Continuous and Accurate Blood Pressure Monitoring Based on Wearable Optical Fiber Wristband

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of blood pressure has significant clinical value for the cardiovascular disease prevention and diagnosis in daily life. However, conventional blood pressure measurement is unsuitable for long-term monitoring due to its discomfort and poor portability. Wearable device is an ideal solution to overcome this problem, which has attracted increasing interests of many researchers. While, high-performance wearable blood pressure sensor still remains a challenge. Here, we present a wearable blood pressure wristband system based on optical fiber. The end face of optical fiber was coated with a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) + Ag composite diaphragm. The continuous and accurate measurement of the pulse waveform was achieved through the phase variation of the light reflected from the diaphragm. Then, the blood pressure can be estimated from the pulse transit time (PTT) which is extracted from the high-fidelity pulse waveform. The estimation model was established using data from 45 subjects. The clinical experiment was also carried out on 17 subjects to test the performance of the proposed wearable blood pressure wristband. The results show that the errors of systolic pressure (SBP) and diastolic pressure (DBP) are 0.24 ± 2.39 mmHg and 0.12 ± 2.62 mmHg compared with commercial sphygmomanometer, respectively. The measurement errors were within the required range of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and the British Hypertension Society (BHS) Grade A, which indicates that the blood pressure wristband has a good accuracy and practicability. This wearable and user-friendly optical fiber blood pressure monitor is a competitive alternative to current commercial products.