Monitoring the Relative Blood Pressure Using a Hydraulic Bed Sensor System

Abstract

We propose a non-wearable hydraulic bed sensor system that is placed underneath the mattress to estimate the relative systolic blood pressure of a subject, which only differs from the actual blood pressure by a scaling and an offset factor. Two types of features are proposed to obtain the relative blood pressure, one based on the strength and the other on the morphology of the bed sensor BCG pulses. The relative blood pressure is related to the actual by a scale and an offset factor that can be obtained through calibration. The proposed system is able to extract the relative blood pressure more accurately with a less sophisticated sensor system compared to those from the literature. We tested the system using a dataset collected from 48 subjects right after active exercises. Comparison with the ground truth obtained from the blood pressure cuff validates the promising performance of the proposed system, where the mean correlation between the estimate and the ground truth is near 90% for the strength feature and 83% for the morphology feature.

Cardiovascular Function and Ballistocardiogram: A Relationship Interpreted via Mathematical Modeling

“…Our in-home sensor system automatically generates health messages that indicate early signs of health change, thereby allowing for very early treatment, which has been shown to produce better health outcomes [20,21]. Several parameters are tracked currently, including in-home gait patterns [58], overall activity level [58][59][60], heart rate and respiration rate [13,61], blood pressure [18], and sleep patterns [62,63]. The proposed model will be used to enhance the data analysis systems for in-home sensors and improve the accuracy in the detection of deteriorating health conditions, in a continuing effort to provide better healthcare options for our aging population.…”

“…Much of this work has focused on monitoring heart rate along with respiration rate from the accompanying respiration signal, and other parameters for tracking sleep quality. Recent work has also investigated the BCG waveform morphology for the purpose of tracking changes in cardiovascular health [2,18,19]. This offers a special relevance and significant potential in monitoring older adults as they age.…”

A review of wearable and unobtrusive sensing technologies for chronic disease management

“…7 (a)). The BCG signal could also be acquired by pneumatic sensors [ 98 ], optical fibers [ 99 ], hydraulic bed sensors [ 100 ], [ 101 ] ( Fig. 7 (b)) and accelerometers [ 102 ].…”

Pervasive blood pressure monitoring using Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor

“…Sharma et al [26] present a review of recent developments in blood pressure monitoring using cuffless approaches, highlighting challenges such as calibration frequency and the inclusion of heart rate as part of measurements to improve the performance efficiency. Su et al [27] presented a design that estimates the systolic blood pressure of patient or object through the use of non-wearable hydraulic bed sensor system that is placed underneath the mattress of a patient. The design requires the bed sensors and only achieve an accuracy of a maximum of 90%.…”