The answer to this question is a little bit involved, as you need to do several things to process the signal and there is no single "right" way to do this. However, for your filter you want to use a band-pass filter. This type of filter allows you to specify a range of frequencies that are accepted both at the high and low ends. For a human heart beat, we know what these bounds should be (no less than 40 bpm and no higher than 250 bpm) so we can create a filter that removes frequencies outside of this range. The filter also moves the data to be centered at zero, so peak detection becomes much easier. This filter will give you a much more smooth signal, even if your users increases/decreases their finger pressure (to a certain degree). After that, additional smoothing and outlier removal will also need to happen.

A specific type of band-pass filter that I have used is a butterworth filter. This is a little involved to create by hand since the filter changes based on the frequency you are collecting your data at. Fortunately, there is a website that can help with this here. If you are collecting your data at 30 fps, then the frequency will be 30 hz.

I have created a project that wraps all of this together and detects a user's heart rate well enough to include it in my app on the iOS app store. I have made the heart rate detection code available on github.