Reproducibility of photoplethysmography-based local pulse transit time measurement

Abstract

There are several previously published approaches of measuring local pulse transit time (PTT). One of these approaches is to use two optical sensors based on photoplethysmography (PPG). However, little information about reproducibility in PPG based PTT measurement is available. Therefore, we performed a small sample size study (n = 5) to investigate quantitative criteria for reproducible PTT measurement. The inflection point as a characteristic feature of the pulse wave showed the most stabile results under varying conditions. Furthermore, we found that correlation between related pulse waves could be used as a threshold for signal quality. We suggest to implement a real-time operator feedback based on the found criteria to ensure reproducible PTT measurements.