Detected pulses from the motion of the head to estimate heartbeat rate

The beating of the heart sends blood throughout the body to feed the cells and puts pressure on the blood vessel walls. Therefore, monitoring this process is extremely important in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In the past, people did this by counting pulses of artery or wearing of heart monitor on the body. In both of these cases, physical contact with the body is required to get the heart rate. Today, with the advancement of science and technology, we can overcome these limitations based on computer vision techniques. This paper proposes one such method - measuring heartbeat rate through frequent pulses from the motion of blood vessel on the head. We extract them from a regular computer's camera in real-time. Our method identifies and records the oscillation of the feature points. Then, using the algorithm principal component analysis decays their trajectories into a group of component motions. Thus, we can determine the best component corresponding to heartbeats based on its frequency. In order to do that, we built an electrocardiogram and analyzed it to identify the peaks of the trajectory, which corresponded to the heartbeats. Based on that data, we calculated the subject's heartbeat rate. When evaluated on 10 subjects, our approach reports heartbeat rate roughly the same as a conventional sphygmomanometer. This result shows that the proposed method is correct, robust, and economically suitable. However, in order to achieve high technical efficiency without changing the economy, this method needs to be further improved in the future.