Estimating Heart Rate and Respiratory Rate from a Single Lead Electrocardiogram Using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and Spectral Data Fusion

Cardiopulmonary monitoring is important and useful for diagnosing and managing multiple conditions, such as stress and sleep disorders. Wearable ambulatory systems can provide continuous, comfortable, and inexpensive means for monitoring; it always has been a research subject in recent years. Being simple and cost-effective, electrocardiogram-based commercial products can be found in the market that provides cardiac diagnostic information for assessment, including heart rate measurement and atrial fibrillation identification. Based on a data-driven and self-adaptive approach, this study aims to estimate heart rate and respiratory rate simultaneously from one lead electrocardiogram signal. In contrast to ensemble empirical mode decomposition with principle component analysis, performed in the time domain, our method uses spectral data fusion, together with intrinsic mode functions using ensemble empirical mode decomposition obtains a more accurate heart rate and respiratory rate. Equipped with a rule-based selection of defined frequency levels for respiratory rate (RR) estimation, the proposed method obtains (0.92, 1.32) beat per minute for the heart rate and (2.20, 2.92) breath per minute for the respiratory rate as their mean absolute error and root mean square error, respectively outperforming other existing methods.