Radio-PPG: photoplethysmogram digital twin synthesis using deep neural representation of 6G/WiFi ISAC signals

Digital twins for 1D bio-signals enable real-time monitoring of physiological processes of a person, which enables early disease diagnosis and personalized treatment. This work introduces a novel non-contact method for digital twin (DT) photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal synthesis under the umbrella of 6G/WiFi integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. We employ a software-defined radio (SDR) operating at 5.23 GHz that illuminates the chest of a nearby person with a wideband 6G/WiFi signal and collects the reflected signals. This allows us to acquire Radio-PPG dataset that consists of 300 minutes worth of near synchronous 64-channel radio data, PPG data, along with the labels (three body vitals) of 30 healthy subjects. With this, we test two artificial intelligence (AI) models for DT-PPG signal synthesis: i) discrete cosine transform followed by a multi-layer perceptron, ii) two U-NET models (Approximation network, Refinement network) in cascade, along with a custom loss function. Experimental results indicate that U-NET model achieves an impressive relative mean absolute error of 0.194 with a small ISAC sensing overhead of 15.62%, for DT-PPG synthesis. Furthermore, we performed quality assessment of the synthetic DT-PPG by computing the accuracy of DT-PPG-based vitals estimation and feature extraction, which turned out to be at par with that of reference PPG-based vitals estimation and feature extraction. This work highlights the potential of generative AI and 6G/WiFi ISAC technologies and serves as a foundational step towards the development of non-contact screening tools for covid-19, cardiovascular diseases and well-being assessment of people with special needs.

Non-Contact Acquisition of PPG Signal using Chest Movement-Modulated Radio Signals

We present for the first time a novel method that utilizes the chest movement-modulated radio signals for non-contact acquisition of the photoplethysmography (PPG) signal. Under the proposed method, a software-defined radio (SDR) exposes the chest of a subject sitting nearby to an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal with 64 sub-carriers at a center frequency 5.24 GHz, while another SDR in the close vicinity collects the modulated radio signal reflected off the chest. This way, we construct a custom dataset by collecting 160 minutes of labeled data (both raw radio data as well as the reference PPG signal) from 16 healthy young subjects. With this, we first utilize principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction of the radio data. Next, we denoise the radio signal and reference PPG signal using wavelet technique, followed by segmentation and Z-score normalization. We then synchronize the radio and PPG segments using cross-correlation method. Finally, we proceed to the waveform translation (regression) task, whereby we first convert the radio and PPG segments into frequency domain using discrete cosine transform (DCT), and then learn the non-linear regression between them. Eventually, we reconstruct the synthetic PPG signal by taking inverse DCT of the output of regression block, with a mean absolute error of 8.1294. The synthetic PPG waveform has a great clinical significance as it could be used for non-contact performance assessment of cardiovascular and respiratory systems of patients suffering from infectious diseases, e.g., covid19.