Contributions to the Acquisition of Heart Rate and Photoplethysmography Signal Using a Real-Time Software

The Heart Rate (HR) is an essential physiological parameter, and it is commonly used to monitor people's health and detect heart diseases. In general, the HR measurement techniques require a contact area for sensors positioning, such as the electrocardiogram, the photoplethysmography sensor and the polar belt, which are the gold standard in HR measurement. A non-contact technique using video streaming of a digital camera has been developed and tested comparing its HR results to the gold standard techniques for HR measurements. During the experiments, the robustness and consolidation of the non-contact method were improved to provide excellent results in comparison to the gold standards. This paper presents a real-time software to measure the HR using two different approaches. The first approach is the utilization of the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to separate the signal components. The second explored approach is the utilization of a fixed color channel. The experiments were conducted using two different Region of Interest (ROI) simultaneously: the forehead and the right-hand palm. The experiment results proved that the acquirement of a photoplethysmography signal is possible via camera. The HR results have shown about 99% of similarity in comparison to the gold standard sensors.