Interoperability of wearable cuffless BP measuring devices

While a traditional cuff-based Blood Pressure (BP) measuring device can only take a snap shot of BP, real-time and continuous measurement of BP without an occluding cuff is preferred which usually use the pulse transit time (PTT) in combination with other physiological parameters to estimate or track BP over a certain period of time after an initial calibration. This article discusses some perspectives of interoperability of wearable medical devices, based on IEEE P1708 draft standard that focuses on the objective performance evaluation of wearable cuffless BP measuring devices. The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards, supporting the plug-and play feature, is intended to enable medical devices to interconnect and interoperate with other medical devices and with computerized healthcare information systems in a manner suitable for the clinical environment. In this paper, the possible adoption of ISO/IEEE 11073 for the interoperability of wearable cuffless BP devices is proposed. In the consideration of the difference of the continuous and cuffless BP measuring methods from the conventional ones, the existing device specialization standards of ISO/IEEE 11073 cannot be directly followed when designing the cuffless BP device. Specifically, this paper discusses how the domain information model (DIM), in which vital sign information is abstracted as objects, is used to structure the information about the device and that generated from the device. Though attention should also be paid to adopt the communication standards for other parts for the communication system, applying communication standards that enable plug-and-play feature allows achieving the interoperability of different cuffless BP measuring devices with possible different configurations.