A comparative study of heart rate estimation via air pressure sensor

In order to realize heart rate monitoring on a bed, there are mainly two types of approaches similar to other signal processing applications: frequency domain analysis and time-series domain analysis. In frequency domain analysis, FFT is widely used to extract heart rate from obtained signals. Since FFT assumes constant frequency, it cannot be used for extracting microscopic variability of heart rate. In time-series domain analysis, pattern matching based on autocorrelation is commonly used. The method is not only advanced in sensitivity to heart rate variability, but it is also sensitive to unexpected noise. In response to these problems, heart rate monitoring technology is proposed by using air pressure sensor. In this paper, a heart rate estimation algorithm employing fuzzy logic is proposed and effectiveness of fuzzy logic applied to biomedical sensing is discussed. The experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technology by comparing it with other methods such as pattern matching based on autocorrelation.