PC Based Blood Pressure Meter for E-health Application

Abstract

A blood pressure is one of the fundamental vital signs, and its measurement is important to medical professionals and the general public alike. Nowadays, there are several types of blood pressure meter available manufactured from various companies. In order to meet the demand on telemedicine and technology advancement, a new form of blood pressure meter is desirable. This prototype of blood pressure meter is interfaced with a personal computer (PC) which able to simulate the measurement process in real time. The proposed system is divided by two parts which are hardware and software. Hardware section includes pressure sensor, microcontroller, bulb, cuff and conditioning circuits. The systems operate on oscillometric principle which gives the results in terms of systolic, diastolic and MAP (Mean Arterial Pressure). Furthermore, these results will be presented and simulated on the software. MP Lab software packages is used to program the microcontroller. The user interface was developed by using Visual Basic 6.0 language, which highlights the user friendly attributes. Moreover, the simulated waveform will evaluate the blood pressure and gives the blood pressure value. This application shows significant improvement on the overall performance and gives reliable results. The average percentage difference for the systolic and diastolic blood pressure between the OMRON BP meter and proposed e-BPMS are ± 0.95% and ± 1.32% respectively, which is very small and still in the acceptable range. The framework used to design proposed machine is easy to understand, and it can be extended further to endorse and meet requirements of e-health applications.