Blood Pressure Monitoring Using Arduino-Android Platform

Increased blood pressure (BP) in the arteries is a common condition that leads to heart diseases and cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, an accurate measurement of BP is vital for the prevention and treatment of these diseases, especially in hypertensive patients. Complications of untreated high blood pressure (HBP) might be heart attack, stroke, or kidney damage. It has no obvious symptoms or warning signs and therefore it is often called "the silent killer". The traditional manual BP monitor is difficult to use by ordinary persons and it requires the expertise of a specialist. The lack of these devices in every home prevents many patients from checking blood pressure regularly. In this paper, we describe our developed BP monitoring system, which integrates the Arduino board as an open-source computer hardware/software platform with the Android smartphone. The system is based on the oscillometric pressure waveforms method and it is combined with a Bluetooth module that transfers data to a mobile application. Therefore, users can get information about their blood pressure on the smartphone easily and get acquainted with their health conditions regularly. This system can be integrated into other devices such as ventilators because it is an open-source and there is a growing demand for the manufacturing of these devices locally. Experimental results are promising with BP measurement accuracy close to the reference values.