Summit Vitals: Multi-Camera and Multi-Signal Biosensing at High Altitudes
This work addresses the problem of non-invasive vital monitoring for individuals in high-altitude settings, presenting incremental improvements through dataset creation and fusion methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of monitoring physiological signals like heart rate and blood oxygen in high-altitude environments by introducing the SUMS dataset and multi-camera fusion techniques, achieving reductions in mean absolute error for SpO2 predictions by up to 17.8% and cross-subject MAE of less than 0.5 BPM for HR and 2.5% for SpO2.
Video photoplethysmography (vPPG) is an emerging method for non-invasive and convenient measurement of physiological signals, utilizing two primary approaches: remote video PPG (rPPG) and contact video PPG (cPPG). Monitoring vitals in high-altitude environments, where heart rates tend to increase and blood oxygen levels often decrease, presents significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce the SUMS dataset comprising 80 synchronized non-contact facial and contact finger videos from 10 subjects during exercise and oxygen recovery scenarios, capturing PPG, respiration rate (RR), and SpO2. This dataset is designed to validate video vitals estimation algorithms and compare facial rPPG with finger cPPG. Additionally, fusing videos from different positions (i.e., face and finger) reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) of SpO2 predictions by 7.6\% and 10.6\% compared to only face and only finger, respectively. In cross-subject evaluation, we achieve an MAE of less than 0.5 BPM for HR estimation and 2.5\% for SpO2 estimation, demonstrating the precision of our multi-camera fusion techniques. Our findings suggest that simultaneous training on multiple indicators, such as PPG and blood oxygen, can reduce MAE in SpO2 estimation by 17.8\%.