Real time heart rate estimation from severely corrupted PPG signal by motion artifact

Abstract

Heart rate is a very important cardio logical data. It is considered to be one of the most important vital sign of a human body. Real time heart rate monitoring provides a great advantage over many aspects. PPG is a low cost and simple method to measure volumetric changes in blood vessel. It consist of vital physiological data along with heart rate. But PPG data gets extremely corrupted with motion artifacts, thus it is difficult to achieve clean PPG data which has been distorted by all sorts of motion. Our method of removing motion artifacts and estimating heart rate included 3 major parts. Adaptive noise cancellation based of four different motion artifact source. Peak tracking method from the four different heart rate estimate for every real time window. Last step was a systematic verification method so that the abrupt changes in PPG does not lead the estimation of heart rate in the wrong direction. Our method of estimating heart rate had an absolute error of about 1.73 beats per min, which is a satisfactory result. This method provides a very robust system in measuring heart rate and also promises result with unbelievingly high accuracy. It can be concluded that this method provides high level of accuracy which can be implemented in today’s high tech health monitoring devices.