Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Monitoring with a 3-Axis Accelerometer

The aim was to propose a cuff-less, cost-efficient, and ultra-convenient blood pressure monitoring technique with a 3-axis accelerometer.

The efficacy of the proposed approach was examined in 8 young healthy volunteers undergoing different activities with a 3-axis accelerometer leveled on their upper chest. The 3-dimensional accelerations were exploited to select features for the calculation of systolic pressure (SP) and diastolic pressure (DP); the whole process involved signal processing, feature extraction, linear multivariate regression, and leave-one-out cross validations (LOOCV).

DP and SP could be approximated with the linear combination of the extracted features: the L₂ norm of lateral acceleration for both DP and SP, state variation (defined in the proposed algorithm) of vertical acceleration for SP, and I-J interval (defined in ballistocardiogram) of vertical acceleration for DP. The correlation coefficient (r) of the estimated and the measured DP was 0.97, and for SP, r = 0.96. In LOOCV, our best validated results in difference errors were -0.02±3.82 mmHg for DP and -0.59 ± 7.46 mmHg for SP.

Compared to AAMI criteria, the proposed acceleration-based technique fulfilled the requirement. The accelerometer-based technique showed the potential to monitor blood pressure cuff-lessly, cost-efficiently, ultra-conveniently, and to be embedded in a long-term wearable device for clinical usage.