An armband wearable device for overnight and cuff-less blood pressure measurement

24-h blood pressure (BP) has significant prognostic value for cardiovascular risk screening, but the present BP devices are mainly cuff-based, which are unsuitable for long-term BP measurement, especially during nighttime. In this paper, we developed an armband wearable pulse transit time (PTT) system for 24-h cuff-less BP measurement and evaluated it in an unattended out-of-laboratory setting. Ten healthy young subjects participated in this ambulatory study, where PTT was measured at 30-min interval by this wearable system and the reference BP was measured by a standard oscillometric ambulatory BP monitor. Due to the misalignment of BP and PTT on their recording time caused by the different measurement principles of the two BP devices, a new estimation method has been proposed: transients in PTT were removed from the raw data by defined criteria, and then evenly interpolated, low-pass filtered, and resampled to synchronize at the time when BP was recorded. The results show that with the proposed method, the correlation between PTT and systolic BP (SBP) during nighttime with dynamic range of 21.8 ± 14.2 mmHg has improved from -0.50 ± 0.24 to -0.62 ± 0.20 , and the difference between the estimated and reference SBP has improved from 0.7 ± 10.7 to 2.8 ± 8.2 mmHg with root mean square error reduced from 10.7 to 8.7 mmHg. In addition, the correlation between a very low frequency component of SBP and PTT obtained from the proposed method during nighttime is -0.80 ± 0.10 and the difference is 2.4 ± 5.7 mmHg for a dynamic BP range of 13.5 ± 8.0 mmHg. It is therefore concluded from this study that the proposed wearable system has great potential to be used for overnight SBP monitoring, especially to measure the averaged SBP over a long period.