A particle filter framework for the estimation of heart rate from ECG signals corrupted by motion artifacts. Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • In this work, we describe a methodology to probabilistically estimate the R-peak locations of an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal using a particle filter. This is useful for heart rate estimation, which is an important metric for medical diagnostics. Some scenarios require constant in-home monitoring using a wearable device. This poses a particularly challenging environment for heart rate detection, due to the susceptibility of ECG signals to motion artifacts. In this work, we show how the particle filter can effectively track the true R-peak locations amidst the motion artifacts, given appropriate heart rate and R-peak observation models. A particle filter based framework has several advantages due to its freedom from strict assumptions on signal and noise models, as well as its ability to simultaneously track multiple possible heart rate hypotheses. Moreover, the proposed framework is not exclusive to ECG signals and could easily be leveraged for tracking other physiological parameters. We describe the implementation of the particle filter and validate our approach on real ECG data affected by motion artifacts from the MIT-BIH noise stress test database. The average heart rate estimation error is about 5 beats per minute for signal streams contaminated with noisy segments with SNR as low as -6 dB.

name of conference

  • 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)

published proceedings

  • Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc

author list (cited authors)

  • Nathan, V., Akkaya, I., & Jafari, R.

citation count

  • 13

complete list of authors

  • Nathan, Viswam||Akkaya, Ilge||Jafari, Roozbeh

publication date

  • August 2015