Essential Feature Extraction of Photoplethysmography Signal of Men and Women in Their 20s

This study aims to extract the essential features of Photoplethysmography (PPG)signal of men and women in healthy subjects using Power Spectral Density (PSD) and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). A PPG instrument was used to obtain the PPG signal of 15 men and 15 women. Using PSD, four frequency bands were selected to divide the spectral component.The areas within the frequency bands relative to the total area were computed as features of the signals. Furthermore, using DFA, the average fluctuation F(w) was computed. The feature extraction using this technique produced 4 features from different windows. Hurst exponent was calculated to analyse the characteristics of the time series. For comparing the feature extraction techniques, Heart Rate (HR) and Peak to Peak Interval (PPI) were computed. Additionally, F and T tests for all techniques were computed to determine the differences between man and woman features that have been gathered using these two techniques. The results indicate that the features of PPG signals of men and women using PSD and DFA were significantly different. In order to evaluate the results, a clustering analysis was applied to the results using K-means clustering technique. The clustering plots show that the features were well distributed into the two groups