Real-time signal processing of photoplethysmographic signals to estimate the on-demand and continuous heart rate by spectral analysis

Abstract

In healthcare applications, heart rate is one of the vital signs which give the health informatics of a person. Nowadays, the evolution of PPG sensors help to develop low cost heart rate monitoring devices with minimal hardware resources compared to ECG. In this paper, an efficient algorithm is proposed to find the heart rate using frequency spectrum analysis on PPG signals. Using the proposed algorithm, the heart rate is calculated with a pass percentage of 99.2, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.59%, mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.20 BPM and reference closeness factor (RCF) of 0.989. The first reliable heart rate output comes in 6.5th second, which is the minimum possible time. The algorithm operates with a speed of 2 MIPS and with a memory of 18 KB. So the proposed method can be integrated to any low cost real-time embedded platforms to accurately measure the heart rate.