Surface chest motion decomposition for cardiovascular monitoring

Surface chest motion can be easily monitored with a wide variety of sensors such as pressure belts, fiber Bragg gratings and inertial sensors, etc. The current applications of these sensors are mainly restricted to respiratory motion monitoring/analysis due to the technical challenges involved in separation of the cardiac motion from the dominant respiratory motion. The contribution of heart to the surface chest motion is relatively very small as compared to the respiratory motion. Further, the heart motion spectrally overlaps with the respiratory harmonics and their separation becomes even more challenging. In this paper, we approach this source separation problem with independent component analysis (ICA) framework. ICA with reference (ICA-R) yields only desired component with improved separation, but the method is highly sensitive to the reference generation. Several reference generation approaches are developed to solve the problem. Experimental validation of these proposed approaches is performed with chest displacement data and ECG obtained from healthy subjects under normal breathing and post-exercise conditions. The extracted component morphologically matches well with the collected ECG. Results show that the proposed methods perform better than conventional band pass filtering.