Noninvasive and Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring Using Wearable Body Sensor Networks

Hypertension is a major health risk that influences the quality of life for many people. The importance of monitoring hypertension in a continuous and noninvasive manner increases as more people experience raised blood pressure (BP). The authors present a smartphone-centric body sensor network to measure the pulse transit time (PTT) in real time. Their robust method for calculating BP uses PPT information that considers the baroreflex mechanism, which reflects the relationship between BP and the heart rate. To evaluate the performance of their proposed method, they collected 300 groups of data from six subjects before and after exercise. Experimental results show that their proposed method can estimate BP values in real time with good precision.