Evaluation of the number of PPG harmonics to assess Smartphone effectiveness

Smart technologies are increasing in popularity due to their current reduction in price and increased accessibility to the lay user. As a result, health monitoring for personalized healthcare is growing in importance. One problem for the current smart technologies is the poorer signal acquisition quality with respect to clinically validated devices. In this paper, we evaluate the minimal required sampling frequency to acquire the Photoplethysmography (PPG) by means of a Smartphone such that the PPG features remain sufficiently accurate. In particular, we show that a sampling frequency of 30 frames per second of the Smartphone camera is sufficient to extract the PPG signal.