Non-Contact Heart Rate Monitoring in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit using RGB Camera

Heart rate (HR) measurement is crucial for newborn infant monitoring in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The widely used contact HR measurement methods based on electrocardiography (ECG) and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals can lead to discomfort and possible skin irritation on neonates, which limit its application in NICU scenarios. In this work, we propose a non-contact HR monitoring method simply using a RGB camera. Eulerian video magnification (EVM) is employed to detect the subtle changes of neonatal faces results from blood circulation. The magnified signal is then transformed to the spectral domain to extract HR information. Compared with the widely investigated independent component analysis (ICA)-based HR measurement method using video recordings, the proposed method can achieve the real time HR measurement, which is a significant superiority in NICU neonatal monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to employ EVM algorithm in real time neonatal HR monitoring.