The goal of this study was to investigate the potential of wearable limb ballistocardiography (BCG) to enable cuff-less blood pressure (BP) monitoring, by investigating the association between wearable limb BCG-based pulse transit time (PTT) and BP. A wearable BCG-based PTT was calculated using the BCG and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals acquired by a wristband as proximal and distal timing reference (called the wrist PTT). Its efficacy as surrogate of BP was examined in comparison with PTT calculated using the whole-body BCG acquired by a customized weighing scale (scale PTT) as well as pulse arrival time (PAT) using the experimental data collected from 22 young healthy participants under multiple BP-perturbing interventions. The wrist PTT exhibited close association with both diastolic (group average r = 0.79; mean absolute error (MAE) = 5.1 mmHg) and systolic (group average r = 0.81; MAE = 7.6 mmHg) BP. The efficacy of the wrist PTT was superior to scale PTT and PAT for both diastolic and systolic BP. The association was consistent and robust against diverse BP-perturbing interventions. The wrist PTT showed superior association with BP when calculated with green PPG rather than infrared PPG. In sum, wearable limb BCG has the potential to realize convenient cuff-less BP monitoring via PTT.

The results of this study may provide a viable basis for ultra-convenient BP monitoring based on a limb BCG alone.

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Wireless power transmission using mid-range magnetic resonance has become an important technology in body area sensor systems. Recent researches have used fine-tuned impedance matching for wireless power transmission at fixed distance. However, this method is significantly sensitive to the distance change between two devices since the impedances at both ends must be perfectly matched. Hence, it is a major challenge to achieve efficient wireless power transmission in mobile environment. We propose a new circuit architecture for wireless power transmission in the near field; the Resonator Isolation (RI) structure. Using the RI structure, the wireless power transmission becomes highly robust under mobile environment. In this paper, we present the circuit design of the RI structure and evaluate its performance with the actual systems we constructed.

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