Online Heart Rate Prediction using Acceleration from a Wrist Worn Wearable

Abstract: In this paper we study the prediction of heart rate from acceleration using a wrist worn wearable. Although existing photoplethysmography (PPG) heart rate sensors provide reliable measurements, they use considerably more energy than accelerometers and have a major impact on battery life of wearable devices. By using energy-efficient accelerometers to predict heart rate, significant energy savings can be made. Further, we are interested in understanding patient recovery after a heart rate intervention, where we expect a variation in heart rate over time. Therefore, we propose an online approach to tackle the concept as time passes. We evaluate the methods on approximately 4 weeks of free living data from three patients over a number of months. We show that our approach can achieve good predictive performance (e.g., 2.89 Mean Absolute Error) while using the PPG heart rate sensor infrequently (e.g., 20.25% of the samples).