Abstract: Non-contact physiological monitoring technologies have advanced rapidly over the past decade, with increased clinical relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Modalities such as imaging-based photoplethysmography (iPPG), infrared thermography(IRT) , ballistocardiography (BCG), capacitively-coupled ECG (cECG), and magnetic induction enable unobtrusive measurement of vital parameters including heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR), temperature, and oxygen saturation. While these approaches improve patient comfort and reduce cross-contamination risk, their reliability during continuous monitoring remains limited due to susceptibility to motion artifacts, morphological variability, and reduced temporal coverage compared to contact-based gold-standard systems. These limitations motivate the integration of signal quality indices (SQI) and multimodal sensor fusion strategies to improve both reliability and temporal coverage of non-contact monitoring.

This work proposes two clinically relevant methodologies to enhance the reliability of continuous non-contact physiological monitoring, validated against reference contact-based systems. First, a decision-level multimodal fusion framework guided by SQI is introduced to improve temporal coverage by fusing visible-spectrum imaging and BCG signals (N=20). The proposed fusion approach achieves an increased temporal coverage of 92.5–100%, compared to 85–95% for BCG alone and 82.5–97.5% for imaging alone. Second, a bed-based non-contact cardiopulmonary monitoring method using BCG signals is presented, leveraging the physiological phenomenon of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) to jointly estimate HR and RR (N = 25). The method demonstrates strong agreement with reference measurements, achieving correlations of R = 0.92 for HR and R = 0.86 for RR. Collectively, the results demonstrate improved robustness, accuracy, and increased temporal coverage, highlighting the potential of SQI-driven frameworks for reliable continuous non-contact vital sign monitoring.

All are cordially invited.

Event Details
Title: Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Improved Non-contact Vitals Monitoring
Date: April 28, 2026 at 03:00 PM
Venue: ESB 244 / Google Meet (http://meet.google.com/ocu-ccmd-ywo)
Speaker: Mr. Clive (EE22S059)
Guide: Dr. Mohanasankar S
Type: MS seminar

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