Heart action monitoring from pulse signals using a growing hybrid polynomial network

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a common used noninvasive test to quickly detect the heart problem with high precision. However, devices used to collect continuous ECG waveforms under free-living conditions have several operational difficulties. As an alternative, photoplethysmography (PPG) signals can be conveniently collected by pulse sensors, which can be mounted onto wearable devices. In this paper, we study the relation between ECG waveforms and PPG signals by proposing a novel growing hybrid polynomial network (GHPN)). Based on the projections between adjacent layers, the network is designed to approximate the target signals with the recorded inputs and the multi-scale dynamics of the input series are explored gradually through the growth of layers. Two public datasets are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on the accuracy of waveform reconstruction and heart rate (HR) detection with the widely used metrics. Compared with the reference ECG waveforms, the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of the proposed approach is 0.248 and 0.216 for PPG-Dalia and CapnoBase datasets, which is smaller than the comparison approaches. The average absolute value (AAE) between the detected HR and reference HR is 0.93 and 1.05 for PPG-Dalia and CapnoBase datasets, which exhibit higher HR detection accuracy. Experimental results obtained from benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed method can achieve higher similarity on the reconstructed morphology with higher HR detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed approach make it possible to employ PPG sensors for long-term monitoring of the heart actions with higher precision.