Measuring cardiac stroke volume through in-ear audio sensing

Stroke volume, the volume of blood ejected by the left ventricle during a contraction, is a key metric of cardiovascular health. Currently, stroke volume is measured in clinic with specialised equipment. While purpose-made wearables exist to measure stroke volume, no solution relies solely on commodity devices. We present a deep learning system for stroke volume estimation from in-ear audio of earbuds. We combine generative self-supervised/transfer learning, a transformer-based autoencoder, to predict average stroke volume in unseen subjects. With data from 23 healthy participants, we compare our estimations to clinically validated device estimations. We achieve a mean absolute error of 5.24 ml, a Pearson correlation of r=0.94 between average predicted stroke volume and average true stroke volume, and a Percentage Error in the limits of agreement of 11.05% (within clinical range for stroke volume measurement devices). These findings open the doors to longitudinal, scalable and affordable cardiovascular measurement out of clinic.