Noncontact Heart Activity Measurement System Based on Video Imaging Analysis

Abstract

Vital parameter monitoring systems based on video camera imagery is a growing interest field in clinical and biomedical applications. Heart rate (HR) is one of the most important vital parameters of interest in a clinical diagnostic and monitoring system. This study proposed a noncontact HR and beat length measurement system based on both motion magnification and motion detection at four different regions of interest (ROIs) (wrist, arm, neck and leg). A motion magnification based on a Chebyshev filter was utilized in order to magnify heart pulses in different ROIs that are difficult to see with the naked eye. A new measuring system based on motion detection was used to measure HR and beat length by detecting rapid motion areas in the video frame sequences that represent the heart pulses and converting video frames into a corresponding logical matrix. Video quality metrics were also used to compare our magnification system with standard Eulerian video magnification to select which one has better magnification results and gives better results for the heart pulse. The 99.3% limits of agreement between the proposed system and reference measurement fall within[Formula: see text] beats/min based on Bland and Altman test. The proposed system is expected to produce new options for further noncontact information extraction.