A Universal Noninvasive Continuous Blood Pressure Measurement System for Remote Healthcare Monitoring.

BACKGROUND: The effectiveness of any remote healthcare monitoring system depends on how much accurate, patient-friendly, versatile, and cost-effective measurement it is delivering. There has always been a huge demand for such a long-term noninvasive remote blood pressure (BP) measurement system, which could be used worldwide in the remote healthcare industry. Thus, noninvasive continuous BP measurement and remote monitoring have become an emerging area in the remote healthcare industry. INTRODUCTION: Photoplethysmography-based (PPG) BP measurement is a continuous, unobtrusive, patient-friendly, and cost-effective solution. However, BP measurements through PPG sensors are not much reliable and accurate due to some major limitations like pressure disturbance, motion artifacts, and variations in human skin tone. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A novel reflective PPG sensor has been developed to eliminate the abovementioned pressure disturbance and motion artifacts during the BP measurement. Considering the variations of the human skin tone across demography, a novel algorithm has been developed to make the BP measurement accurate and reliable. The training dataset captured 186 subjects' data and the trial dataset captured another new 102 subjects' data. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The overall accuracy achieved by using the proposed method is nearly 98%. Thus, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed method. CONCLUSIONS: The developed BP monitoring system is quite accurate, reliable, cost-effective, handy, and user friendly. It is also expected that this system would be quite useful to monitor the BP of infants, elderly people, patients having wounds, burn injury, or in the intensive care unit environment.

A Literature Review on Current and Proposed Technologies of Noninvasive Blood Pressure Measurement.

BACKGROUND: Noninvasive continuous blood pressure (BP) measurement has become an evolving topic in the field of remote healthcare. The classical noninvasive BP measurement techniques provide spontaneous values of systolic and diastolic BP. On the other hand, intrusive type BP measurement techniques provide continuous values of systolic and diastolic BP. However, these techniques are very painful, cannot be used for long-term monitoring, and are obtainable only in an intensive care unit environment. With the advancement of the remote healthcare industry, there is a growing demand for noninvasive continuous BP monitoring. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this research was to present a compact literature review on the various prospective approaches of noninvasive continuous BP measurement techniques. MATERIALS & METHODS: The most contemporary and advanced technologies on noninvasive continuous BP measurement are Tactile Sensing, Vascular Unloading Technique, Pulse Transit Time, Photoplethysmography, Ultrasound-based BP measurement, BP measurement from image processing, etc. The literature search based on these technologies was conducted in EMBASE, Web of Science, IEEE, PubMed, and Ovid MEDLINE databases. In this study, each selected approach was evaluated and characterized using the following criteria: (1) accuracy; (2) cost; (3) portability; (4) comfort and convenience of use; (5) clinical health and safety; and (6) ability to integrate with the remote healthcare system. RESULTS: A detailed technical analysis was done to determine the advantages and limitations of each technique in the context of the abovementioned parameters. It was observed that BP measurement, using photoplethysmography (using camera or sensor or both), perhaps was the most promising technique among all. CONCLUSION: The study emphasized the fact that the noninvasive, continuous BP measurement technique needs to evolve further to make it reliable, accurate, and user-friendly. Lastly, a possible direction toward a more reliable and comfortable noninvasive continuous BP measurement technique has been discussed.