Robust heart rate monitoring by a wearable stethoscope based on signal processing

Abstract

Heart rate monitoring is of great importance for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases or the assessment of mental status. The most popular methods are electrocardiography (ECG) on the thorax in the hospital and photoplethysmography (PPG) on the dorsum manus in daily life. In this work inspired by auscultation, a wearable stethoscope with biocompatible adhesives was designed and assembled along with an application for robust heart rate monitoring. The geometry of the adhesives was firstly optimized, and the device was compared to PPG with several advantages. Then it was demonstrated on different arteries of the body. Algorithms were performed to make our device robust under some motion artifacts or environmental noise. At last, the accuracy of our device for continuous heart rate monitoring compared with ECG as the gold standard indicates that our system could potentially provide a new wearable technology, which could help realize early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases or mental illness related to abnormal heart rate within different time scales.