Vision based Measurement of Arterial Pulse Rate

Abstract

As per modern medical Science, doctors measure a pulse of an individual to know the heart strength and to know whether any irregularities in the rhythm of a person’s heart. It helps doctors to get an indication whether the patient has a severe heart condition or other medical problem that means it will just indicate them the condition of one’s heart and make them do further tests to know the conditions of other body parts. The Ayurvedic pulse diagnosis method also says, by palpating on the radial artery, one can know if there are any anomalies in any of the body parts or internal organs like Heart, kidney, spleen, bladder, liver, small intestine, etc., all at once. Both methods tell us the importance of Pulse, and there can be other ways to measure it. Here we tried to measure the heart rate visually using image processing. Blood pulse is a pressure wave of distension caused due to contraction and relaxation of heart muscles. Here we made a measurement system which can measure the pulse rate in the visible range. The pulse rate is found by measuring one of the pulses from the radial artery. This system uses image processing to make the pulsation of our artery visible in a regular video of one’s wrist along the radial artery, which was earlier not visible. Then further using KLT tracker and PCA we convert this exaggerated pulsation from a video to a one-dimensional signal to get a clear idea of how the trajectory of the radial artery in the video and after analyzing it we get the pulse rate of an individual. Found was the heart rate of subjects which was validated right using a Heart Rate monitoring device. This system can be used to detect the ailments or anomalies in the different organ of a person and get a treatment accordingly by experts, or this system can be further enhanced to measure all the three pulses from the radial artery which will be helpful because it is a non-invasive method, quick, cheap and unbiased.