw other health care applications for these devices.

“We want to be able to predict or identify many problems using technology like this,” he said. “Whether that’s heart attacks or seizures or dementia, the detection of a disease or condition depends on the disease itself, but we’re working to find faster, more efficient ways of doing that.”