Development of a FPGA-based contactless pulse rate detection system

Contactless physiological measurement is a new trend for long-term monitoring and future home care. Remote image photo-plethysmography (RIPPG) is one of data acquisition method for contactless measurement. Nowadays, the presented frameworks are mostly developed based on PC or smartphone. However, the large scale of image and signal operations can cause the performance issues for image capturing and computing on software based platforms. In this paper, we propose a contactless pulse rate detection system based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform to evaluate user's pulse rate. With hardware support, it provides a steadier frame rate for instant operations regardless the computation scales. The system contains an image sensor, DE2-115 FPGA board, Bluetooth module and a smartphone. The pulse rate accuracy of the proposed system is 0.19±7.8 bpm after validating with a clinical used apparatus. In the future, the system can be integrated with sick beds for home caring and hospitalizing usages.