Cuff-less blood pressure measurement from dual-channel photoplethysmographic signals via peripheral pulse transit time with singular spectrum analysis.

OBJECTIVE: This paper proposes an unobtrusive blood pressure (BP) measurement system design with a motion artifact (MA) compensation strategy as a potential surrogate to the traditional cuff-based sphygmomanometer for self-monitoring in a less restricted environment. APPROACH: A dual-channel photoplethysmographic signal acquisition system is designed and implemented for cuff-less BP measurement based on the peripheral pulse transit time (PPTT) acquired from the forearm and wrist. Comprising a motion decision, singular spectrum analysis, PPTT calculation and BP measurement, a novel approach is proposed to realize BP measurements and suppress MA interference. MAIN
RESULTS: Compared with the reference BP recorded by a cuff-based sphygmomanometer, our preliminary examinations on 30 subjects found that the correlation coefficients for systolic BP estimation and diastolic BP estimation were 0.75 and 0.78, and the mean absolute differences were 7.61 mmHg and 6.82 mmHg, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed approach was compared with the other most widely used pulse transit time (PTT) measuring methods and BP-PTT models. All the results indicate that our work was highly effective in realizing the BP measurement. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed system and approach have resulted in remarkable progress in cuff-less BP measurements with MA removal, and have great potential value in wearable applications without environmental restrictions.