A4 Refereed article in a conference publication

An LLM-Powered Agent for Physiological Data Analysis: A Case Study on PPG-based Heart Rate Estimation




AuthorsFeli, Mohammad; Azimi, Iman; Liljeberg, Pasi; Rahmani, Amir M.

EditorsN/A

Conference nameAnnual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

Publication year2025

Journal: Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

Book title 2025 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)

Volume47

ISBN979-8-3315-8619-5

eISBN979-8-3315-8618-8

ISSN2375-7477

eISSN2694-0604

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC58623.2025.11254428

Publication's open availability at the time of reportingNo Open Access

Publication channel's open availability Partially Open Access publication channel

Web address https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11254428


Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing healthcare by improving diagnosis, patient care, and decision support through interactive communication. More recently, they have been applied to analyzing physiological time-series like wearable data for health insight extraction. Existing methods embed raw numerical sequences directly into prompts, which exceeds token limits and increases computational costs. Additionally, some studies integrated features extracted from time-series in textual prompts or applied multimodal approaches. However, these methods often produce generic and unreliable outputs due to LLMs’ limited analytical rigor and inefficiency in interpreting continuous waveforms. In this paper, we develop an LLM-powered agent for physiological time-series analysis aimed to bridge the gap in integrating LLMs with well-established analytical tools. Built on the OpenCHA, an open-source LLM-powered framework, our agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5-turbo model features an orchestrator that integrates user interaction, data sources, and analytical tools to generate accurate health insights. To evaluate its effectiveness, we implement a case study on heart rate (HR) estimation from Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals using a dataset of PPG and Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings in a remote health monitoring study. The agent’s performance is benchmarked against OpenAI GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o, with ECG serving as the gold standard for HR estimation. Results demonstrate that our agent significantly outperforms benchmark models by achieving lower error rates and more reliable HR estimations. The agent implementation is publicly available on GitHub1.



Last updated on 2025-05-12 at 07:54