Accurate Blood Pressure Measurement Using Smartphone's Built-in Accelerometer

Abstract

Efficient blood pressure (BP) monitoring in everyday contexts stands as a substantial public health challenge that has garnered considerable attention from both industry and academia. Commercial mobile phones have emerged as a promising tool for BP measurement, benefitting from their widespread popularity, portability, and ease of use. Most mobile phone-based systems leverage a combination of the built-in camera and LED to capture photoplethysmography (PPG) signals, which can be used to infer BP by analyzing the blood flow characteristics. However, due to low Signal-to-Noise (SNR), various factors such as finger motion, improper finger placement, skin tattoos, or fluctuations in environmental lighting can distort the PPG signal. These distortions consequentially affect the performance of BP estimation. In this paper, we introduce a novel sensing system that utilizes the built-in accelerometer of a mobile phone to capture seismocardiography (SCG) signals, enabling accurate BP measurement. Our system surpasses previous mobile phone-based BP measurement systems, offering advantages such as high SNR, ease of use, and power efficiency. We propose a triple-stage noise reduction scheme, integrating improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN), recursive least squares (RLS) adaptive filter, and soft-thresholding, to effectively reconstruct high-quality heartbeat waveforms from initially contaminated raw SCG signals. Moreover, we introduce a data augmentation technique encompassing normalization coupled with temporal-sliding, effectively augmenting the diversity of the training sample set. To enable battery efficiency on smartphone, we propose a resource-efficient deep learning model that incorporates resource-efficient convolution, shortcut connections, and Huber loss. We conduct extensive experiments with 70 volunteers, comprising 35 healthy individuals and 35 individuals diagnosed with hypertension, under a user-independent setting. The excellent performance of our system demonstrates its capacity for robust and accurate daily BP measurement.