Wavelet Analysis and Self-Similarity of Photoplethysmography Signals for HRV Estimation and Quality Assessment

Peak-to-peak intervals in Photoplethysmography (PPG) can be used for heart rate variability (HRV) estimation if the PPG is collected from a healthy person at rest. Many factors, such as a person’s movements or hardware issues, can affect the signal quality and make some parts of the PPG signal unsuitable for reliable peak detection. Therefore, a robust HRV estimation algorithm should not only detect peaks, but also identify corrupted signal parts. We introduce such an algorithm in this paper. It uses continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for peak detection and a combination of features derived from CWT and metrics based on PPG signals’ self-similarity to identify corrupted parts. We tested the algorithm on three different datasets: a newly introduced Welltory-PPG-dataset containing PPG signals collected with smartphones using the Welltory app, and two publicly available PPG datasets: TROIKAand PPG-DaLiA. The algorithm demonstrated good accuracy in peak-to-peak intervals detection and HRV metric estimation.