Separate estimation of long- and short-term systolic blood pressure variability from photoplethysmograph

This paper proposed a method to monitor systolic blood pressure (BP) variability without using a cuff during the daytime. In this method, BP variability of long-term and short-term were separated and estimated respectively from features of phoplethysmograph (PPG) through the use of a frequency filter. Then, total variability was obtained from the combination of long-term and short-term. BP by using a cuff (ground truth) and PPG of nine healthy young subjects were measured during the daytime; then BP variability was estimated from PPG to verify the validity of our method. As a result, the correlation coefficients between measured BP variability and estimated BP variability was improved from r = 0.35 in previous method to r = 0.41 in proposed method. In particular, the estimation results in short-term BP variability showed good accuracy (r = 0.67). This method of estimating BP variability has the potential to be a simple and continuous BP monitoring system during the daytime.