Auscultatory Blood Pressure Measurement using HMMs

This paper reports on a study of applying an HMM-based labeler along with a tailored feature extraction to Korotkoff sounds. These sounds can be heard through a stethoscope during the auscultatory blood pressure measurement usually done at medical practices. While this method works well when the patient is at rest, interfering noise from muscles and joints cause major problems when the subject is doing any activities like sports or fitness exercises. We propose a signal processing and classification method to overcome these difficulties and present first promising results.