Cuffless blood pressure meter with mobile application for home-care service.

Abstract

Hypertension is one of the “silent killers” and 1 out of 3 adults globally suffer from high blood pressure. Therefore, hypertension patients require frequent blood pressure measurements and commonly use a conventional cuff-based blood pressure monitor. However, patients reflected several issues regarding cuff-based blood pressure monitors, such as cuff inflation causing pain, being inconvenient to bring around, and providing one measurement only at a time. These problems can be overcome using a cuffless blood pressure monitor. Unfortunately, commercial cuffless blood pressure measurement methods and devices are inaccurate, insensitive, and require cuff calibration. As a result, this paper presents a rechargeable cuffless blood pressure meter based on the Pulse Transit Time (PTT) technique using Arduino technology and the correlation of PTT with blood pressure using the Electrocardiography-Photoplethysmography (ECG-PPG) approach. The approach involves Electrocardiogram (ECG) and reflective optical sensor signal acquisition and signal processing using blood pressure estimation algorithms. It is also supported by a mobile application for real-time monitoring and trend analysis. The results have shown that the device can deliver the accuracy of systolic, diastolic, and heart rate measurements of up to 92.99%, 93.50%, and 94.85%, respectively. This invention offers an attractive alternative solution to contributes towards better healthcare by enabling frequent painless continuous blood pressure monitoring.