Evaluating the robustness of a contact-less mHealth solution for personal and remote monitoring of blood oxygen saturation

Abstract

MHealth technologies play a fundamental role in epidemiological situations such as the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 because they allow people to self-monitor their health status (e.g. vital parameters) at any time and place, without necessarily having to physically go to a medical clinic. Among vital parameters, special care should be given to monitor blood oxygen saturation (SpO₂), whose abnormal values are a warning sign for potential COVID-19 infection. SpO₂ is commonly measured through the pulse oximeter that requires skin contact and hence could be a potential way of spreading contagious infections. To overcome this problem, we have recently developed a contact-less mHealth solution that can measure blood oxygen saturation without any contact device but simply processing short facial videos acquired by any common mobile device equipped with a camera. Facial video frames are processed in real-time to extract the remote photoplethysmographic signal useful to estimate the SpO₂ value. Such a solution promises to be an easy-to-use tool for both personal and remote monitoring of SpO₂. However, the use of mobile devices in daily situations holds some challenges in comparison to the controlled laboratory scenarios. One main issue is the frequent change of perspective viewpoint due to head movements, which makes it more difficult to identify the face and measure SpO₂. The focus of this work is to assess the robustness of our mHealth solution to head movements. To this aim, we carry out a pilot study on the benchmark PURE dataset that takes into account different head movements during the measurement. Experimental results show that the SpO₂ values obtained by our solution are not only reliable, since they are comparable with those obtained with a pulse oximeter, but are also insensitive to head motion, thus allowing a natural interaction with the mobile acquisition device.

Keywords: Blood oxygen saturation; COVID-19; Remote Photopletismography - rPPG; Self-monitoring; Signal and Video Processing; mHealth.