Improved heart rate detection using smart phone

Abstract

Smart Phone based health care is a very recent topic and various methods for detection of heart rate are available. Reflective photoplethysmography (PPG) is used to measure heart rate of a person while placing the finger on the camera of a smart phone. In this paper, authors have proposed the usage of certain signal processing components to enhance the performance while retaining low complexity. Overlapping window based approach improves the accuracy of the solution. Post processing components are implemented in both time and frequency domain to detect the erroneous signals and remove false positives. Results indicate that, by additionally employing the above components, more than 50% improvement in heart rate detection accuracy is achieved as compared to a standard spectral based approach.