City Research Online

Abstract

With the continued development and rapid growth of wearable technologies, PPG has become increasingly common in everyday consumer devices such as smartphones and watches. There is, however, minimal knowledge on the effect of the contact pressure exerted by the sensor device on the PPG signal and how it might affect its morphology and the parameters being calculated. This study explores a controlled in vitro study to investigate the effect of continually applied contact pressure on PPG signals (signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and 17 morphological PPG features) from an artificial tissue-vessel phantom across a range of simulated blood pressure values. This experiment confirmed that for reflectance PPG signal measurements for a given anatomical model, there exists an optimum sensor contact pressure (between 35.1 mmHg and 48.1 mmHg). Statistical analysis shows that temporal morphological features are less affected by contact pressure, lending credit to the hypothesis that for some physiological parameters, such as heart rate and respiration rate, the contact pressure of the sensor is of little significance, whereas the amplitude and geometric features can show significant change, and care must be taken when using morphological analysis for parameters such as SpO2 and assessing autonomic responses.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	photoplethysmography (PPG); tissue phantoms; artificial blood vessels; contact pressure; signal to noise ratio; PPG features
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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