Research Article - Biomedical Research (2017) Volume 28, Issue 9

Simplified real-time heartbeat detection in ballistocardiography using a dispersion-maximum method

Ballistocardiography (BCG) enables the recording of heartbeat, respiration, and body movement data from an unconscious human subject. In this paper, we propose a new heartbeat detection algorithm for calculating heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) from the BCG signal. The proposed algorithm consists of a moving dispersion calculation method to effectively highlight the respective heartbeat locations and an adaptive heartbeat peak detection method that can set a heartbeat detection window by automatically predicting the next heartbeat location. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we compared it with other reference algorithms using a filter, waveform analysis and envelope calculation of signal by setting the ECG lead I as the gold standard. The heartbeat detection in BCG should be able to measure sensitively in the regions for lower and higher HR. However, previous detection algorithms are optimized mainly in the region of HR range (60~90 bpm) without considering the HR range of lower (40~60 bpm) and higher (90~110 bpm) HR. Therefore, we proposed an improved method in wide HR range that 40~110 bpm. The proposed algorithm detected the heartbeat greater stability in varying and wider heartbeat intervals as comparing with other previous algorithms. Our proposed algorithm achieved a relative accuracy of 98.29% with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.83 bpm for HR, as well as coverage of 97.63% and relative accuracy of 94.36% for HRV. And we obtained the root mean square (RMS) value of 1.67 for separated ranges in HR.

Author(s): Sun-Taag Choe, We-Duke Cho

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