Ethical and Innovative Smartphone-Based Blood Vessel Assessment: Privacy and Data Protection in the ‘ECG for Everybody’ App for Smart Cities

Proceedings of International Scientific Conference „ALFATECH – Smart Cities and modern technologies“ (pp. 176-180) 

 

АУТОР(И) / AUTHOR(S): Stevan Jokić , Ivan Jokić , Branislav Gerazov , Nenad Gligorić , Ana Kovačević    

 

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DOI:  10.46793/ALFATECHproc25.176J

САЖЕТАК / ABSTRACT:

The growing emphasis on personalized healthcare within the paradigm of smart cities highlights the need for innovative, accessible solutions that enable early detection and continuous monitoring of cardiovascular health. In this study, we propose an advanced methodology for assessing blood vessel elasticity, expressed as the vascular „biological age,“ through the analysis of Photoplethysmography (PPG) signals acquired via the widely adopted mobile application „ECG for Everybody,“ which boasts over 150,000 downloads and a database of nearly 3 million recordings.

Our approach introduces the concept of a dominant PPG beat, derived by averaging PPG signals across the entire recording. This averaged waveform serves as a robust representation of vascular characteristics, enabling precise assessment of blood vessel elasticity. By analyzing the shape and temporal dynamics of this dominant beat, we estimate vascular health parameters and determine the biological age of blood vessels.

The analysis leverages a deep neural network trained on a diverse dataset collected from real-world users of the „ECG for Everybody“ application, as well as multiple signal processing techniques. This neural model correlates the morphological features of the averaged PPG beat with vascular elasticity, providing an innovative and noninvasive method for assessing cardiovascular health.

Initial experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed approach in accurately estimating vascular biological age. By integrating advanced PPG signal processing and machine learning techniques within a user-friendly mobile application, this work represents a significant step toward accessible, real-time healthcare solutions tailored for smart city environments.

КЉУЧНЕ РЕЧИ / KEYWORDS:

Photoplethysmography (PPG) analysis, vascular elasticity, biological age, neural networks, healthcare technology, smart cities

ПРОЈЕКАТ / ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

This research is co-financed by the PLANET4HEALTH project funded by the European Union (granting authority European Health and Digital Executive Agency) under the Grant Agreement No.101136652.

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