The results indicate that the proposed algorithm for the cuffless estimation of the BP can potentially enable mobile health-care gadgets to monitor the BP continuously.

Recently a few methods have been proposed in the literature for non-invasive cuff-less estimation of systolic and diastolic blood pressures. One of the most prominent methods is to use the Pulse Transit Time (PTT). Although it is proven that PTT has a strong correlation with the systolic and diastolic blood pressures, this relation is highly dependent to each individuals physiological properties. Therefore, it requires per person calibration for accurate and reliable blood pressure estimation from PTT, which is a big drawback. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, a novel method is proposed for accurate and reliable estimation of blood pressure that is calibration-free. This goal is accomplished by extraction of several physiological parameters from Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal as well as utilizing signal processing and machine learning algorithms. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed method achieves grade B for the estimation of the diastolic blood pressure and grade C for the estimation of the mean arterial pressure under the standard British Hypertension Society (BHS) protocol.978-1-4799-8391-9/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE

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This paper presents a novel blood pressure (BP) estimation method based on pulse transit time (PTT) and pulse arrival time (PAT) to estimate the systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). A data acquisition hardware is designed for high-resolution sampling of phonocardiogram (PCG), photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG). PCG and ECG perform as the proximal timing reference to obtain PTT and PAT indexes, respectively. In order to derive a BP estimator model, a calibration procedure including a supervised physical exercise is conducted for each individual which causes changes in their BP and then, a number of reference BPs are measured alongside the acquisition of the signals per subject. It is suggested to use a force-sensing resistor (FSR) that is placed under the cuff of the BP reference device to mark the exact moments of reference BP measurements, which are corresponding to the inflation of the cuff. Additionally, a novel BP estimator nonlinear model, based on the theory of elastic tubes, is introduced to estimate the BP using PTT/PAT values precisely. The proposed method is evaluated on 32 subjects. Using the PTT index, the correlation coefficients for SBP and DBP estimation are 0.89 and 0.84, respectively. Using the PAT index, the correlation coefficients for SBP and DBP estimation are 0.95 and 0.84, respectively. The results show that the proposed method, exploiting the introduced nonlinear model with the use of PAT index or PTT index, provides a reliable estimation of SBP and DBP.Index Terms-cuff-less blood pressure, mobile health (mHealth), pulse transit time (PTT), pulse arrival time (PAT), vital signals

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