A Smart Cushion for Real-Time Heart Rate Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper introduces a smart cushion with integrated sensors and algorithms for real-time, contactless heart rate monitoring, demonstrating high responsiveness and accuracy comparable to commercial devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, contactless heart rate monitoring system using a smart cushion with integrated fiber sensors and a new efficient detection algorithm.

Findings

High accuracy in heart rate detection compared to commercial devices

Responsive updates every 3 seconds with initial response within 10 seconds

No need for pre-training, suitable for real-time monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a smart cushion for real time heart rate monitoring. The cushion comprises of an integrated micro-bending fiber sensor, which records the BCG (Ballistocardiogram) signal without direct skin-electrode contact, and an optical transceiver that does signal amplification, digitization, and pre-filtering. To remove the artifacts and extract heart rate from BCG signal, a computationally efficient heart rate detection algorithm is developed. The system doesn't require any pre-training and is highly responsive with the outputs updated every 3 sec and initial response within first 10 sec. Tests conducted on human subjects show the detected heart rate closely matches the one from a commercial SpO2 device.