Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Monitoring in a Cohort of People with Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease is often considered as a “movement disorder”. Nevertheless, People with Parkinson's (PwPD) may also experience other non-motor symptoms, such as abnormalities and alterations in blood pressure (BP). Real-time cuffless BP monitoring may help identify the end-users' overall health state and support clinical decision-making, however most of the studies in the field did not investigate PwPD as a possible cohort of reference. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no scientific publications, or commercially available wearable solutions, monitoring BP measurements by means of electrocardiogram (ECG) and/or photoplethysmogram (PPG) in a Parkinsonian cohort. Based on a Random Forest (RF) model and a combination of publicly available data and data collected in lab-settings using a wearable prototype developed at Tyndall National Institute, good performance were achieved on both systolic and diastolic BP measurements with a mean absolute error equal to
$7.84\pm 8.12$
and
$7.51 \pm 6.16\ \text{mmHg}$
, respectively, for PwPD. As BP disorders are highly prevalent in PwPD, and can mimic dopaminergic deficiency, this work is a step forward in the effective management of motor and non-motor symptoms in this complex cohort of patients.