Spot and continuous monitoring of heart rate by combining time and frequency domain analysis of photoplethysmographic signals at rest conditions

Heart rate (HR) is one of the vital signs in healthcare monitoring systems. The traditional medical devices are very expensive and the accessibility of these devices is limited. So the objective is to propose an efficient framework to monitor the HR at on‐demand and continuous modes during rest conditions, which are a typical use case. The proposed framework is based on combining the time‐domain (TD) and frequency‐domain (FD) analysis. This hybrid approach would handle the different signal conditions to improve the results. The proposed method is compared with the standard ECG device and the real‐time results show that the HR is calculated accurately with an average pass percentage of 97.85, mean absolute percentage error of 1.99%, mean absolute error of 1.51 BPM and reference closeness factor of 0.977. The reliable on‐demand HR output from the proposed method comes in 6th second, which is the minimum possible time. The results show that the proposed method is efficient in estimating the HR and the results are comparable with other methods. So the proposed method can be targeted to wearable devices to accurately monitor the HR at rest conditions.