Remote Measurements of Heart and Respiration Rates for Telemedicine

Fang Zhao, Meng Li, Yi Qian, Joe Z. Tsien, Ioannis P. Androulakis
2013 PLoS ONE  
Non-contact and low-cost measurements of heart and respiration rates are highly desirable for telemedicine. Here, we describe a novel technique to extract blood volume pulse and respiratory wave from a single channel images captured by a video camera for both day and night conditions. The principle of our technique is to uncover the temporal dynamics of heart beat and breathing rate through delay-coordinate transformation and independent component analysis-based deconstruction of the single
more » ... nel images. Our method further achieves robust elimination of false positives via applying ratio-variation probability distributions filtering approaches. Moreover, it enables a much needed low-cost means for preventing sudden infant death syndrome in new born infants and detecting stroke and heart attack in elderly population in home environments. This noncontact-based method can also be applied to a variety of animal model organisms for biomedical research.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071384 pmid:24115996 pmcid:PMC3792902 fatcat:6eheuklscjfutcrigflbyrtbvm