Design of Kalman Filter to Estimate Heart Rate Variability from PPG Signal for Mobile Healthcare

In the mobile healthcare system, a very important vital sign in analyzing the status of user health is the HRV (heart rate variability). The used signals for measuring the HRV are electrocardiograph and PPG (photoplethysmograph). In extracting the HRV from the PPG signal, an important issue is that extract the exactly HRV from PPG signal distorted from the user"s movements. This study suggested a design method of the Kalman filter to solve the problem, and evaluated the performances of a proposed method by PPG signals containing motion artifacts. In the results of experiments that compared with a variable step size adaptive filter proposed in recently, the proposed method showed better performance than an adaptive filter.