AI-Assisted Early Detection of Cardiovascular Abnormalities Using Continuous Wearable Sensor Signals
Keywords:
continuous wearable sensing; cardiovascular abnormality detection; artificial intelligence; system architecture; health data governance; clinical deploymentAbstract
The growing burden of cardiovascular disease has intensified interest in continuous monitoring paradigms that extend beyond episodic clinical encounters. Wearable devices now acquire high-frequency photoplethysmographic, electrocardiographic, accelerometric, and contextual signals over prolonged periods, creating opportunities for artificial intelligence systems to detect subtle anomalies before acute events. However, translating raw sensor streams into clinically trustworthy early warning requires careful consideration of sensing quality, system architecture, data governance, robustness, fairness, and deployment sustainability. This article presents a system-level examination of AI-assisted early detection of cardiovascular abnormalities using continuous wearable sensor signals. It discusses how motion artifact, signal degradation, and interindividual variability shape sensing infrastructure. The paper then analyzes architectural choices spanning on-device processing, edge aggregation, cloud inference, and adaptive model updating. It further addresses privacy-preserving learning, algorithmic bias, uncertainty quantification, regulatory validation, interoperability, and lifecycle sustainability. Rather than focusing on a single algorithm, the analysis emphasizes structural trade-offs that determine whether such systems can operate safely in real-world health ecosystems. The article argues that early detection platforms should be designed as socio-technical infrastructures with transparent governance, prospective clinical evidence, and mechanisms for continuous monitoring of model performance. These considerations are essential for moving beyond diagnostic accuracy toward equitable, robust, and sustainable cardiovascular care.
References
1. Roth, G. A., Mensah, G. A., Johnson, C. O., Addolorato, G., Ammirati, E., Baddour, L. M., Barengo, N. C., Beaton, A. Z., Benjamin, E. J., Benziger, C. P., Bonny, A., Brauer, M., Brodmann, M., Cahill, T. J., Carapetis, J., Catapano, A. L., Chugh, S. S., Cooper, L. T., Coresh, J., ... Fuster, V. (2020). Global burden of cardiovascular diseases and risk factors, 1990–2019: Update from the GBD 2019 study. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 76(25), 2982–3021.
2. Allen, J. (2007). Photoplethysmography and its application in clinical physiological measurement. Physiological Measurement, 28(3), R1–R39.
3. Perez, M. V., Mahaffey, K. W., Hedlin, H., Rumsfeld, J. S., Garcia, A., Ferris, T., Balasubramanian, V., Russo, A. M., Rajmane, A., Cheung, L., Hung, G., Lee, J., Kowey, P., Talati, N., Nag, D., Gummidipundi, S. E., Beatty, A., Hills, M. T., Desai, S., ... Turakhia, M. P. (2019). Large-scale assessment of a smartwatch to identify atrial fibrillation. New England Journal of Medicine, 381(20), 1909–1917.
4. Hannun, A. Y., Rajpurkar, P., Haghpanahi, M., Tison, G. H., Bourn, C., Turakhia, M. P., & Ng, A. Y. (2019). Cardiologist-level arrhythmia detection and classification in ambulatory electrocardiograms using a deep neural network. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 65–69.
5. Zheng, X., Dwyer, V. M., Barrett, L. A., Derakhshani, M., & Hu, S. (2022). Adaptive notch-filtration to effectively recover photoplethysmographic signals during physical activity. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 72, 103303.
6. Clifford, G. D., Behar, J., Li, Q., & Oeff, M. (2012). Signal quality indices and data fusion for determining acceptability of electrocardiograms collected in noisy ambulatory environments. Physiological Measurement, 33(9), 1419–1437.
7. Charlton, P. H., Birrenkott, D. A., Bonnici, T., Pimentel, M. A. F., Johnson, A. E. W., Alastruey, J., Tarassenko, L., Watkinson, P. J., Beale, R., & Kyriacou, P. A. (2022). Wearable photoplethysmography for cardiovascular monitoring. Proceedings of the IEEE, 110(3), 355–381.
8. Steinhubl, S. R., Waalen, J., Edwards, A. M., Ariniello, L. M., Mehta, R. R., Ebner, G. S., Carter, C., Baca-Motes, K., Felicione, E., Sarich, T., & Topol, E. J. (2018). Effect of a home-based wearable continuous ECG monitoring patch on detection of undiagnosed atrial fibrillation: The mSToPS randomized clinical trial. JAMA, 320(2), 146–155.
9. Rieke, N., Hancox, J., Li, W., Milletari, F., Roth, H. R., Albarqouni, S., Bakas, S., Galtier, M. N., Landman, B. A., Maier-Hein, K., Ourselin, S., Sheller, M., Summers, R. M., Trask, A., Xu, D., Baust, M., & Cardoso, M. J. (2020). The future of digital health with federated learning. npj Digital Medicine, 3, 119.
10. Obermeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., & Mullainathan, S. (2019). Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Science, 366(6464), 447–453.
11. Wiens, J., Saria, S., Sendak, M., Ghassemi, M., Liu, V. X., Doshi-Velez, F., Jung, K., Heller, K., Kale, D., Saeed, M., Ossorio, P. N., Thadaney-Israni, S., & Goldenberg, A. (2019). Do no harm: A roadmap for responsible machine learning for health care. Nature Medicine, 25(9), 1337–1340.
12. Kelly, C. J., Karthikesalingam, A., Suleyman, M., Corrado, G., & King, D. (2019). Key challenges for delivering clinical impact with artificial intelligence. BMC Medicine, 17, 195.
13. Leibig, C., Allken, V., Ayhan, M. S., Berens, P., & Wahl, S. (2017). Leveraging uncertainty information from deep neural networks for disease detection. Scientific Reports, 7, 17816.
14. Tonekaboni, S., Joshi, S., McCradden, M. D., & Goldenberg, A. (2019). What clinicians want: Contextualizing explainable machine learning for clinical end use. JMIR Medical Informatics, 7(4), e14359.
15. Mathews, S. C., McShea, M. J., Hanley, C. L., Ravitz, A., Labrique, A. B., Cohen, W. J., & Green, J. (2019). Digital health: A path to validation. npj Digital Medicine, 2, 38.
16. Lehne, M., Sass, J., Essenwanger, A., Schepers, J., & Thun, S. (2019). Why digital medicine depends on interoperability. npj Digital Medicine, 2, 79.
17. Greenhalgh, T., Wherton, J., Papoutsi, C., Lynch, J., Hughes, G., A'Court, C., Hinder, S., Fahy, N., Procter, R., & Shaw, S. (2017). Beyond adoption: A new framework for theorizing and evaluating nonadoption, abandonment, and challenges to scale-up of health and care technologies. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 19(11), e367.
18. Morley, J., Machado, C. C. V., Burr, C., Cowls, J., Joshi, I., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). The ethics of AI in health care: A mapping review. Social Science & Medicine, 260, 113172.
19. van Wynsberghe, A. (2021). Sustainable AI: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI. AI and Ethics, 1(3), 213–218.
20. Chen, R. J., Lu, M. Y., Chen, T. Y., Williamson, D. F. K., & Mahmood, F. (2021). Synthetic data in machine learning for medicine and healthcare. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 5(6), 493–497.
21. Dörr, M., Nohturfft, V., Brasier, N., Bosshard, E., Djurdjevic, A., Gross, S., Raichle, C. J., Rhinisperger, M., Stöckli, R., & Steck, H. (2019). The WATCH AF trial: SmartWATCHes for detection of atrial fibrillation. JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology, 5(2), 199–208.
22. Miotto, R., Wang, F., Wang, S., Jiang, X., & Dudley, J. T. (2018). Deep learning for healthcare: Review, opportunities and challenges. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 19(6), 1236–1246.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Engineering and Systems

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.