Comparisons of a combined wavelet and a combined principal component analysis classification model for BCG signal analysis

Heart disease is one of the main factors causing death in the developed countries. Over several decades, variety of electronic and computer technology have been developed to assist clinical practices for cardiac performance monitoring and heart disease diagnosis. Among these methods, ballistocardiography (BCG) has an interesting feature that no electrodes are needed to be attached to the body during the measurement. Thus, it is provides a potential application to asses the patients heart condition in the home. In this paper, a comparison is made of two neural network based BCG signal classification models. One system uses a principal component analysis (PCA) method, and the other a discrete wavelet transform, to reduce the input dimensionality. It is indicated that the combined wavelet transform and neural network classifier has a more reliable performance than the combined PCA and neural network system. Moreover, the wavelet transform requires no prior knowledge of the statistical distribution of data samples and the computation complexity and training time are reduced.