Recently, supplying healthcare services with wearable devices has been investigated. To realize this for true wireless stereo (TWS), which has limited resources (e.g. space, power consumption, and area), implementing multiple functions with one sensor simultaneously is required. The Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor is a representative healthcare sensor that measures repeated data according to the heart rate. However, since the PPG data are biological, they are influenced by motion artifact and subject characteristics. Hence, noise reduction is needed for PPG data. In this paper, we propose the distance estimation algorithm for PPG signals of TWS. For distance estimation, we designed a waveform adjustment (WA) filter that minimizes noise while maintaining the relationship between before and after data, a lightweight deep learning model called MobileNet, and a PPG monitoring testbed. The number of criteria for distance estimation was set to three. In order to verify the proposed algorithm, we compared several metrics with other filters and AI models. The highest accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score of the proposed algorithm were 92.5%, 92.6%, 92.8%, and 0.927, respectively, when the signal length was 15. Experimental results of other algorithms showed higher metrics than the proposed algorithm in some cases, but the proposed model showed the fastest inference time.
Keywords: distance estimation; embedded system; noise reduction; photoplethysmography (PPG); true wireless stereo (TWS); waveform adjustment (WA).