PPGSynth: An Innovative Toolbox for Synthesizing Regular and Irregular Photoplethysmography Waveforms

Frontiers in Medicine

article

Qunfeng Tang¹  Zhencheng Chen²  John Allen³  Aymen Alian⁵  Carlo Menon⁶  Rabab Ward¹  Mohamed Elgendi¹ 

[1] Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia;School of Electronic Engineering and Automation, Guilin University of Electronic Technology;Faculty of Medical Sciences, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, United Kingdom;Research Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, Coventry University, United Kingdom;Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, United States;School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering, Simon Fraser University;Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia;BC Children's & Women's Hospital

关键词: digital health;    data modeling;    data generation;    big data;    biosignal generation;    PPG construction;    signal simulation;    generative model;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmed.2020.597774

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly used in digital health, exceptionally in smartwatches. The PPG signal contains valuable information about heart activity, and there is lots of research interest in its means and analysis for cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, there is no arrhythmic PPG dataset publicly available—this paper attempt to provide a toolbox that can generate synthesized arrhythmic PPG signals. The model of a single PPG pulse in this toolbox utilizes two combined Gaussian functions. This toolbox supports synthesizing PPG waveform with regular heartbeats and three irregular heartbeats: compensation, interpolation, and reset. The user can generate a large amount of PPG data with a certain irregularity, with different sampling frequency, time length, and a range of noise types (Gaussian noise and multi-frequency noise) can be added to the synthesized PPG which can all be modified from the interface, and different types of arrhythmic PPGs (as calculated by the model) generated. The generation for large PPG datasets that simulate PPG collected from real humans could be used for testing the robustness of developed algorithms that are targeting arrhythmic PPG signals. Our PPG synthesis tool is publicly available.

【 授权许可】

CC BY