Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation Using Pulse Transit Time and Photoplethysmogram Intensity Ratio

Abstract

High blood pressure (BP) is one of the common risk factors for heart disease, stroke, congestive heart failure, and kidney disease. An accurate, continuous and cuffless BP monitoring technique could help clinicians improve the rate of prevention, detection, and treatment of hypertension and related diseases. Pulse transit time (PTT) has attracted interest as an index of BP changes for cuffless BP measurement techniques. Currently, PPT-based BP measurement approaches have improved and are able to relieve the discomfort associated with an inflated cuff such as that used in auscultatory and oscillometric BP measurement techniques. However, PTT can only track the BP variation in high frequency (HF) which limits the true representation of BP changes. This paper presents a continuous and cuffless BP monitoring method based on multi-parameter fusion. We used photoplethysmogram (PPG) and a two-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) and employed an algorithm based on PTT and the PPG intensity ratio (PIR) to continuously track BP in both high and low frequencies and estimate systolic and diastolic BP.