Robust De-Noising Technique for Accurate Heart Rate Estimation Using Wrist-Type PPG Signals

Abstract

Heart rate (HR) estimated using the photoplethysmography (PPG) signals during intense physical exercise is highly onerous owing to the existence of noise components like motion artifacts (MA’s) in the PPG signal. In this work, a robust de-noising technique for accurate HR estimation from the corrupted PPG signal is reported. The de-noising technique reported employs three pairs of Recursive Least Squares (RLS) as well as Normalized Least Mean Squares (NLMS) adaptive filters. The de-noised PPG signal obtained at the output of RLS and NLMS adaptive filters are combined using the sigmoid function. The three MA reduced PPG signals obtained from each adaptive filter pair are again combined using softmax activation function to form a MA reduced PPG signal from which the HR is estimated. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used to estimate the HR and phase vocoder is used to refine the estimated HR. The proposed method is tested on the publically available 23 PPG datasets and it resulted in an HR estimation error of 1.89 beat per minute (BPM). The HR estimated using the proposed technique is found to be accurate and the HR estimation error is 1.89 BPM which is less when compared to other existing HR estimation mechanisms that reported an error of 1.97 BPM and 2.09 BPM.