Essay On Pulse Signal Analysis

Introduction

Traditional Indian medicine has been using the radial pulse in order to examine the health condition of a person for over more than 5000 years. The basis of pulse diagnosis lies in three radial pulses which are known as vata, pitta, and kapha. They exhibit different characteristics in terms of their amplitude, frequency, regularity, etc. The features related to the radial signals are important from diagnostic point of view.

The computerized pulse signal analysis has shown promises to the modernization of traditional pulse diagnosis, such as the pulse pattern recognition, the pulse series analysis and so on. It can be achieved in three stages, as shown in Figure 1. These three stages are acquisition, pre-processing and analysis.

A pressure sensor is used to convert a physical phenomenon of force into a measurable electrical signal typically a voltage or current signal. DAQ card NI9219 is used which acts as the interface between the computer and the force measurement device i.e pressure sensor. Its primary function is to digitize the incoming analog signals so that the computer can interpret them. The recorded raw signal is most often affected by noise and artifacts. Processing that contaminated signal will give false information which may lead to incorrect results. To avoid such problem, pre-processing of raw pulse signal is necessary. Analysis includes the extraction of features and further analyzing the various comparisons and variations between the signal patterns and data points etc.

According to Traditional Indian medicine pulse regularity is one of the main characteristics for a healthy person. During acquisition process the signal get affected by factors like body movements, circuit interferences, etc. That results in the presence of abnormal items in data series called artifacts. It becomes impossible to conduct the intended analysis of morphological feature extraction from the signal itself. Most of these artifacts could not be removed through the signal filtering alone. If not properly identified and removed, they may largely affect the results of the performed