Preliminary study on detection of atrial fibrillation during oscillometric blood pressure measurement

The paper presents a prototype method for detection of cardiac arrhythmia from pneumatic cuff pressure course, obtained during oscillometric blood pressure measurement. Oscillometric blood pressure measurement is an indirect method for blood pressure measure where pneumatic cuff is placed on patient´s extremity, usually upper arm, inflated and then gradually deflated. During deflation phase the pressure oscillations in the cuff caused by squeezed blood vessels are analyzed to determine patient´s blood pressure. Since presence of arrhythmia can be detected through observation of heart rhythm, it is possible to detect arrhythmia during blood pressure measurement. We have captured cuff pressure courses - samples from 34 patients of which 6 had arrhythmia present. From captured pressure courses we determined a set of features which we used to train a classifier for discrimination of samples with present arrhythmia from samples where arrhythmia is not present.