Heart rate measurement via smart phone acceleration sensor

The invention of various types of sensors, enhancement of computing ability of the smart terminal and booming development of wearable and portable device gave an practical way to monitor the elder´s physical condition, especially people with heart disease or blood pressure disease. This paper describes a method to get the apical pulse signal via acceleration sensor and proposes a new way estimating the heart rate, besides, a signal processing procedures are given to get and tracking the signal. Considering in detail, we firstly analyzed the generation mechanism, and found suitable positions to deploy sensors, then we came up with an idea that separating heart rate signal and respiratory via wavelet analysis, further a real-time heart tracking algorithm is designed and local prediction via phase-space method is used to predict missing heart rate. After that, we discussed about the embedding dimension and the delay time of different ages of people. Finally, we carried out an experiment with commercial device, and proposed a evaluation method based signal quality, then analyzed the tracking performance. This low cost technology can be used in real time monitor on wearable devices especially emergency condition and long-term health support.