Noninvasive Cuffless Estimation of Blood Pressure from Pulse Arrival Time and Heart Rate with Adaptive Calibration

Abstract

We study the problem of noninvasively estimating Blood Pressure (BP) without using a cuff, which is attractive for continuous monitoring of BP over Body Area Networks. It has been shown that the Pulse Arrival Time (PAT) measured as the delay between the ECG peak and a point in the finger PPG waveform can be used to estimate systolic and diastolic BP. Our aim is to evaluate the performance of such a method using the available MIMIC database, while at the same time improve the performance of existing techniques. We propose an algorithm to estimate BP from a combination of PAT and heart rate, showing improvement over PAT alone. We also show how the method achieves recalibration using an RLS adaptive algorithm. Finally, we address the use case of ECG and PPG sensors wirelessly communicating to an aggregator and study the effect of skew and jitter on BP estimation.