Sampling Rate Reduction for Wearable Heart Rate Variability Monitoring

This report describes a sampling rate reduction method for heart rate variability monitoring with a wearable device. This work was conducted to realize low-power measurement of biological signals necessary for heart rate variability (HRV) analysis. Continuous operation of the wearable device is an important factor for daily life monitoring. Therefore, the active time of the measuring circuit must be minimized. To reduce the required sampling rate, we propose a sampling error reduction method using interpolation and correlation of the heartbeat waveform. The proposed method is evaluated using measured electrocardiograms from five subjects. Evaluation results demonstrate that the sampling rate can be reduced to 32 Hz with 1 ms RMS error in heartbeat interval and 1.04% LF/HF degradation in HRV analysis.