Fang Zhao, Meng Li, Yi Qian, Joe Z. Tsien

Non-contact and low-cost measurements of heart and respiration rates are highly desirable for telemedicine. Here, we describe a novel technique to extract blood volume pulse and respiratory wave from a single channel images captured by a video camera for both day and night conditions. The principle of our technique is to uncover the temporal dynamics of heart beat and breathing rate through delay-coordinate transformation and independent component analysis-based deconstruction of the single channel images. Our method further achieves robust elimination of false positives via applying ratio-variation probability distributions filtering approaches. Moreover, it enables a much needed low-cost means for preventing sudden infant death syndrome in new born infants and detecting stroke and heart attack in elderly population in home environments. This noncontact-based method can also be applied to a variety of animal model organisms for biomedical research.