A Personalized Beat-to-Beat Heart Rate Detection System From Ballistocardiogram for Smart Home Applications

This paper presents a ballistocardiogram (BCG) based beat-to-beat heart rate (HR) measurement system for healthcare applications in smart home. The BCG signal is picked up by two parallel connected piezoelectric elements, and processed by a robust HR detection algorithm. To deal with the diversity in BCG signal, a personalized heartbeat template is extracted to handle the diversity in BCG signal. The Pearson correlation coefficient is used to correlate between personalized template and the BCG signal. Heartbeats are detected by using the Hilbert Transform. The system is verified on 32 subjects with simultaneously recorded BCG and ECG signals. With the reference to ECG signal, we have achieved mean absolute relative error of the beat-to-beat intervals of 4.56%, and average absolute error±standard deviation of absolute error for HR estimation in a 30-seconds window of 0.59±0.56 beats per minute. Meanwhile, 99.67% of the beat-to-beat intervals are detected on average.