Imaging Photoplethysmography: Signal Waveform Analysis

Imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) is used to remotely measure the blood volume pulse using a camera. Traditionally, it has been employed to estimate heart and respiratory rates, and recently blood pressure and oxygen saturation. Biomedical engineering researchers have become increasingly interested in iPPG because of its several advantages as comfort, non-invasive, simple, non-stressful and inexpensive characteristics. Moreover, the results of the waveform signal analysis obtained by the conducted studies on contact PPG sensors made the use of iPPG a more promising technique for early screening of various atherosclerotic and cardiovascular pathologies. iPPG waveform has not been studied before. In this paper we process the iPPG signal obtained using a camera to extract its waveform features such as areas and time parameters. These features will make possible a non-contact estimation of arterial stiffness and early diagnosis of many cardiovascular pathologies. The obtained results show a high correlation with those obtained by an approved contact PPG sensor.