A Novel Approach for Estimation of Electrical Bioimpedance: Total Least Square

Abstract

There are several methods used for AC-impedance estimation in Electrical Bioimpedance measurements. In this paper we propose a novel method for digital estimation of electrical impedance based in the Total Least Square (TLS) technique and we carry out a performance comparison between the proposed method and the typical Digital Sine Correlation (DSC) method. The TLS method has been implemented using the Singular Value Decomposition approach and the performance of both methods have been compared in terms of robustness against noise and size of the data set. The results indicate that the TLS method shows a better performance for impedance estimation than the DSC with reduced set of measurement samples and high SNR levels, while its performance worsen for increasing number of samples and decreasing SNR. The DSC method exhibits a better robustness against noise, especially for increasing the number of data samples. The main observed advantage of the TLS method is that it suffers from less mathematical constrains than the DSC method, and since the noise levels in bioimpedance applications are not expected to be very high we conclude that the TLS method is a good choice as impedance estimator.