PPG derived heart rate estimation during intensive physical exercise

Accurate and reliable estimation of heart rate (HR) from photoplethysmographic (PPG) signals during moderate and vigorous physical activities is a challenging task, since intense motion artifacts can easily disguise the true HR. A novel method for estimating HR from PPG signal, during intensive physical exercise, is presented in this paper. The proposed method employs a recursive Wiener filtering technique for HR estimation from motion artifacts-corrupted PPG signal and simultaneously recorded the triaxial accelerometer signal. The experimental results demonstrated that the average relative error and the average absolute error of the proposed method on a public dataset (IEEE 2015 Signal Processing Cup Database) of 23 PPG recordings were 1.73 and 1.85 beats per minute, respectively. Our proposed approach is faster and more accurate than the existing proposals. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be a reliable solution for HR estimation from noisy PPG signal.