Blind Source Separation on Non-Contact Heartbeat Detection by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Algorithms.

In non-contact heart rate (HR) monitoring via Doppler radar, the disturbance from respiration and/or body motion is treated as a key problem on the estimation of HR. This paper proposes a blind source separation (BSS) approach to mitigate the noise effect in the received radar signal, and incorporates the sparse spectrum reconstruction to achieve a high-resolution of heartbeat spectrum. The proposed BSS decomposes the spectrogram of mixture signal into original sources, including heartbeat, using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms, through learning the complete basis spectra (BS) by a hierarchical clustering. In particular, to exploit the temporal sparsity of heartbeat component, two variants of NMF algorithms with sparseness constraints are applied as well, namely sparse NMF and weighted sparse NMF. Compared with usual BSS, our proposed BSS has three advantages: 1) clustering-induced unsupervised manner; 2) compact demixing architecture; and 3) merely requiring single-channel input data. In addition, the HR estimation method using our proposal delivers more satisfactory precision and robustness over other existing methods, which is demonstrated through the measurements of distinguishing people's activities, gaining both smallest absolute errors of HR estimation for sitting still and typewriting.

Novel CA-CFAR Approach for Improvement of Doppler Sensor-based Heart Rate Variability Estimation.

Heart rate variability is one of major physiological parameters to reflect our stress, which has motivated researchers to investigate a Doppler sensor-based non-contact heartbeat interval estimation algorithm. As one of such methods, we have previously proposed a spectrogram-based method. In this method, the spectrum that might be due to heartbeats is integrated over a spectrogram, and then heartbeat interval is estimated by detecting peaks over the integrated spectrum. However, when a subject moves, undesired peaks with large amplitude appear, which causes the incorrect peak detection. As one of the technique to eliminate the undesired peaks with large amplitude, there is CA-CFAR (Cell Average-Constant False Alarm Rate). CA-CFAR is the technique to detect a signal, when the amplitude of a signal exceeds a threshold calculated with average amplitude of signals before and after the investigated one. However, depending on the duration of body movements, the influence of body movements might be included within the signals used for the threshold calculation, which might results in the detection failure of undesired peaks. This is because the length of GT (Guard Time) is fixed, where GT is the time to prevent the signal used for the threshold calculation from including the investigated signal components. To solve this problem, we propose a novel CA-CFAR in which the length of GT is set as the latest peak interval and only the signal before the investigated one is used so that the influence of body movements does not affect the threshold calculation. Through the experiments where a subject moves, i.e., typing, we confirmed that our spectrogram-based heart rate variability estimation method with the proposed CA-CFAR outperformed the one with CA-CFAR based on fixed GT by the RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) between the estimated heartbeat interval and the ground truth value of the one.

MUSIC-based Non-contact Heart Rate Estimation with Adaptive Window Size Setting.

Continuous HR (Heart Rate) monitoring enables the stress estimation in daily life. A Doppler sensor could be a key device to facilitate the non-contact HR estimation. As one of the Doppler sensor-based HR estimation methods, we have previously proposed a MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification)-based HR estimation method. MUSIC is the algorithm widely used as a tool to estimate DOA (Direction of Arrival). In our previous method, MUSIC spectrum is calculated in each sliding window, and then HR is estimated by the maximum peak detection over the MUSIC spectrum. However, when HR changes largely within the window, several peaks due to heartbeats appear over the MUSIC spectrum, which might cause the incorrect peak detection. Hence, an adaptive window is required so that only one peak appears. In this paper, we propose a MUSIC-based HR estimation method with an adaptive window size setting. When several peaks due to heartbeats appear over the MUSIC spectrum, our proposed method shortens the time window and re-calculates the MUSIC spectrum, which is repeated until only one peak appears. The experimental results showed that our method outperformed not only our previous one but also the other existing MUSIC-based HR estimation one in terms of the estimation accuracy of the HR, the stress indexes CVI (Cardiac Vagal Index) and CSI (Cardiac Sympathetic Index).

A Stochastic Gradient Approach for Robust Heartbeat Detection With Doppler Radar Using Time-Window-Variation Technique.

Heart rate (HR) variability indicates health condition and mental stress. The development of non-contact HR monitoring techniques with Doppler radar is attracting great attention. However, the performance of heartbeat detection via radar signals easily degrades due to respiration and body motion. In this paper, first, a stochastic gradient approach is applied to reconstruct the high-resolution spectrum of heartbeat by proposing the zero-attracting sign least-mean-square (ZA-SLMS) algorithm. To correct the quantized gradient of cost function and penalize the sparse constraint on updating the spectrum, a more accurate heartbeat spectrum is reconstructed. Then, to better adapt to the noises of different strengths caused by subjects' movements, an adaptive regularization parameter is introduced in the ZA-SLMS algorithm as an improved variant, which can adaptively regulate the proportion between gradient correction and sparse penalty. Moreover, in view of the stability of the location of the spectral peak associated with the HR when the size of time window slightly changes, a time-window-variation (TWV) technique is further incorporated in the improved ZA-SLMS (IZA-SLMS) algorithm for more stable HR estimation. Through the experiments on five subjects, our proposal is demonstrated to bring a significant improvement in accuracy compared with existing detection methods. Specifically, the IZA-SLMS algorithm with TWV achieves the smallest average error of 3.79 beats per minute when subjects type on a laptop.

Improved Sparse Adaptive Algorithms for Accurate Non-contact Heartbeat Detection Using Time-Window-Variation Technique.

Recently, a sparse adaptive algorithm termed zero-attracting sign least-mean-square (ZA-SLMS), has been clarified to be able to reconstruct robustly heartbeat spectrum by Doppler radar signal. However, since the strengths of noise evidently differ under different body motions, the sparse heartbeat spectra cannot be always acquired accurately by the constant regularization parameter (REPA) that balances the gradient correction and the sparse penalty, applying in the ZA-SLMS algorithm. In this paper, an improved ZA-SLMS algorithm is proposed by introducing adaptive REPA (AREPA), where the proportion of sparse penalty is adjusted based on the standard deviation of radar data. Moreover, to enhance the stability of heartbeat detection, a time-window-variation (TWV) technique is further introduced in the improved ZA-SLMS algorithm, considering the fact that the position of spectral peak associated with the heart rate (HR) is stable when the length of time window changes within a short period. Experimental results measured against five subjects validated that our proposal reliably improves the error of HR estimation than the standard ZA-SLMS algorithm.