A Novel Method for Real-Time Human Core Temperature Estimation Based on Extended Kalman Filter.

Abstract

The gold standard real-time core temperature (CT) monitoring methods are invasive and cost-inefficient. The application of the Kalman filter for an indirect estimation of CT has been explored in the literature for more than 10 years. This paper presents a comparative study between different state-of-the-art Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) approaches. Moreover, we proposed the addition of an extra layer to the pipeline that applies a pre-emptive mapping concept based on the physiological response of the heart rate (HR) signal, before using it as input to the EKF. The algorithm was trained and tested using two datasets (18 subjects). The best-performing approach with the novel pre-emptive mapping achieved an average Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.34 $^{\circ }$C, while without pre-emptive mapping, it resulted in an RMSE of 0.41 $^{\circ }$C, leading to a performance improvement of 17%. Given these favorable outcomes, it is compelling to assess the efficacy of this method on a larger dataset in the future.