Remote laser-speckle sensing of heart sounds for health assessment and biometric identification

Abstract

Assessment of heart sounds is the cornerstone of cardiac examination, but it requires a stethoscope, skills and experience, and a direct contact with the patient. We developed a contactless, machine-learning assisted method for heart-sound identification and quantification based on the remote measurement of the reflected laser speckle from the neck skin surface in healthy individuals. We compare the performance of this method to standard digital stethoscope recordings on an example task of heart-beat sound biometric identification. We show that our method outperforms the stethoscope even allowing identification on the test data taken on different days. This method might allow development of devices for remote monitoring of cardiovascular health in different settings.

A comprehensive multimodal dataset for contactless lip reading and acoustic analysis

“…These two researches have distinct focus directions: the paper 5 considered the distance coefficient for radar signals and successfully make speech enhancement system implementation in 7 meters; and works 6 , 9 on audio separation of multiple speakers with radar-based spatial information. For laser-related information, paper 10 proposed a remote measurement technique for healthy individuals that involves capturing the reflected laser speckle from the surface of the neck skin. This system is capable of capturing the micro-vibration on the surface of the neck produced by blood pressure, which can also be adopted for the extraction of voice signals without audio signals through detecting the vibration caused by throat.…”

A large-scale multimodal dataset of human speech recognition

“…These two researches has distinct focus directions: 5 considered the distance coefficient for radar signal and successfully make speech enhancement system implementation in 7 meters; and 6,8 works on audio separation of multiple speakers with radar based spacial information. For laser-related information, 9 proposed a remote measurement technique for healthy individuals that involves capturing the reflected laser speckle from the surface of the neck skin. This system is capable of capturing the micro-vibration on the surface of the neck produced by blood pressure, which can also be adopted for the extraction of voice signals without audio signals through detecting the vibration caused by throat.…”