• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.33-37
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• 2024

Recently, wearable virtual reality devices are widely used. These instruments include a 3-axis accelerometer. User's heart rate information in virtual reality contents can be useful for measuring user experience. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the heart rate through a 3-axis accelerometer based on the principle of ballistocardiography without additional sensors. The angular velocity was successively measured in a time series by the 3-axis accelerometer mounted to the head. The frequency of the maximum magnitude is determined as the heart rate through frequency transform and band pass filtering of the time series signal. For verification, the heart rate calculated from photoplethysmography sensors acquired at the same time was compared as ground-truth. In the virtual reality, the user's heart rate information can be extracted without additional heart rate sensor, and the emotional state and fatigue can be measured.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.1388-1395
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• 2020

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.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.51-56
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• 2019

This paper proposes an improved heartbeat signal extraction method for ballistocardiography(BCG)-based heart-rate measurement on mobile environment. First, from a mobile facial video, a handshake-free head motion signal is extracted by tracking facial features and background features at the same time. Then, a novel signal periodicity computation method is proposed to accurately separate out the heartbeat signal from the head motion signal. The proposed method could robustly extract heartbeat signals from mobile facial videos, and enabled more accurate heart rate measurement (measurement errors were reduced by 3-4 bpm) compared to the existing method.