Wrist-type Photoplethysmographic Signals Research Articles

Robust heart rate estimation using wrist-type photoplethysmographic signals during physical exercise: an approach based on adaptive filtering

Photoplethysmographic (PPG) signals are easily corrupted by motion artifacts when the subjects perform physical exercise. This paper introduces a two-step processing scheme to estimate heart rate (HR) from wrist-type PPG signals strongly corrupted by motion artifacts. Adaptive noise cancellation, using normalized least-mean-square algorithm, is first performed to attenuate motion artifacts and reconstruct multiple PPG waveforms from different combinations of corrupted PPG waveforms and accelerometer data. An adaptive band-pass filter is then used to track the common instantaneous frequency component (i.e. HR) of the reconstructed PPG waveforms. The proposed HR estimation scheme was evaluated on two datasets, composed of records from running subjects and subjects performing different kinds of arm/forearm movements and resulted in average absolute errors of 1.40 ± 0.60 and 4.28 ± 3.16 beats-per-minute for these two datasets, respectively. Importantly, the proposed method is fully automatic, induces an average estimation delay of 0.93 s, and is therefore suitable for real-time monitoring applications.

TROIKA: a general framework for heart rate monitoring using wrist-type photoplethysmographic signals during intensive physical exercise.

Heart rate monitoring using wrist-type photoplethysmographic signals during subjects' intensive exercise is a difficult problem, since the signals are contaminated by extremely strong motion artifacts caused by subjects' hand movements. So far few works have studied this problem. In this study, a general framework, termed TROIKA, is proposed, which consists of signal decomposiTion for denoising, sparse signal RecOnstructIon for high-resolution spectrum estimation, and spectral peaK trAcking with verification. The TROIKA framework has high estimation accuracy and is robust to strong motion artifacts. Many variants can be straightforwardly derived from this framework. Experimental results on datasets recorded from 12 subjects during fast running at the peak speed of 15 km/h showed that the average absolute error of heart rate estimation was 2.34 beat per minute, and the Pearson correlation between the estimates and the ground truth of heart rate was 0.992. This framework is of great values to wearable devices such as smartwatches which use PPG signals to monitor heart rate for fitness.