Non-invasive method for blood glucose monitoring using ECG signal

Abstract

Introduction: Tight glucose monitoring is crucial for diabetic patients by using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). The existing CGMs measure the Blood Glucose Concentration (BGC) from the interstitial fluid. These technologies are quite expensive, and most of them are invasive. Previous studies have demonstrated that hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia episodes affect the electrophysiology of the heart. However, they did not determine a cohort relationship between BGC and ECG parameters. Material and method: In this work, we propose a new method for determining the BGC using surface ECG signals. Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNN) were applied to segment the ECG signals. Then, the extracted features were employed to determine the BGC using two mathematical equations. This method has been tested on 04 patients over multiple days from the D1namo dataset, using surface ECG signals instead of intracardiac signal. Results: We were able to segment the ECG signals with an accuracy of 94% using the RCNN algorithm. According to the results, the proposed method was able to estimate the BGC with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0539, and a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.1604. In addition, the linear relationship between BGC and ECG features has been confirmed in this paper. Conclusion: In this paper, we propose the potential use of ECG features to determine the BGC. Additionally, we confirmed the linear relationship between BGC and ECG features. That fact will open new perspectives for further research, namely physiological models. Furthermore, the findings point to the possible application of ECG wearable devices for non-invasive continuous blood glucose monitoring via machine learning.