Abstract
Cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, is one of the top killers of human life and early detection of cardiovascular disease is of great importance. However, traditional medical devices are often bulky and expensive, and unsuitable for home healthcare. In this paper, we proposed an easy and inexpensive technique to estimate continuous blood pressure from the heart sound signals acquired by the microphone of a smartphone. A cold-pressor experiment was performed in 32 healthy subjects, with a smartphone to acquire heart sound signals and with a commercial device to measure continuous blood pressure. The Fourier spectrum of the second heart sound and the blood pressure were regressed using a support vector machine, and the accuracy of the regression was evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. Statistical analysis showed that the mean correlation coefficients between the predicted values from the regression model and the measured values from the commercial device were 0.707, 0.712, and 0.748 for systolic, diastolic, and mean blood pressure, respectively, and that the mean errors were less than 5 mmHg, with standard deviations less than 8 mmHg. These results suggest that this technique is of potential use for cuffless and continuous blood pressure monitoring and it has promising application in home healthcare services.
Highlights
Cardiovascular disease is one of the top killers of human life
A typical example of blood pressure estimation was given in Figures 6 and 7.The predicted values of the systolic, diastolic, and mean blood pressure using the support vector machine (SVM) regression were compared with the corresponding values measured by the Finometer device
As required by the American Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), the mean error (ME) should be ± 5 mmHg or less, with a standard deviation (SD) of mmHg or less [23]. These results suggested that this technique might provide effective estimates of blood pressure with sufficient accuracy
Summary
Cardiovascular disease (e.g., hypertension, arteriosclerosis, coronary heart disease) is one of the top killers of human life. As reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), it took 17.5 million people’s lives globally in 2012 [1]. The number will increase as the population ages. Early detection and prevention of the cardiovascular disease is of significant importance to promote people’s health. Traditional medical devices used in the hospital are often bulky and expensive, only operated by specially trained nurses, and not suitable for home healthcare. There is a need of portable, low-cost devices that can be operated by ordinary people to detect physiological parameters (e.g., heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure) for self-monitoring at home
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