Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring Method Based on Multiple Photoplethysmography Features

Abstract

Continuous blood pressure monitoring is of great significance for the prevention and early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. However, the existing continuous blood pressure monitoring methods, especially the sleeveless blood pressure monitoring methods, are complex and computationally heavy. In this paper, we propose a method, using plethysmography (PPG) signals alone, to estimate continuous blood pressure by extracting multiple PPG features related to intravascular blood flow characteristics. The performance of our method was evaluated using ten minutes synchronized PPG signals and continuous blood pressure from 21 healthy volunteers and 19 patients with hypertension and diabetes. The test results have shown that the absolute mean errors and standard deviation errors between the estimated and referenced blood pressure are 3.22±0.66 mmHg for systolic blood pressure and 2.11±1.11 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure, which meet AAMI (the association for the advancement of medical instrumentation) error acceptance.