This is a private hackathon open to IndabaX South Africa participants.

At LifeQ we are all about assisting people to live their lives to the fullest by supporting them in Aging Well™. Keeping an eye on heart health is important in this regard. Using the data collected from a person’s wearable device while they are sleeping, it’s possible to detect heart rhythm problems, or arrhythmias, before they become more serious.

An arrhythmia is an irregular or abnormal heartbeat. Arrhythmias occur when the electrical signals that coordinate the heart’s normal beating pattern do not work properly. For a person prone to experiencing heart arrhythmias it can sometimes feel as though their heart is either racing or fluttering. Although occasional episodes of heart arrhythmias can be harmless, chronic arrhythmias can be bothersome and even life-threatening.

There are several types of heart arrhythmias. Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) is a relatively common arrhythmia and is characterised by extremely disorganized, rapid and irregular heartbeats. AFib increases the possibility of blood clots in the heart which in turn increases the risk of stroke, heart failure and other heart-related complications. Other types of arrhythmias include premature or extra beats, bigeminy and trigeminy.

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the signals collected in sleep studies. The ECG signal associated with a single cardiac cycle consists of a series of waveforms and the segments between them (see figure below). The “RR interval” is the time duration between successive QRS waves (think of it as the time between heartbeats or the inverse of heart rate). An analogous input can be generated from wearable data.

Reference: By ECG-P+QRSkomplex+T.svg: *ECG-PQRST+popis.svg: *SinusRhythmLabels.svg: Created by Agateller (Anthony Atkielski), converted to svg by atom.derivative work: Kychot (talk)derivative work: Kychot (talk)derivative work: Kychot (talk) - ECG-P+QRSkomplex+T.svg, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7875806

The objective of the challenge is to build a predictive model that accurately classifies the presence of chronic atrial fibrillation or other arrhythmias in a sleep session, given the time series of RR intervals.

RR intervals can be generated from wearables - e.g. from ECG sensors found on chest straps. A solution that warns a person of heart issues using data from normal sleep sessions could alert them to an issue and allow for early treatment.

About LifeQ (lifeq.com)

LifeQ is the leading provider of biometrics and health information derived from wearable devices, helping people detect health problems, prevent illness, and live healthier lives.

This is a private hackathon open to IndabaX South Africa participants.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in competitions as an individual.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.

External data is not permitted. Pretrained models are not allowed.

You are allowed to access data under Open Data Commons Attribution License v1.0.

Contains information from Physionet which is made available under the ODC Attribution License.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 5 submissions per day.

You may make a maximum of 50 submissions for this competition.

Before the end of the competition you need to choose 2 submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection your 2 best public leaderboard submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 30% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 70% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition. Your 2 selected submissions will be scored against a different error metric by the LifeQ team. Prizes will be distributed according to this private validation.

Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Competition’s discussion forum.

If you are in the top 5 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 2 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places in the top 20 on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi and LifeQ.

If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).

If the error metric requires probabilities to be submitted, do not set thresholds (or round your probabilities) to improve your place on the leaderboard. In order to ensure that the client receives the best solution Zindi will need the raw probabilities. This will allow the clients to set thresholds to their own needs.

The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners. The top 3 winners or team leaders will be required to present Zindi with proof of identification, proof of residence and a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.Winners will be paid in USD or the currency of the competition. If your account cannot receive US Dollars or the currency of the competition then your bank will need to provide proof of this and Zindi will try to accommodate this.

Payment will be made after code review and an introductory call with the host.

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.

Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

Reproducibility of submitted code

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
• We expect full documentation. This includes:
• All data used
• Output data and where they are stored
• Explanation of features used
• A requirements file with all packages and versions used
• Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (if allowed)
• All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)
• Environment code to be run. (e.g. Google Colab or the specifications of your local machine)
• Expected run time for each notebook. This will be useful to the review team for time and resource allocation.

Data standards:

• Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
• If external data is allowed, external data must be freely and publicly available, including pre-trained models with standard libraries. If external data is allowed, any data used should be shared with Zindi to be approved and then shared on the discussion forum. Zindi will also make note of the external data available on the data page.
• Packages:
• You must submit a requirements file with all packages and versions used.
• If a requirements file is not provided, solutions will be run on the most recent packages available.
• Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
• You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

• First offence: No prizes for 6 months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile (probation period). If you are caught cheating, all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions for the next six months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile. If you have less than 2000 points to your profile your points will be set to 0.
• Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.
• Teams with individuals who are caught cheating will not be eligible to win prizes or points in the competition in which the cheating occurred, regardless of the individuals’ knowledge of or participation in the offence.
• Teams with individuals who have previously committed an offence will not be eligible for any prizes for any competitions during the 6-month probation period.

Monitoring of submissions

• We will review the top 20 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above). Zindi reserves the right not to explain our reasons for requesting code. If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points with any other account.

The metric used for this challenge is Accuracy.

Then the submission file should be as follows:

ID         target

rr_ed2f00   0

rr_feec73   1

Your 2 selected submissions will be scored against a different error metric by the LifeQ team. Prizes will be distributed according to this private validation.

1st Place: R10 000

2nd Place: R5 000

3rd Place: R3 000

We reserve the right to not award any / all prizes if no suitable entries are received.

Prizes will only be awarded to IndabaX South Africa participants with a South African bank account.

Competition closes on 22 November 2021.

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.