A Novel Model for Continuous Cuff-less Blood Pressure Estimation

Abstract

Continuous cuff-less blood pressure (BP) monitoring using pulse transit time (PTT) or pulse arrival time (PAT) has shown great prospect in the estimation of systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) due to the convenience. To further improve the accuracy and efficiency, in this paper, we present a novel model for continuous cuff-less BP estimation, which is derived from empirical formulas based on physical model of arteries. We then apply the proposed model on 26 subjects with a cuff based model as a reference and compare the correlation coefficients for validation. Numerical results suggest that the estimation method based on the proposed model outperforms traditional approaches by achieving correlation coefficients for SBP and DBP as 0.953 and 0.872 respectively using PAT index, and as 0.932 and 0.874 respectively using PTT index. Besides, as British Hypertension Society (BHS) protocol implied, the results are consistent with the highest grade of A in the estimation of both SBP and DBP, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model for continuous BP estimation.