Comparison Empatica E3 / Mio Alpha / Polar H7

This document compares the performances of Empatica E3 and Mio Alpha into different working conditions. During sessions, the two devices were worn on left and right wrists. The control signal is represented by a recording of Polar H7 in parallel with the two compared devices.

Recording during a morning commute to Empaticas office

Figure 1 shows heart rate signals acquired in parallel by the three systems. At the beginning of the session a colleague is sitting in a train, then walks to the metro, stands in it, and finally gets to the office. From the graphs it is pretty easy to recognize the four phases: - Relaxed train journey, roughly from 08:30 to 09:50; - Ten minutes of light physical activity (walk) to get from the station platform to the underground metro platform; - Gradual relaxation on the metro train, till about 10:10; - Final walk from the metro station to the office, recognizable by the heart rate (HR) increase at the end of the session

Figure 1: Heart rate during morning commute Zooming into the session it is possible to see how the three signals behave, as shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3.

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Figure 2: Comparison during resting condition

Figure 3: Comparison during noisy condition

! Mio Alphas features

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Mio Alpha is characterized by two peculiar features. Firstly, the HR is usually exactly the same for more than one beat (it is visible by further zooming the Matlab figure Empatica-MioGlobal-Polar.fig attached; if this is not a convenient format please let us know). This is probably achieved by averaging subsequent beats. Secondly, Alpha applies a strong low-pass filter to the raw interbeat interval (IBI) sequence. That is why the HR signal has a slow responsiveness, as visible especially in the right end of Figure 2. Such a strategy is effective in hiding/masking misidentified beats. The two just-mentioned characteristics entail an important drawback. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is nothing but how variable the heartbeat is. Therefore this phenomenon is represented by the spikes one can see in any HR sequence, or equivalently in the interbeat interval sequence. An averaging operation coupled with a strong low-pass filtering, completely kills the information content related to HRV. It must be said that the use case of Alpha is heavy physical activity in which, to a first approximation, HRV is not extremely important. But in case of physical activity that requires wrist movement, as it happens in most sports and sometimes even while running, the filtering strategy results weak rather often (see Figure 3). This point will be better explored in subsection Empatica E3s Features.

Polar H7s features

It is interesting to observe how Polar H7, the consumer gold standard currently available, has problems when the chest moves. Even while chest deformations are little (i.e. during walk) some beats are wrongly identified. The artifact enclosed by the black ovals is the most typical and consists in recognizing a one-lead ECG signal peak which does not correspond to the actual systole, mainly because of noise. The one enclosed by the light blue oval, namely one or more missing beats, is due to a plain check applied by us that eliminates beats outside any reasonable physiological range. As a consequence, there is a hole in the sequence that is not visible in Figure 3 simply because points are interconnected by a continuous line. Leaving a hole in it is preferable to taking for good senseless beats, given the proper expedients that will be briefly explained below. As it can be seen in Figure 3, it might happen that when E3 fails H7 fails too. Importantly, misbehavior of H7 might also depend on the conditions of the chest stripe. We experienced that performances degrade even if the stripe does not seem to be worn out. The fact that it is impossible to univocally evaluate when it is time to replace the strap, it is both a technical and a cost flaw that wristwatch-type systems do not have. Just a note on this topic, we developed a software tool to identify and discard wrong beats that follow typical patterns, such as the one aforementioned. The resulting signal will have a number of holes that depends on how severe recording conditions are. Traditional methods of spectral analysis are not reliable in this case, therefore we implemented a more advanced algorithm to extract the frequency bands necessary to calculate HRV. This IBI corrector was not applied to the signals analyzed in the present document, except for the plain elimination of senseless beats in the H7s trace, because the goal is comparing the outputs of Empatica E3 and Mio Alpha. However, our system is configured to easily incorporate this tool into the E3.

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Moreover, lately we have upgraded algorithms of beat recognition and HRV calculation. These are currently under offline testing and will be transferred to the mobile app in the next month.

Empatica E3s features

As many know, the primary limit of photoplethysmography (PPG) is movements artifact, which can be split into two main categories: tissue (or local) movement and global movement. This taxonomy is crucial as both sources of noise have the same effect on the blood volume pulse (BVP) signal, but they can be reduced, or even eliminated, through diverse methods. Based on the experience gained during our research, we understood that tissue movement, i.e. movement that is located between sensors and blood, is strongly correlated with our bichromatic signal and very weakly correlated with the acceleration signal. Therefore tendons and other structures that move underneath the photodiode tend to blind the signal. Our differential signal contains bvp + blinding info as well as blinding info alone, therefore bvp info is extractable through smartly differencing the two pieces of information. As Figure 2 and Figure 3 show, HRV is preserved in most cases despite the presence of noise. The concept mentioned above seems to be confirmed by Alphas session, in fact during noisy condition the frequency goes up to about 170 bpm. We commonly experience the same behavior when we turn off our differencing system, since a strong high frequency disturbance is superimposed to the BVP signal. Note that when we move fingers, movement is usually repeated at a frequency that equals some events per second. On the contrary, when the system wrist+device moves with respect to the ground reference, a disturbance appears that is strongly correlated with acceleration signals and fairly correlated with the bichromatic signal. We have not exploited acceleration signals yet, therefore sometimes we still have problems when the arm moves (see Figure 3). This is not a concern, the task requires properly conditioning the acceleration signal and merging it with the bichromatic signal. So far we have preferred to defer this operation to other priorities in the development.

Conclusions
We believe Alpha exploits accelerometers to compensate noise, in fact running is an activity characterized by extremely repetitive accelerations. Together with a strong numerical filter, that has the flaw of suppressing HRV, they seem to manage to sense an averaged HR while running. We have not tested it yet in this condition, but some crowdfunding backers did (see http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2012/07/hands-on-look-at-mio-alpha-strapless.html for instance) Summarizing, Alpha is very effective whenever the arm swings but loses efficacy when the wrist is not still (e.g. walking and chatting on the smartphone). We are confident Empatica E3 can satisfactorily meet both goals, given its wider sensor and the bichromatic system.

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