Using Photoplethysmography & ECG Towards a Non-Invasive Cuff less Blood Pressure Measurement Technique

Abstract

The continuous systolic and diastolic pressure have great medical value, especially for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases detection. Beside the inconvenience of cuff based blood pressure (BP) measurement devices, the lack of widely accepted accurate measurements and calibration, the BP portable devices are even less attractive.The pulse transit time (PTT) is related to arterial stiffness and can be used to estimate systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Considering the complex multivariate physiological processes in human body, depending on only PTT doesn’t give acceptable accuracy. This study extends the pulse transit time (PTT) based cuff less BP measurement method to include the heart rate (HR) as an additional information. A new model based on linear regression is proposed that include the HR to measure the BP.PTT only BP and the proposed PTT and HR based BP measurement models are tested using MIMIC database. Using model including linear regression and curve fitting, it was shown that the proposed model reduced the BP root mean square error (RMSE) for SBP from 9.6 to 7.1 and for DBP from 4.2 to 3.1 compared to conventional PTT only based methods.