HandRate: Heart Rate Monitoring While Simply Holding a Smartphone

We present HandRate, the first smartphone-based system using a standard sensor (accelerometer) for opportunistically computing heart rate while a user holds their phone. Fundamentally, HandRate revisits ballistocardiography (BCG), a century-old technique for monitoring heart activity by measuring the body movement caused by the cardiac cycle. Traditionally performed using custom hardware, attached to a subject’s body, revisiting BCG for the smartphone, held in hand, faces several challenges. The hand is an external organ furthest from the aorta and subject to motion artifacts, leading to a weak and noisy signal, while the position the phone is held in can impact which accelerometer axis best captures BCG. HandRate addresses these challenges by introducing a design involving two modules operating in tandem: the first aimed at transforming the accelerometer readings into a single-dimensional signal oblivious to how the phone is held, while the second module making heartbeat predictions based on this signal. Results from testing HandRate using data collected from 18 subjects show that it can estimate heart rate with accuracy similar to or better than systems requiring special sensors and/or active user participation.