Abstract
The ballistocardiogram (BCG) is a relevant unobtrusive alternative to traditional vital monitoring signals. Through the measurement of the heart’s ballistic force, representative signals can be collected that contain cardiac related health features. However, the BCG’s morphology can vary based on the measurement system and subject. This paper seeks to quantify the system-level distortion applied to measured BCG signals in a bed-based acquisition system. The characteristic “ring” of commonly acquired signals are modeled and correction techniques including ideal lowpass filtering, band stop filtering, linear predictive coding, and frequency domain deconvolution are utilized to attempt to remove this distortion. The time-domain and frequency-domain characteristics of the resulting signals are analyzed. These results document a reduction in “ring” of characteristically distorted signals and promote further research into the source of this distortion. Such results are relevant to the enhancement of understanding regarding the characteristics of bed-based BCG acquisition as well as future applications in non-contact vitals monitoring systems.
