EVM-iPPG: Design and Evaluation of a Vital Monitoring System in NICU

The vital monitoring system is a critical component of a Neonatal Intensive Care unit. Despite recent advances in intensive care technology, conventional techniques are obtrusive and may cause skin abrasion and discomfort during movement in the neonate. Traditional approaches have recently undergone adjustments, such as the use of wireless equipment to replace wired systems, but these modifications have not made the approach less unsafe for the skin of neonates. To address the limitations of previous techniques, this study introduces a novel approach for developing a non-invasive, real-time, low-cost vital monitoring system employing video processing technology. The purpose of this research is to determine how different areas of interest, specifically the forehead and chest, influence heart rate and respiration rate when measured with a webcam. The model uses eulerian video magnification to enlarge the region of interest observed by the haar cascade detector, followed by the use of an imaging photoplethysmogram to detect changes in skin color to estimate heart rate and respiration rate in a situational setting. Using the proposed EVM-iPPG approach, we were able to obtain results that were compared with ground truth acquired from the hospital’s vital monitoring system, with mean absolute error of 5.097 for the forehead and 6.494 for the chest when measured for heart rate, and mean absolute error of 3.523 for the forehead and 4.902 for the chest when measured for respiration rate. The forehead showed lower errors than the chest, indicating that it should be the region of focus for vitals estimation.