Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Measurements Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor with Optical Power Detection Scheme.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Optical Sensing
• Cardiovascular Monitoring

Background:

• Accurate blood pressure (BP) monitoring is crucial for cardiovascular health management.
• Existing BP measurement methods can be invasive or cumbersome.
• Novel, non-invasive, and low-cost BP estimation techniques are needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a low-cost dual-fiber Bragg grating (FBG) system for non-invasive blood pressure estimation.
• To assess the accuracy of the developed system by comparing estimated BP with reference measurements.
• To evaluate the performance of the developed BP estimation model against existing models.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a dual-FBG architecture to capture arterial pulse waveforms from the wrist via optical power changes.
• Extracted pulse transit time (PTT), pulse ascending time, and pulse descending time from the captured waveforms.
• Developed a BP estimation model by fitting extracted pulse waveform parameters with reference BP measurements from a sphygmomanometer.
• Validated the model using data from 29 subjects aged 20-54.

Main Results:

• The developed BP estimation model demonstrated high accuracy, with errors between -4 to 5 mmHg for both systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure.
• Mean errors for SBP and DBP were 0.72 mmHg and 0.83 mmHg, respectively.
• Standard errors for SBP and DBP were 2.45 mmHg and 2.59 mmHg, respectively.
• The model incorporating multiple pulse waveform parameters outperformed models using only PTT.

Conclusions:

• The low-cost dual-FBG system offers a promising non-invasive approach for accurate blood pressure monitoring.
• The developed estimation model, leveraging detailed pulse waveform analysis, provides superior accuracy compared to PTT-only methods.
• This technology has the potential for widespread application in remote and continuous cardiovascular health assessment.