Cuff-Free Blood Pressure Estimation Using Pulse Transit Time and Heart Rate

It has been reported that the pulse transit time (PTT), the interval between the peak of the R-wave in electrocardiogram (ECG) and the fingertip photoplethysmogram (PPG), is related to arterial stiffness, and can be used to estimate the systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). This phenomenon has been used as the basis to design portable systems for continuously cuff-less blood pressure measurement, benefiting numerous people with heart conditions. However, the PTT-based blood pressure estimation may not be sufficiently accurate because the regulation of blood pressure within the human body is a complex, multivariate physiological process. Considering the negative feedback mechanism in the blood pressure control, we introduce the heart rate (HR) and the blood pressure estimate in the previous step to obtain the current estimate. We validate this method using a clinical database. Our results show that the PTT, HR and previous estimate reduce the estimated error significantly when compared to the conventional PTT estimation approach (p<0.05).