Evaluation of ensemble averaging methods in 3D ballistocardiography

Ballistocardiography (BCG) is a non-invasive technique which measures the acceleration of a body induced by cardiovascular activity, namely the force exerted by the beating heart. Measuring a BCG in a gravity-free environment provides ideal conditions where the subject is completely decoupled from its environment. Furthermore, because gravity constrains the motion in two dimensions, the non-negligible accelerations taking place in the third dimension are lost. In every experimental situation, the measured BCG signal contains artifacts pertaining to different causes. One of them is the undesirable involuntary movements of the subject. Ensemble averaging (EA) tackles the issue of constructing a typical one cardiac cycle BCG signal which best represents a longer recording. The present work compares state-of-the-art EA methods and proposes two novel techniques, one taking into account the ECG sub-intervals and the other one based on Dynamic Time Warping. The effects of lung volume are also assessed.