Combined detection of respiratory and cardiac rhythms disorders by high resolution differential cuff pressure measurement

Abstract

The aim of this prospective work is to present recent results obtained in the detection of respiratory and cardiac rhythm disorders. Unlike conventional nonconstraining methods, our method detects variations of the pressure within a lightly inflated cuff wrapped around the wrist, related to changes in the blood arterial pressure. By suitable numerical processing, it is possible to extract from this signal a number of informations on cardiac and respiratory rhythms, as well as to detect and differentiate a number of sleep disorders like central and obstructive apnoeas. This paper presents a cross-validation of our method with respect to the conventional, standard methods.