A Hybrid Body Sensor Network for Continuous and Long-term Measurement of Arterial Blood Pressure

Continuous and long-term measurement of arterial blood pressure (BP) and its variability is an important but unsolved topic in physiological monitoring. A possible solution is to use an approach that estimate BP based on pulse transit time. Since the method requires information collected from sensors placed at various body locations, a network could be setup to connect the different sensors effectively and securely. In this paper, we propose using multiple modes of communication, including communication via wired, wireless and/or biological channels (bio-channels) of the human body, to network the various sensors, i.e. the idea of hybrid body sensor network (h-BSN). Preliminary results show that h-BSN is potentially useful for monitoring BP over extensive periods of time and the idea can be extended to other applications that employ multiple on-body or in-body sensors.