Wearable Medical Devices in Preventive Health Care: Cuffless Blood Pressure Measurement

Abstract

The advent of technology has made great leaps from the conventional methods of disease treatment. Nowadays, there has been a great shift toward continual monitoring, early detection, and prevention of diseases. Complimenting to this is the innovation of wearable medical devices. Wearable medical devices are portable electronic devices embedded in the user's outfit. This not only facilitates faster treatment but also ensures comfortable diagnostic environment for the patient. ECG and PPG signals are of prime importance when the continual monitoring of the cardiac state of the patient is concerned. Hence, using a wearable medical device, the biomedical signals can be easily obtained and interpreted. This paper discusses a method to measure blood pressure from ECG and PPG signals acquired from the device. To realize the method, various algorithms for the implementation were coded in MATLAB. The algorithm was tested on records taken from PhysioNet ATM and a private database. © Springer India 2015.