A Highly Configurable Platform for Advanced PPG Analysis

Growing interest in healthcare applications has made biomedical engineering one of the fastest growing disciplines in recent years. Photoplethysmography (PPG) is one of these trends since PPG sensors are embedded into many devices like smartwatches or oximeters. Due to the versatility of PPG, it is the technique of choice for the non-invasive monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation and blood pressure. However, commercial pulse oximeters often use proprietary data acquisition and visualization techniques, making digital signal processing on raw data difficult or impossible. This paper presents a hardware platform for the exploration of new biological signal analysis based on PPG. The originality of the platform is to expand the number of wavelengths to 8 and to allow the parameterization of the acquisition by choosing the sample rate. This allows the PPG sensor to be adapted to the needs of analysis on the whole signal or perform high precision measurements. Much consideration has been given to the accurate data acquisition during sports activities.