A Novel Scheme Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Multiple Denoising Technologies for Heartbeat Rate Estimation

ABSTRACT

In the face of the serious aging of the global population and the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, monitoring human vital signs such as heart rate is very important to save lives. For more accurate heartbeat detection, we propose a heartbeat detection scheme based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and multiple technologies of noise and interference suppression. First, a filter is designed to suppress the impulse noise and reduce the loss of useful signal information. Then, VMD is performed to decompose the pre-processed vital signs into a series of intrinsic mode function (IMF) components. Thirdly, much attention is paid on denoising of IMF components corresponding to the heartbeat signals, an improved wavelet threshold denoising method is proposed to process these IMF components and reconstruct the heartbeat signal. Finally, an adaptive notch filter is used to process the residual respiratory harmonics in the reconstructed heartbeat signal. To verify the heartbeat detection accuracy of our method, the results are compared with a reliable reference sensor. Our results show that the mean average absolute error (AAE) of heart rate estimated by the proposed method is 1.06 bpm, which is 7.51 bpm better than the original method. © 2022 IEEE.