PPG-based Heart Rate Estimation with Efficient Sensor Sampling and Learning Models

Abstract: Recent studies showed that Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors embedded in wearable devices can estimate heart rate (HR) with high accuracy. However, despite of prior research efforts, applying PPG sensor based HR estimation to embedded devices still faces challenges due to the energy-intensive high-frequency PPG sampling and the resource-intensive machine-learning models. In this work, we aim to explore HR estimation techniques that are more suitable for lower-power and resource-constrained embedded devices. More specifically, we seek to design techniques that could provide high-accuracy HR estimation with low-frequency PPG sampling, small model size, and fast inference time. First, we show that by combining signal processing and ML, it is possible to reduce the PPG sampling frequency from 125 Hz to only 25 Hz while providing higher HR estimation accuracy. This combination also helps to reduce the ML model feature size, leading to smaller models. Additionally, we present a comprehensive analysis on different ML models and feature sizes to compare their accuracy, model size, and inference time. The models explored include Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Support vector machines (SVM), and Multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Experiments were conducted using both a widely-utilized dataset and our self-collected dataset. The experimental results show that our method by combining signal processing and ML had only 5% error for HR estimation using low-frequency PPG data. Moreover, our analysis showed that DT models with 10 to 20 input features usually have good accuracy, while are several magnitude smaller in model sizes and faster in inference time.