Heart Rate Measurement Combining Motion and Color Information

Daily monitoring of the heart rate can facilitate detection of heart-related diseases in their early stages. Therefore, providing an easy-to-use and noninvasive heart rate monitoring system has been a very popular research topic in the field of healthcare. One of good candidate methods is to use commonly available cameras and extract information that can help to estimate heart rate from a human face. Generally, such information can be retrieved using two different approaches: photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG). PPG exploits slight color changes caused by blood volume variations during heartbeats; thus, it tends to be vulnerable to unstable lighting conditions. BCG exploits subtle head motions caused by pumped blood travelling through the carotid artery during heartbeats; thus, it is vulnerable to the voluntary head movements that are not related to heartbeats. Nevertheless, most related works use either to estimate the heart rate. In this paper, we propose to combine two approaches to be robust to challenging conditions. Specifically, we explore possible ways to combine raw signals obtained from two approaches and verify that the proposed combination shows better accuracies under challenging conditions, such as voluntary head movements and ambient lighting changes.