Motion Artifact Reduction In Photoplethysmography For Reliable Signal Selection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to automatically generate pseudo clean PPG signals from noisy data collected during daily activities, enabling reliable signal quality assessment and improving motion artifact reduction in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

The study proposes an automatic pseudo clean PPG generation process to evaluate and select high-quality signals from real-life activity data, enhancing motion artifact reduction methods.

Findings

71% of pseudo clean PPG segments are high quality

Heart rate MAE of 1.46 BPM in selected segments

Respiration rate MAE of 3.93 BrPM in selected segments

Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a non-invasive and economical technique to extract vital signs of the human body. Although it has been widely used in consumer and research grade wrist devices to track a user's physiology, the PPG signal is very sensitive to motion which can corrupt the signal's quality. Existing Motion Artifact (MA) reduction techniques have been developed and evaluated using either synthetic noisy signals or signals collected during high-intensity activities - both of which are difficult to generalize for real-life scenarios. Therefore, it is valuable to collect realistic PPG signals while performing Activities of Daily Living (ADL) to develop practical signal denoising and analysis methods. In this work, we propose an automatic pseudo clean PPG generation process for reliable PPG signal selection. For each noisy PPG segment, the corresponding pseudo clean PPG reduces the MAs and contains rich temporal details depicting cardiac features. Our experimental results show that 71% of the pseudo clean PPG collected from ADL can be considered as high quality segment where the derived MAE of heart rate and respiration rate are 1.46 BPM and 3.93 BrPM, respectively. Therefore, our proposed method can determine the reliability of the raw noisy PPG by considering quality of the corresponding pseudo clean PPG signal.