Papers › Tiny-PPG: A Lightweight Deep Neural Network for Real-Time Detection of Motion...

Tiny-PPG: A Lightweight Deep Neural Network for Real-Time Detection of Motion Artifacts in Photoplethysmogram Signals on Edge Devices

5 May 2023arXiv:2305.03308archive 2025-07-28

Yali Zheng, Chen Wu, Peizheng Cai, Zhiqiang Zhong, Hongda Huang, Yuqi Jiang

Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals are easily contaminated by motion artifacts in real-world settings, despite their widespread use in Internet-of-Things (IoT) based wearable and smart health devices for cardiovascular health monitoring. This study proposed a lightweight deep neural network, called Tiny-PPG, for accurate and real-time PPG artifact segmentation on IoT edge devices. The model was trained and tested on a public dataset, PPG DaLiA, which featured complex artifacts with diverse lengths and morphologies during various daily activities of 15 subjects using a watch-type device (Empatica E4). The model structure, training method and loss function were specifically designed to balance detection accuracy and speed for real-time PPG artifact detection in resource-constrained embedded devices. To optimize the model size and capability in multi-scale feature representation, the model employed depth-wise separable convolution and atrous spatial pyramid pooling modules, respectively. Additionally, the contrastive loss was also utilized to further optimize the feature embeddings. With additional model pruning, Tiny-PPG achieved state-of-the-art detection accuracy of 87.4% while only having 19,726 model parameters (0.15 megabytes), and was successfully deployed on an STM32 embedded system for real-time PPG artifact detection. Therefore, this study provides an effective solution for resource-constraint IoT smart health devices in PPG artifact detection.

PaperPDFCode

Code

heyonghu/tiny-ppg officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
sztu-wearable/tiny-ppg officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Artifact Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ConvolutionSPEEDSpatial Pyramid Pooling

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections