Non-invasive beat-to-beat blood pressure monitoring: new developments.

Continuous blood pressure monitoring is an essential prerequisite for any study on blood pressure variability. Invasive procedures are no longer acceptable for research projects in a clinical setting, and recently developed devices able to record blood pressure on a beat-by-beat basis in a non-invasive fashion may represent valuable alternative tools. This article will briefly review the available information on the most recent advances in this field. It will focus on further developments of the original technology for finger blood pressure monitoring introduced by Penáz, as well as on newer devices that have been proposed over the last few years for non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring both in research and in clinical studies.