Continuous cuffless blood pressure monitoring based on PTT

Blood pressure (BP) is one of the important vital signs that need to be monitored for personal healthcare. This paper describes the method developed by the authors to measure systolic blood pressure from pulse transit time (PTT) Pulse transit time is the time taken for the arterial pulse pressure wave to travel from the aortic valve to a peripheral site. It is usually measured from the R wave on the electrocardiogram to a photoplethysmography signal. PTT is inversely proportional to blood pressure. This method does not require an air cuff and only a minimal inconvenience of attaching electrodes and LED/photo detector sensors on a subject. Twenty three healthy subjects (age 18–60 yrs) were studied. Blood pressure measurement is carried out using pulse transit time and is compared with sphygmomanometry, the reference standard and the oscillometric based automatic BP measuring machine. The results show that the standard deviation of their differences was around 3 mmHg. The developed pulse transit time based method can be used as a noninvasive and cuffless alternative to the conventional occluding-cuff approaches for long-term and continuous monitoring of blood pressure.