Cuff-Less Methods for Blood Pressure Measurement

Blood pressure (BP) is one of the important indicators to measure physical condition, the most frequently detected physiological parameters in life, and also one of the important reference indexes in clinical medical nursing. Continuous monitoring of BP can protect against and control cardiovascular disease. Currently, cuff-based mercury sphygmomanometers are commonly used to monitor systolic and diastolic BP. However, traditional BP measurement technique is discontinuous essentially and inconvenient to use in daily life. Therefore, according to the relationship between pulse wave and BP, this paper designs a new cuff-less BP measurement method to estimate BP. The specific method is to calculate the pulse transit time (PTT) by combining electrocardiogram (ECG) and Photoplethysmograms (PPG). Experimental results showed that the proposed approach exhibited good accuracy for diverse population with maximum error of 3mmHg and standard deviation of 2.12 for systolic BP, maximum error of 6mmHg and standard deviation of 4.82mmhg for diastolic BP, which complied with the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation standards in BP estimation. These results show that this method is a promising alternative to traditional sphygmomanometer and is convenient for continuous monitoring of BP.