Variations of Heart Rate, Pulse Arrival Time and Blood Pressure in a Versatile Laboratory Protocol

Many studies dealing with blood pressure modeling are evaluated based on a single type of provocation. This paper investigates widely used provocations such as controlled breathing, mental arithmetic and Stroop tests, Valsalva maneuver, cold pressor and muscle tension and combines them in a versatile laboratory protocol. The protocol was tested in an experiment where pulse arrival time (PAT) and heart rate (HR) were measured with chest ECG and finger PPG sensors and blood pressure (BP) with continuous fingercuff monitor. The experiment results show that mental tasks provoked HR, BP and PAT very little while cold pressor and muscle tension had strong impact in all parameters. Valsalva maneuver had strongest impact in HR and PAT but the effect was transient like. We also predicted systolic BP based on the PAT values. We selected nine points in the protocol to calculate linear prediction model for each subject and then fitted data points to the models. If only the calibration points are taken into account, the correlation between the predicted and measured systolic BP was 0.91. When all the data points are fed into model, correlation was 0.75.