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Article History

Received: 22 August 2025

Accepted: 22 January 2026

First Online: 18 February 2026

Declarations

:

: Philip Aston and Manasi Nandi have a patent, WO2015121679A1, “Delay coordinate analysis of periodic data,” which covers the foundations of the Symmetric Projection Attractor Reconstruction (SPAR) method used in this paper. Steven Creasy, Gregory Lip, Gary Tse, and Kamalan Jeevaratnam have no competing interests to declare.

: The research in this paper was completed while adhering to the regulations of the University of Surrey review boards on human studies and animal care.

: The data used in this paper was open source and was approved for publication by the Institutional Ethics Committee as anonymous data (PTB-2020-1).

: Atrial fibrillation impacts a significant proportion of the adult population and is a serious risk factor for strokes. Detection is often difficult due to the brief nature of the episodes and as such long term monitoring has become the accepted method for diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. Studies have shown that long term monitoring is a fairly ineffective way to diagnose atrial fibrillation and so there is scope to improve the methodologies used. In this study we looked to apply a signal processing technique to electrocardiograms in conjunction with machine learning techniques to detect atrial fibrillation episodes after they had occurred. By investigating the impact of the sampling frequency of the electrocardiograms and optimising other parameters within the method we were able to not only detect atrial fibrillation after it had occurred but do so with a higher accuracy than current long term monitoring methods. This poses potential for a future change to the detection of atrial fibrillation for improved detection rate and also lower risk to the patients.