Novel blood pressure estimation method using single photoplethysmography feature

Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring has a significant meaning to the prevention and early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. However, existing continuous BP monitoring approaches, especially cuff-less BP monitoring approaches, are all contraptions which complex and huge computation required. For example, for the most sophisticated cuff-less BP monitoring method using pulse transit time (PTT), the simultaneous record of photoplethysmography (PPG) signal and electrocardiography (ECG) are required, and various measurement of characteristic points are needed. These issues hindered widely application of cuff less BP measurement in the wearable devices. In this study, a novel BP estimation method using single PPG signal feature was proposed and its performance in BP estimation was also tested. The results showed that the new approach proposed in this study has a mean error −0.91 ± 3.84 mmHg for SBP estimation and −0.36 ± 3.36 mmHg for DBP estimation respectively. This approach performed better than the traditional PTT based BP estimation, which mean error for SBP estimation was −0.31 ± 4.78 mmHg, and for DBP estimation was −0.18 ± 4.32 mmHg. Further investigation revealed that this new BP estimation approach only required measurement of one characteristic point, reducing much computation when implementing. These results demonstrated that this new approach might be more suitable implemented in the wearable BP monitoring devices.