Fusion estimation of respiration rate from ECG and PPG signal based on Android platform and wearable watch

We have developed a health system based on Android platform and wearable watch to serve as a portable monitor and analyser for several physiological parameters. The raw photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms were continuously collected on the wearable watch and transmitted to the Android phone/tablet by Bluetooth low energy (BLE) protocol. A robust transfer protocol was applied to reduce the impact of packet loss. The feature points of filtered ECG were extracted by Pan Tompkins QRS detection algorithm and that of PPG was extracted by a slope-based algorithm. A kurtosis-based algorithm was implemented to indirectly estimate the respiration rate (PR) through feature fusion without additional respiratory sensor node. All physiological parameters can be stored in the Android device and transmitted to remote server for further analysis. The preliminary experiment results demonstrated that the proposed portable system was suitable for daily monitoring of ECG, PPG and PR, and achieved the expected accuracy.