Evaluation of Remote Monitoring Technology across different skin tone participants

BackgroundMany research studies seek to improve vital sign monitoring to enhance the conditions under which doctors and caregivers track patients health. Non-invasive and contactless monitoring has emerged as an optimal solution for this problem, with telemedicine, self-monitoring, and wellbeing tools being the next generation of technology in the biomedical field. However, there is worldwide concern about the general purpose and bias towards a certain demographic group of these techniques. In particular, skin tone and the accuracy of monitoring dark skin tone groups have been key questions among researchers, with the lack of results and studies contributing to this uncertainty. MethodsThis paper proposes a benchmark for remote monitoring solution against a medical device across different skin tone people. Around 330 videos from 90 different patients were analyzed, and Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability were compared across different subgroups. The Fitzpatrick scale (1-6) was used to classify participants into three skin tone groups: 1 and 2; 3 and 4; 5 and 6. ResultsThe results showed that our proposed methodology was able to estimate heart rate with a mean absolute error of 3 bpm across all samples and subgroups. Moreover, for Heart Rate Variability (HRV) metrics, we achieved the following results, in terms of Mobility Assistive Equipment (MAE): HRV-IBI (Inter-Beat-Interval) of 10 ms; HRV-SDNN (Standard Deviation of Normal to Normal heartbeats) of 14 ms and HRV-RMSSD (Root Mean Square of Successive Differences between normal heartbeats) of 22 ms. No significant performance decrease was found for any skin tone group, and there was no error trend towards a certain group. ConclusionsThe study showed that our methodology meets acceptable agreement levels for the proposed metrics and is well-suited for users who want to understand their general health and wellness. Furthermore, the experiments showed that skin tone had no impact on the results, which remained within the same range across all groups.