Efficient Deep Learning-based Estimation of the Vital Signs on Smartphones
This work addresses the need for efficient, on-device health monitoring for the elderly or those with diseases, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods by reducing implementation overhead.
The research tackled the problem of estimating vital signs like heart rate and respiratory rate on smartphones by proposing a novel end-to-end deep learning solution that eliminates pre-processing steps, resulting in a model with fewer parameters and lower computational complexity.
With the increasing use of smartphones in our daily lives, these devices have become capable of performing many complex tasks. Concerning the need for continuous monitoring of vital signs, especially for the elderly or those with certain types of diseases, the development of algorithms that can estimate vital signs using smartphones has attracted researchers worldwide. In particular, researchers have been exploring ways to estimate vital signs, such as heart rate, oxygen saturation levels, and respiratory rate, using algorithms that can be run on smartphones. However, many of these algorithms require multiple pre-processing steps that might introduce some implementation overheads or require the design of a couple of hand-crafted stages to obtain an optimal result. To address this issue, this research proposes a novel end-to-end solution to mobile-based vital sign estimation using deep learning that eliminates the need for pre-processing. By using a fully convolutional architecture, the proposed model has much fewer parameters and less computational complexity compared to the architectures that use fully-connected layers as the prediction heads. This also reduces the risk of overfitting. Additionally, a public dataset for vital sign estimation, which includes 62 videos collected from 35 men and 27 women, is provided. Overall, the proposed end-to-end approach promises significantly improved efficiency and performance for on-device health monitoring on readily available consumer electronics.