Described herein is a new and robust method to extract heart-beat timing from seismocardiogram (SCG). This timing indicates the precise time location of each heart beat and therefore directly conveys heart rate information. Knowledge of the time location of each occurrence of the underlying SCG waveform allows us to obtain a clean SCG waveform estimate by time averaging noisy segments of an SCG time series. The algorithm can be implemented in wearable SCG-based devices to provide heart monitoring or diagnosis capabilities without relying on any other methodology, such as electrocardiography, as a timing reference.