A real-time software to the acquisition of heart rate and photoplethysmography signal using two region of interest simultaneously via webcam

The Heart Rate (HR) is an important physiological parameter that can be used to monitor people's health and detect heart diseases. In general, artifacts that require a contact area are used to measure HR; however, non-contact methods that only need the use of a camera have already been created. With these methods being developed, their robustness and consolidation must be improved in order to provide good results. This paper presents a real-time software to measure the HR using two different approaches as well as the acquirement of a photoplethysmography (PPG) signal via webcam. The first and most used approach is the utilization of the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to separate the signals, and the second explored approach, is the utilization of a fixed color channel. The experiments were made using two different Region of Interest (ROI) simultaneously; the forehead and the right palm, and the results were compared with a PPG sensor and Polar belt sensor. Also, the PPG signal wave extracted from the image was compared to the wave produced by another PPG sensor attached to the finger. The results have shown about 90% of similarity in comparison to the sensors used.