Continuous Heartbeat Prediction Using a Face Recognition Algorithm

Abstract

Health providers use the ECG machine to get information about the heart. This information plays a significant role since it tells them about the status of the heart. The ECG machine presents this information in a waveform. During the Covid-19 pandemic, all governments have placed numerous rules and policies to protect people from the virus and from spreading it. One of the rules and policies is to prevent touching surfaces in public places. However, in health care centers, touching surfaces can’t be avoided completely since there is a need to touch them or place some wires on the human body such as placing wires to use the ECG machine. In Saudi Arabia, the government has placed a policy in all its buildings, public places, and the private sector to measure the temperature at the entrance. Due to this situation, the idea has come into mind to have a touchless method to measure the heartbeat rate. In this paper, proposing a feasible and reliable method to estimate a continuous heartbeat rate is presented. It uses a face recognition approach to predict the heart pulse continuously in real-time according to colors intensity measurement. Using a segmentation algorithm is involved since the approach takes its input from a video or an image. Several experiments have been conducted on volunteers to verify the obtained results and measure their relative errors. Consequently, the errors are less than 7% which is quite acceptable. At the end of this article, a comparative assessment is performed between the presented approach and some works from literature. This assessment is conducted based on the methodologies being utilized and applied and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Furthermore, it shows whether those methods require physical contact or not. The obtained results indicate that the implemented system herein outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.