A Feasibility Study of Heartbeat Detections from Photoplethysmograms With Fingers Compressed

摘要

In this paper, we study the influence of a pressure applied to the fingers when measuring photoplethysmographic (PPG) signals. We built our own PPG device that acquires the applied finger forces and standard electrocardiographic signals in parallel with the PPG measurements. An experiment was carried out with 8 test subjects whose PPG signals were recorded in 30 8-second intervals with finger forces increasing from 0 to 8.83 N in steps of 0.59 N, and then decreasing back to 0. We developed a method to detect PPG-based heartbeats. The obtained results yield sensitivity, specificity, and precision of the detections of 95.6%, 94.2%, and 95.6%, respectively. We also present the quality of detections versus the forces applied with fingers.