FFT averaging of multichannel BCG signals from bed mattress sensor to improve estimation of heart beat interval

A multichannel pressure sensing Emfit foil was integrated to a bed mattress for measuring ballistocardiograph signals during sleep. We calculated the heart beat interval with cepstrum method, by applying FFT for short time windows including pair of consequent heart beats. We decreased the variance of FFT by averaging the multichannel data in the frequency domain. Relative error of our method in reference to electrocardiograph RR interval was only 0.35% for 15 night recordings with six normal subjects, when 12% of data was automatically removed due to movement artifacts. Background motivation for this work is given from the studies applying heart rate variability for the sleep staging.