Abstract
Videoplethysmography (VPG) has been studied for more than a decade and recently found useful as a tool for touchless measurement of the human pulse. The principle of measurement lies in subtle changes of skin color due to filling of subcutaneous capillary vessels with blood and emptying in the rhythm of pulse. Most authors assume the measurement video footage is taken at the face or forehead due to good perfusion, dense capillary network, most fragile skin and good visibility in most humans. However, a setup requiring the subject facing to the camera is impractical and we found interesting to explore how the accuracy of the method degrades with moving the area of observation to other uncovered parts of the body. In this paper we compared the VPG from three simultaneously captured video tracks and the ECG-based reference beat recorder as sources of the pulse information. The principal finding is that consistency between VPG pulse measurements made at the forehead, cheek and interclavicular region is high (1.28 bpm), despite occasional high absolute error (up to 3.9 bpm). The reliability of the VPG measurement is the highest at the forehead and drops in other regions without affecting the measurement accuracy.
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Research supported by the AGH University of Science and Technology in year 2019 from the subvention granted by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
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Mędrala, R., Augustyniak, P. (2020). Taking Videoplethysmographic Measurements at Alternative Parts of the Body – Pilot Study. In: Korbicz, J., Maniewski, R., Patan, K., Kowal, M. (eds) Current Trends in Biomedical Engineering and Bioimages Analysis. PCBEE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1033. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29885-2_17
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