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Cuffless and Continuous Blood Pressure Estimation from the Heart Sound Signals
Rong-Chao Peng1,2,3, Wen-Rong Yan4, Ning-Ling Zhang5,6,7
1Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China. pengxiaotu@126.com.
Insights
This study presents an affordable smartphone method for continuous blood pressure monitoring using heart sounds. This technique shows potential for non-invasive home healthcare, improving early cardiovascular disease detection.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Cardiology
- Digital Health
Background:
- Cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension, are leading causes of mortality worldwide.
- Early detection and continuous monitoring of blood pressure are crucial for managing cardiovascular health.
- Traditional blood pressure monitoring devices are often cumbersome, expensive, and not ideal for home use.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop an accessible and inexpensive technique for estimating continuous blood pressure using smartphone-acquired heart sound signals.
- To evaluate the accuracy of this novel method for potential application in home healthcare.
Main Methods:
- Acquisition of heart sound signals using a smartphone microphone during a cold-pressor experiment in 32 healthy subjects.
- Utilizing a support vector machine to regress the Fourier spectrum of the second heart sound against continuous blood pressure measurements from a commercial device.
- Employing 10-fold cross-validation to assess the accuracy of the developed regression model.
Main Results:
- The regression model achieved mean correlation coefficients of 0.707 for systolic, 0.712 for diastolic, and 0.748 for mean blood pressure.
- The developed technique demonstrated mean errors of less than 5 mmHg and standard deviations below 8 mmHg when compared to a commercial device.
- High accuracy suggests the feasibility of estimating blood pressure from heart sounds.
Conclusions:
- The proposed smartphone-based technique offers a promising, low-cost solution for cuffless and continuous blood pressure monitoring.
- This method has significant potential for integration into home healthcare services, facilitating early detection and management of cardiovascular conditions.
Abstract:
Cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, is one of the top killers of human life and early detection of cardiovascular disease is of great importance. However, traditional medical devices are often bulky and expensive, and unsuitable for home healthcare. In this paper, we proposed an easy and inexpensive technique to estimate continuous blood pressure from the heart sound signals acquired by the microphone of a smartphone. A cold-pressor experiment was performed in 32 healthy subjects, with a smartphone to acquire heart sound signals and with a commercial device to measure continuous blood pressure. The Fourier spectrum of the second heart sound and the blood pressure were regressed using a support vector machine, and the accuracy of the regression was evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. Statistical analysis showed that the mean correlation coefficients between the predicted values from the regression model and the measured values from the commercial device were 0.707, 0.712, and 0.748 for systolic, diastolic, and mean blood pressure, respectively, and that the mean errors were less than 5 mmHg, with standard deviations less than 8 mmHg. These results suggest that this technique is of potential use for cuffless and continuous blood pressure monitoring and it has promising application in home healthcare services.
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