Characterization of Artifact Signals in Neck Photoplethysmography

The neck is a very attractive measurement location for multimodal physiological monitoring, since it offers the possibility of extracting clinically relevant parameters, which cannot be obtained from other body locations, such as lung volumes. It is for this reason that obtaining PPG from the neck would be of interest. PPG signals, however, are very susceptible to artifacts which greatly compromise their quality. But the extent of this is going to depend on, the nature of the artifacts and the strength of the sensed signal, both of which are location dependent. This paper presents for the first time the characterization of artifacts affecting neck PPG signals.

Neck PPG data was recorded from 19 participants, who performed ten different activities to deliberately introduce common artifacts. 41 PPG features were extracted and statistically analyzed to investigate which ones showed the greatest ability to differentiate normal PPG from each artifact. A customized minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) feature selection approach was implemented, to select the top 10 features.

Artifacts caused by Swallowing, Yawning and Coughing exhibited larger Spectral Entropy, Average Power and smaller Spectral Kurtosis, than normal PPG. Head movement artifacts, also demonstrated highly disordered and noisy frequency spectra, and were characterized by having larger and irregular time domain features. In addition, the analysis showed that different respiratory states that could be of clinical interests, such as presence of apneas, were also distinguishable from sources of interference.

These findings are important for the development of PPG denoising algorithms and subsequent obtention of biomarkers of interest, or alternatively for applications where the events of interest are the artifacts themselves.