Analysing Ballistocardiography for Pervasive Healthcare

Abstract

We describe a methodology to measure ballistocardiography (BCG) signals from the body surface, using body-worn digital accelerometers to extract medically relevant information for Pervasive Healthcare. We are able to measure measuring heart rate with an 95% accuracy as well as other cardiac metrics, such as the S1-S2 interval, deviating from ECG by only 1.3%. Our results show that BCG can be a viable alternative to an electrocardiogram to provide complementary information on the heart’s condition in mobile and pervasive use cases. We further show that BCG information can be detected from arm as reliably as from chest, which is especially convenient for measuring from supine positions in Pervasive healthcare applications.