Photoplethysmography — a Modern Approach and Applications

Blood is an important biological fluid that carries vital nutrients, vitamins, minerals and oxygen to various parts of the body. It helps in actual functioning of the body organs. Blood flow is the amount of blood flowing through arteries or veins of the circulatory system. Impairment in the blood flow is an indicator of various diseases. Hence a simple, fast, accurate and non-invasive blood flow measurement technique is required for early detection of the diseases. This paper proposes a simple, accurate, non-invasive method to measure the blood flow related parameters using Photoplethysmography (PPG). The blood volume through the veins is measured by acquiring the PPG signal from the body and further analysing the signal to measure different parameters like heart rate, oxygen saturation level (SpO2) and the PPG values are further used for building a cuffless blood pressure measuring system using an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with the dataset obtained from Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC III).