Title: A multiple signal classification approach for photoplethysmography signals in healthy and athletic subjects

Authors: Amjed S. Al-Fahoum; Awad Al-Zaben; Waseem Seafan

Addresses: Department of Biomedical Systems and Informatics Engineering, Hijjawi Faculty for Engineering Technology, Yarmouk University, Irbid 21163, Jordan ' Department of Biomedical Systems and Informatics Engineering, Hijjawi Faculty for Engineering Technology, Yarmouk University, Irbid 21163, Jordan ' Ali Al Sauwaidi Trading Est., Doha, Qatar

Abstract: In this paper, various spectral analysis methods are applied to investigate the spectral behaviour of Photoplethysmography (PPG) signals for both healthy normal athletic and non-athletic subjects. The paper investigates the contribution of the PPG spectral components in revealing time trends and how they minimise artefacts that conceal these spectral contents. Both parametric and non-parametric spectral methods are utilised to study the PPG signal. However, eigenstructure methods such as multiple signal classification are found to be more suitable to localise spectral contents of the signal and robustly estimate the heart rate. The heart rate detection correlation is found to be 99.62% and the PPG detection accuracy is 99.61%. These findings show that PPG can be used as an effective tool in investigating cardiovascular disorders as well rather than in investigating only blood oxygenation and heart rate measurements. Furthermore, it can advance the research for existing heart rate variability methods.

Keywords: plethysmography; heart rate variability; respiration rate; motion artefacts; de-trending; spectral analysis; MUSIC; multiple signal classification; HRV; PPG signals; healthy subjects; athletic subjects; cardiovascular disorders.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2015.066962

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2015 Vol.17 No.1, pp.1 - 23

Received: 09 Jan 2014
Accepted: 28 May 2014
Published online: 18 Jan 2015 *

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