An adaptive Kalman filter technique for context-aware heart rate monitoring

Traditional physiological monitoring systems convert a person´s vital sign waveforms, such as heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure, into meaningful information by comparing the instant reading with a preset threshold or a baseline without considering the contextual information of the person. It would be beneficial to incorporate the contextual data such as activity status of the person to the physiological data in order to obtain a more accurate representation of a person´s physiological status. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm based on adaptive Kalman filter that describes the heart rate response with respect to different activity levels. It is towards our final goal of intelligent detection of any abnormality in the person´s vital signs. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the algorithm.