A decision support system for home BP measurements

Wearable and non-wearable sensors are pervasive. However, the health implications of the data they provide is not always clear for the user. In this paper we present a Decision Support System (DSS) that assists a user of a Home Blood Pressure (HBP) monitor to decide timely consultation with a doctor. While HBP is more reliable than office readings, it is more variable due to factors such as food, exercise or error in recording measurements. Our DSS is based on fuzzy rules composed of linguistic summaries of the data. The rules are designed from the current US clinical guidelines and are tuned using an evolutionary algorithm. On a dataset of 40 patients monitored over 3 months, we obtained an interrater agreement of 0.97 between the physicians and DSS trained with their data, while the average agreement between these same physicians was 0.95.